War and Peace (1956)

The war sequences in King Vidor's War and Peace are cool. Well, they're big anyway, and the scale of direction is impressive. But this 1956 movie version mostly feels like a bloated melodrama rendition of Tolstoy's novel with a bunch of USAmerican 1950s moral conservatism and ideology laid over top of it. I liked Mel Ferrer in this or at least I think I liked Mel Ferrer in this. Maybe I just thought he was handsome, though.

Visitez Mon Site! (Holy Motors)

I know there are a lot of in-jokes and symbols and references I am supposed to get in order to enjoy Holy Motors, and I supposed it didn't help that I haven't seen any of Leos Carax's other work, so you will have to judge me for my reaction to this movie.

Holy Motors (this is the title in French, as well) is a movie about a man who rides around the Île-de-France region all day in a white limousine. He has nine appointments for the day, and for each appointment he is (apparently) – or perhaps simply portrays – a different person. All fine and well, but why?

The film is quite self-consciously about the movies, and so Holy Motors displays a nostalgia for old films and old ways of making films, as well as nostalgia in general (a beautiful building has been gutted and will be turned into some modern monstrosity, the headstones in the cemetery don't have names but instead say "visit my website"). Nostalgia is not really my thing, so I didn't quite identify with the film's sentiments on this count. In fact, I found the day's second appointment – which contains the most hip technology in the film – to be one of the most intriguing of the day's appointments.

The film is also about Leos Carax, though, and these are the references I didn't get as I watched. Evidently he conceded to make this film digitally and he believes that older cameras are holy in some way (they have motors, which is where he, apparently, gets his title). The main character's name is M. Oscar, which is Leos Carax's given name. Carax appears in the film, as well, having woken up from a dream and stumbling into a movie theatre where everyone is (as still as stone) watching King Vidor's The Crowd. I was oblivious to all of these self-references, and I am not sure if they are intended to be humor. I rather think that they are: in-jokes for the initiated. They certainly are not self-critiques, however. Holy Motors is not interested in real self-reflexivity.

Holy Motors is interested in what is real and what is not, where people go when they are not in our lives, whether we can actually trust what we see or not, whether the cameras are lying. Again, I get these questions, but I am not really interested in these kinds of questions. Perhaps it is so many years working in the theatre. Is this real? Is this possible? In the theatre we don't really ask that. We ask how to do it or what is happening or where it is headed. Of course it's not real.

More than anything, Leos Carax's film reminded me of David Lynch. Carax is much more interesting than Lynch for my money, but their styles are very similar. The poster, too, recalls the poster for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and the film made me think of that too – but only for a little bit. Apichatpong's project (I am thinking of his other films, as well) is very different and strikes me as a spiritual exploration, not of what is real, but of what is possible or how desire can shift our morphologies. Or maybe I'm just saying that I like Apichatpong and don't like Lynch or Carax. (The poster is also supposed to make us think of Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes without a Face), and if you miss the fact that Édith Scob is in both films, there is an explicit reference to Les Yeux near the end of Holy Motors.)

I will say this for Holy Motors, it is constantly surprising. Every time I think I have figured it out, Carax reminds me that I have not. The film's ending(s) are absolutely insane and worthy of any Lynchian surreal trip.

Things I Didn't Know about Wings

I finally saw William A. Wellman's Wings from 1927, the silent film that won the very first Best Picture Oscar. (I have seen lots of movies from that first year of Oscar – my favorites have always been Murnau's Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans, Borzage's 7th Heaven, and Vidor's The Crowd; recently I also fell in love with Josef von Sternberg's Underworld – but I had never been able actually to get my hands on a copy of Wings. Until today. I came home (to my new digs in New Hampshire) and what was sitting on my stoop, but the Wings DVD from Netflix (thanks, Netflix).

And so:

Ten things I didn't quite expect from Wings:

1. Butts! Click on this image and you will see what I mean. When the two male leads go to sign up to be in the Air Force or whatever it was called in WWI, what does the camera find, but a room full of naked men behind door number one! I was shocked, to say the least! It is a film that was made before the Hayes code, of course, but that doesn't mean William Wellman needed to include a shot of naked men. In fact, the nude rear ends are in the center of the shot. The eye is unavoidably drawn to the door at the center of the shot, and then when the door opens: butts! It is an odd thing, indeed.

2. Gary Cooper! Coop isn't in Wings for very long, and I hadn't even noticed his name in the opening credits, but there he is in the film's first act. His appearance was so unexpected to me that I didn't quite believe it was even him until I realized that he was nearly a foot taller than his castmates, and then I was sure.





3. This movie loves Buddy Rogers who plays the lead, Jack. And I have to admit, I've never even seen any of his other films. I guess he married Mary Pickford and then started making music or something, because his film career didn't quite live up to his appearance in Wings, but Wellman loves this guy, and you can see why. He is a handsome devil.


4. There was a moment when I truly feared I was going to have to sit through the original Spielberg duck joke – this is a WWI film, after all. Thankfully, however, I was spared. This is the lone shot of ducks (or geese or other waterfowl) in the picture.





 5. Let's talk about Fokkers. I had never heard the term, but evidently it was in such common usage in the 1920s that it needed no explanation for Wings' first audience in 1927.



 


6. And while we're looking at title cards, let's speak briefly about typography. Wings' title cards all have that gorgeous elaboration behind their first letter (you can see it in the P above. And then look at this amazing typeface being used to indicate intermission. It's just so elegant! I want this for my résumé.

7. More butts. Wings is also interested in the female anatomy. It-girl Clara Bow appears nearly nude somewhere in act two, and during an extended sequence at the Folies-Bergères there are lots of lovely shots of butts and breasts. The camera, for example, has no reason to focus on the derrières above left, and yet it lingers there. Ditto the breasts above right. The woman in the shot fastens that pin, and the camera never looks away the entire time she does that.

8. Also: lesbians. This is no joke. Look very carefully at this image. It is extraordinary. As far as I can tell those are two women, dressed more or less as men, caressing each other and holding hands. Am I right?

9. The next image is the other amazing thing about Wings. The photography is excellent. You can see in the following image that the female couple is not in the foreground as the camera has moved through them to the couple behind them. There was a couple in front of the lesbians that the camera treated similarly.

Again and again, Wellman and his photographer, the great Harry Perry, show an artistic, unique flair with angles and tracking shots and perspective. Not only in the air during the spectacular flight sequences, but in the Folies-Bergères, at training camp, in No Man's Land. It is lovely work.

10. Wings is so homoerotic. I thought I had remembered a sequence in The Celluloid Closet in which we are shown the image of the two men whose friendship means more than anything else in Wings. But I hadn't quite remembered what it looked like. Well, it looks like this:

But what I wasn't prepared for was this:

Oh my goodness. It is lovely. These two men love each other so much, and while they are clearly not gay – it was 1927, after all – the whole thing is just so sweet! As I said earlier, much of Wings is erotic, and much of that is heterosexual, but the homoerotic is unmistakeably present in this film, and I found it just delightful.

Somethin's Gotta Change, 'Cause Our Love's the Slowest-Moving Train

Today has been slightly productive. Actually, the whole weekend has been rather productive.

On Friday night I went on a date, yes, ladies and gentlemen, a date. I know, it's been forever. It was good to do that again. Hopefully, I will be doing more of that in the future.

Yesterday I got a haircut. I meant to do some reading as well, but that didn't really happen. I did see King Vidor's 1937 melodrama Stella Dallas, which was much better than I thought it would be. I like that Barbara Stanwyck. I never thought I did (mostly because of her hideous bangs in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, and her irritating performance in Executive Suite, but after seeing Stella Dallas, I think I do like her. I will have to check out Sorry, Wrong Number soon. After having dinner with the family, I went to a birthday party for someone I barely know, but who recently came out of the closet at age thirty-seven! Mm-hm. It was a nice party, and he's a nice man. His boyfriend's very nice, too. I met Lisa and Julie (who used to date this guy) there. It was, like, a party of all gay men. Good times.

This morning I watched an early Merchant Ivory film called Shakespeare Wallah which I absolutely loved. I recommend it to everyone. It's about the fading influence of British culture on India in the early 1960s and its absolutely wonderful. It's really a neat movie: subtle, poetic and beautiful like M/I's later work. I am on a M/I kick. I am going to check out more of their earlier work. Today I ironed, cleaned my house, paid my bills, ordered photos from a wedding I attended last November, and finished cutting As You Like It. I haven't started the crossword yet, and I don't think I will today. I'm going to go wash my car and try to finish The Line of Beauty.