May 2024 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Films in Focus podcast #3: The Zone of Interest + TWIN PEAKS Character Series advance

I hoped and suspected that The Zone of Interest would be the next film patrons picked for me to cover following its prominence at the Academy Awards in March, where it won much-deserved prizes for Best Sound and Best International Film, as well as the backlash to and praise for director Jonathan Glazer's acceptance speech drawn directly from the film's own themes. The title had appeared in an earlier poll, spurred by last year's podcast on Glazer's earlier Under the Skin; while I missed most of the press around it in 2023 I'd been anticipating this coverage for several months. Nonetheless, I wasn't really prepared for the power of this film, the purity of its aesthetic and especially the emotional devastation of its conclusion. Responding to a post about how the film "must most importantly be 'felt', rather than be 'understood'", I recently commented on Twitter that "The 'felt' and 'understood' were more intertwined than in most films I can think of. So much of its impact relies on what you know rather than see/hear yet it's so visceral. The power of the ending rests in an intellectual concept but [is] as emotional as any ending I've experienced." The Zone of Interest follows several months in the life of the Auschwitz commandant, told entirely on one side of the concentration camp wall - the side on which Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) live in their tidy, well-manicured villa. This episode discusses the film's aggressive, intricate soundtrack, surveillance-style shooting strategy, and differences from the novel Glazer very loosely used as inspiration; I also explore the history of the real Höss, the prisoner-written song "Sunbeam" featured in the film, connections to other famous Nazi- or genocide-themed works like Schindler's List, The Act of Killing, and Dr. Strangelove, what marks the time period as both distinct and resonant, and much more, in one of my longest reviews of a single film.

In addition to that $5/tier feature, for all patrons I've advanced another TWIN PEAKS Character Series entry, in this case one of the most complicated, fascinating characters of the third season (and, in some ways, before that too).

What are the May rewards?

The Favorites - Schindler's List (#85)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Schindler's List (1993/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg) appeared at #85 on my original list.

What it is • Oskar Schindler arrives on the screen with an aura of glamor, charisma, and mystery, as superficially charming as he is morally bankrupt. All around him the Jews of Krakow - rich and poor, old and young, cynical and idealistic - are stripped of their property, huddled together in ghettos, herded into work camps, and executed on the whims of their German occupiers. Schindler's concern is to get his enamelware business going, taking advantage of the war (and the possibility of Jewish slave labor) to make a fortune which he can then spend on lavish parties and the best in consumer goods. It would be easy to set Schindler up as an instinctively despicable figure, but instead Spielberg and star Liam Neeson encourage us to enjoy his company, to see the world simultaneously through his eyes and through a wider lens which perceives the suffering he is oblivious to. This is a risky gambit (it would have been easier to focus the film through his eyes entirely OR to make a docudrama about the horrors of the Holocaust) but one that ultimately pays off as these two distant worlds come crashing together, and the awakened Oskar discovers the humanity of those around him, and of himself.

Why I like it •

The Last Stage

When Wanda Jakubowska entered the gates of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a political prisoner of the Nazis, she seized upon a goal that may have kept her alive in the months and years to come. Although she had joined the Polish Resistance early in World War II and been committed to the Left many years before that, this was not a political goal (at least not primarily). Jakubowska had also been a filmmaker for over a decade, founding the film group START and crafting experimental films throughout the thirties, climaxing with a feature film whose only print was destroyed during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Inside the concentration camp, Jakubowska conceived the idea for her second feature even as she herself, not just her work, faced destruction. If and when the Nazis were defeated and Auschwitz was liberated, she would create a film about life in the camp. And so she did.

Schindler's List and Munich

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

When Schindler's List was released in 1993, it was regarded as a breakthrough, a true turning point in Steven Spielberg's career when the wunderkind director finally became a "grown-up." In fact, the movie is very much a culmination of his previous films, more of a crescendo to his early period than a harbinger of his later work. It is a film of flourishes, grand gestures and set pieces, full of heroism and villainy with a larger-than-life backdrop and clearly delineated moral stakes. For this reason, this extremely popular and widely acclaimed movie had a fair number of detractors on its release. They focused on the sentimentality of certain moments (especially Schindler's tearful plea at the end of the movie) and the selectivity of its focus, choosing to dwell on the positive in such an overwhelmingly negative subject. Stanley Kubrick, a friend and posthumous collaborator of Spielberg, supposedly noted that Schindler's List was a story about success, but the Holocaust was all about failure, and J. Hoberman dismissed the movie with the rhetorical question, "Is it possible to make a feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th century?"

These criticisms could be viewed as footnotes to the film's overwhelming success but they speak to a larger phenomenon, a deep-seated critical and intellectual antipathy toward Spielberg (along with an acknowledgement that he can't merely be dismissed, but must be debunked). They're also important because they remind us of that essential fact - that Schindler's List grows out of Spielberg's earlier body of work - and they are interesting because of what came later, especially Munich. Indeed, that film makes an interesting companion piece to the earlier one, in terms of subject matter, narrative approach, and stylistic inclinations. It comes from a period where Spielberg had overcome some of the critical hurdles that still faced him with Schindler's List, and when a truer break with the early films had been made. I would argue that the real turning point in Spielberg's filmography arrives not with Schindler's List, or The Color Purple, or Saving Private Ryan, any of his other self-consciously "adult" films dealing with real-world historical subjects, but with a science fiction film at the dawn of the new millennium. Beginning with AI Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's work darkened - or rather the darkness that had always been there came to the forefront, coinciding with a breakdown in the strict discipline Spielberg films always enjoyed. Munich belongs to this new period of uncertainty and messiness; Schindler's List definitely does not although it contains hints of the darkness and maturity to come.

Storm Clouds Gather 1940 - 1942 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 6

The sixth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 6: Storm Clouds Gather"

Storm Clouds Gather

In a quiet European cafe, a couple bicker and, by bickering, flirt. It is charming, wistful...and more than a little poignant: argument as gradual romance rather than violent dispute. In another establishment, in another European country, this same couple (or so it seems) find themselves surrounded by a bloodthirsty crowd, hands raised high in stiff salute, singing lustily about their glorious leader. Upon reflection, that cafe scene becomes even more poignant, tragic even. War has come to Europe, and by extension, to Hollywood.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds' hook is clever, canny, and seemingly irresistible. A squadron of Jewish-American soldiers, led by a gentile backwoodsmen (is there any other kind?), drops behind enemy lines in 1944 Germany and sets about killing as many Nazis as possible.  While Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads his titular squadron on an Apache-inspired campaign of terror against the Germans, a quiet, beautiful young cinema owner endures the unwanted attention of a chipper Aryan sharpshooter. Unexpectedly, these overtures lead to a meeting with Goebbels, a tense dinner with the man who killed her family (he does not recognize her) and the opportunity to exact retribution on her kin's murderers. The climax sees the Basterds' official mission unknowingly collide with Shoshana's personal revenge plot, as a propaganda print and occupied theater goes up in flames, and the Fuhrer goes down in a flurry of bullets. Yes, the movie's hooky all right, but in the finished film the goofy high concept (Nazi-hunting Jewish guerrillas) is probably the least interesting element; one frequently wonders if Tarantino couldn't have made a better film by foregoing the cartoonish central device and withholding the residual hipster winking (dramatically toned down, but still a dominant element in the director's style).

Triumph of the Will

As I may have mentioned recently, I've been tracking down classics I haven't seen (and re-watching old favorites) in anticipation of a long-awaited, perpetually postponed canonical exercise. On Netflix, I set up a queue of about 50 films which it seemed especially pressing to watch. The list ranged from iconic hits without a great deal of critical acclaim (Saturday Night Fever, A Nightmare on Elm Street) to widely acknowledged classics I had seen only parts of (The Great Dictator, Orpheus) to unseen films by auteur directors (Made in USA, Simon of the Desert, Salo). I proceeded chronologically and finished just before the new year; but at task's end I realized there were still a few films I meant to see which had slipped through the cracks.

One of them was Leni Riefenstahl's notorious 1935 Triumph of the Will, probably the most famous, castigated, and cautiously celebrated propaganda film of all time. Documenting the National Socialist Party rally of '34, when Hitler had just ascended to power but had already taken complete control of the country, the film has been imitated even as it's been held at arms' length. Today, Hitler and the Nazis tend to be viewed primarily in conjunction with the Holocaust but to watch Triumph of the Will in 2010 is to be reminded not just how the Nazis saw themselves but how the world first came to see them. Before his name became synonymous with pure evil, the German dictator and his bizarre, unexpected, and wildly popular movement were regarded with a mixture of awe, dread, and comic incredulity - sometimes all three at once. Triumph of the Will was widely screened and, while scorning the political content, many filmmakers admired the craft and later imitated it for their own propaganda films (once Hitler's Germany had unqualifiably become the enemy). Indeed, seeing this film after the films which followed it, one can see all the sources of the Hitlerite myth, both the one he fostered and the one that sprung up when his toxic brand of fanatical monumentalism encountered foreign sensibilities.

Zelig

Zelig is a marvellous non sequitur, much like its hero. Well, that's not true exactly - the film has a message of sorts ("be yourself," squarely enunciated by the titular protagonist before he falls off the wagon and begins chameleon-ing again). But just as Leonard Zelig the man becomes a fad for his relatively purposeless ability to transform, Zelig the movie is too busy creating a lovingly thorough pastiche of the documentary form (and paying parodic but affectionate tribute to the 20s and 30s) to be "about" much other than itself. Resultingly, the movie is enjoyable but slight - Woody in the minor key - which is not such a bad thing, after all. At the same time, Zelig is, unlike some of Allen's other slight work (and most of his work has been, at best, slight since his 70s zenith) remarkably clever and sophisticated.

A Quick One: Theater fodder

As I indicated in my previous "quick one" I've seen few films in theaters over the past few months. What's more, the films I did see were not usually of the highest grade, in terms of being Oscar bait and the like...I tended to go out and spend when I was forced (i.e. with friends and family) hence I did not see the cream so much as the crop. But for all you completists out there, here are some quick rundowns on what I thought of what I saw.

Valkyrie - Entertaining enough, the way Hillary was likable enough. Brian Singer didn't goof up the inherently interesting (albeit not so inherently suspenseful) story, which has Tom Cruise attempting to kill Adolf Hitler and install L. Ron Hubbard as Chancellor of Germany. Tom Wilkinson gives the best performance as a slippery careerist trying to figure out which way the wind's blowing before aligning himself with any conspiracies. The film is a competent thriller, but I kept wondering what a Jean-Pierre Melville could have done with it.

Taken - A proudly straightforward thriller with one or two exceptional or unusual elements. Some of these are a consequence of its increasingly rare (and thus, increasingly refreshing), almost naive straightforwardness: the (perhaps unintentionally oddball) portrayal of notorious Ivy League Skull & Bones CIA agents as working-class schlubs, the un-ironic use of a career in bubblegum pop as desirable, the un-ironic use of U2 as the band which hip teenagers follow around Europe (hat tip to the local newspaper for pointing this out), the un-ironic use of the bratty girl from "Lost," as a rich kid who's good-hearted. But the film's trump card is its casting - Liam Neeson is perfect as the gentle giant of a father turned stone-cold professional. Not for he the teeth-gnashing of bereaved, vengeful parents most movies present: the moment his daughter is kidnapped, he turns totally pro, speaking calmly and forcefully as he takes control of the situation. It's a remarkable, well-played, subtle twist. Thus both major pitfalls of this sort of action movie - hip irony and sentimental sops to presumed audience desires - are generally avoided. However, there is one decision made by Neeson (or rather Luc Besson, the writer) which may go too far in the direction of unsentimental. Since the film had keyed me to expect a tough, admirably professional, but ultimately fair and just hero (he's dark but a good guy), I had some trouble accepting this particular decision. But it is memorable and in retrospect, perhaps the film's standout moment. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. We'll discuss in the comments section.

The Spirit - A friend of mine had a couple free movie passes, one of which he generously shared. Hence I saw this movie for free, and it was worth every penny. I did pay for the popcorn, however, and that was pretty good.

A Quick One - The Mortal Storm

[As December, and with it 2008, comes to a close, let me take a moment to look back on several recently viewed (but undiscussed) movies. Each "Quick One" will be a paragraph, with the open invitation for you to keep the discussion going by leaving comments.]

"Message" movies are usually looked down upon, and often with some justification. But there are different sorts of movies, which deliver different sorts of messages. There are some which are cloaked in an overbearing sense of self-righteousness, a complacency borne of "being in the right." And then there are others, like The Mortal Storm, which may be somewhat naive in their good-heartedness, but which move you, in part because of that very naivitee. Fashioned with quietly poetic grace by Frank Borzage in 1940, but set in 1933, The Mortal Storm is anti-Nazi at a time when many elements in America were flirting with unscrupulous neutrality. More importantly, it does not show the rise of Nazism in the halls of power, or amongst diverse groups in an urban environment, but in a small mountain town, within a single family. It allows us to soak in this warm domestic environment, slowly, before the pall of fascism has fallen over this town and this way of life. The film exudes a quiet, noble desperation rather than a florid, chest-thumping heroism and it ends up exhibiting a painful sorrow. Its primary flaw is that it does not identify its protagonists as Jewish - though this fact is so apparent, perhaps one could argue that the dialogue's denial only adds an extra shade of poignancy. Although I didn't notice it, the country in the movie is never once referred to as Germany. The conceit is completely absurd, as the country in the movie is demonstrably Germany.* The film cannot be pegged as an allegory when the swastika is featured prominently, and the name "Hitler" is unmistakably invoked. James Stewart is good in what could potentially be a one-dimensional, thankless role (the good farm boy who never buys into Nazism). But the real star of the picture is Margaret Sullavan. Before seeing this film, I didn't really "get" her appeal. That's now changed. Her wounded, luminous expressiveness adds another shade of poignancy to that already invoked by the sweetly, sadly good-hearted screenplay and a tragedy-tinged performance by Frank Morgan as her befuddled father, a kind of tragic twin to his beloved Professor Marvell.

*This is incorrect - the country is referred to as Germany several times.

Walt Disney On the Front Lines

(Follow the links to see the shorts themselves.)

A few years ago, Disney finally released wartime propaganda cartoons that had been tied up in its vaults for decades. As part of the Walt Disney Treasures series, the "Walt Disney On the Front Lines" DVD collects several entertainment and educational cartoon shorts (some of which have been available) and the largely unseen feature Victory Through Air Power, introduced in maudlin, overlit fashion by a perpetually cheery Leonard Maltin (some of these introductions are, maddeningly, unskippable). The collection fascinates because it represents a studio -and a country- at the crossroads.