Review - The Cool World (1963)

Set amidst the unsavory street corners and Babylonian din of early 60's Harlem, Shirley Clarke's vivid, rough-edged drama tells the story of the Royal Pythons, a scrappy teen-aged gang trying to make a name for themselves. 15-year old Duke, a Python warlord (played with affecting stoicism by first-time actor Rony Clanton), aspires to become the club's president and have a reputation as a killer - for both he requires a gun. He arranges to buy a pearl-handled Colt from a local gangster, and spends the duration of the film frantically hustling to pay for it, violently clashing with a rival gang, ascending the ranks of his own crew, and reaping all that comes along with the top spot.

As she does in better known works like 'The Connection' and 'Portrait of Jason,' Clarke freely blends scripted narrative with elements of cinéma vérité. She forgoes set pieces for a series of authentic city locales, into which she disperses her players; bustling boulevards uptown, deserted playgrounds at dusk, a dreamily rendered Coney Island worthy of Morris Engel. The voyeuristic framework, exoticized setting, casting of non-actors and poor sound dubbing recall the ethnographic fictions of Jean Rouch, who's pioneering works shot in Africa are probably this film's closest antecedents. Like Rouch, Clarke presents a somewhat naive diagnosis of the community that she documents, in this case a relentless death-drive that compels the young African American protagonists to murder each other and pursue their own demise with little rationale. Fortunately for the filmmaker, the vitality and sheer energy of the inner-city neighborhood and its residents shine through.

While the simplistic superimposed storyline hangs a bit loosely from the dynamic imagery, the jazz score by the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet is tight and tensile, nimbly shadowing the onscreen action. The legendary trumpeter gets top billing, but it's Mal Waldron's kinetic compositions that constitute the film's greatest triumph. Waldron, who would go on to craft under-appreciated scores for 'Sweet Love, Bitter' and 'Three Rooms in Manhattan,' provides a masterful selection of moody themes and probing piano cues that complement the narrative in a number of inventive ways. On the boardwalk in Brooklyn, he incorporates a carnival organ that is playful yet ominous, and in one desperately needed scene of tenderness, a music box tinkles while Duke gives an impromptu geography lesson to LuAnne, a childlike teenage prostitute.

Notes on... Muhammed Ali, The Greatest (1974)

In the wake of Muhammed Ali's passing earlier this year, many of the films that immortalized the boxer's legacy in and out of the ring have been revisited, in print and on the repertory circuit. Leon Gast's polished Oscar-winner 'When We Were Kings' an account of Ali's 1974 title bout with George Foreman in Zaire, reappeared at movie-houses across the country, as did Bill Siegel's illuminating 'The Trials of Muhammad Ali,' focused on the fighter's legal travails at the end of the 1960's. Some lesser known titles have wisely been reevaluated (William Greaves' gritty, unembellished 'The Fighters,' reassessed by Richard Brody), while other, more questionable works have remained obscure (Tom Gries' hokey hagiography 'The Greatest,' featuring among many other missteps, James Earl Jones portraying Malcolm X).

Worthy of a fresh look but excluded from recent conversation is William Klein's 'Muhammed Ali, The Greatest.' Likely due to a confusing release history (its first section was put out as a standalone feature with a different title in 1969), as well as an emerging distaste among American audiences and critics for Klein's blatantly anti-U.S. stripe, his artful documentary was and is still rarely shown. It's a shame, as it is a sharply realized portrait of the complex fighter, one that is far more ingenious in conception than any of the aforementioned titles. The film boasts two rather bold formalistic innovations, the most striking of which is a bipartite narrative structure. Its first half, shot in 1964 in black and white, chronicles Ali's quest for the heavyweight championship, trailing him as he trains, whips up media frenzy and upsets the fearsome Sonny Liston twice. The young Ali, then still going by his birth name of Cassius Clay, is pompous yet introspective, confident of his greatness but increasingly aware of the glass ceiling he will inevitably crash into as a black athlete in the stifling racial climate of 60's America. Klein then jumps ahead to 1974 in full color, to the "Rumble in the Jungle" fight with Foreman, where a slightly ripened, but no less flamboyant or dominant Ali regains the title in another shocker.

The elision of the intervening decade - in which Clay joined the Nation of Islam, became Ali, refused to serve in Vietnam, and lost his public and professional stature - exemplifies the filmmaker's oblique storytelling slant. Rather than have one of his subjects speak his views on the state of racial affairs in 1964, Klein shows the stakes. He contrasts ghoulish, cigar-smoking stakeholders conferring about boxers as if they were livestock (distorted with the director's signature fish-eye lens) with stoic undercard fighters, grimly awaiting a grueling punishment that will likely be their moment in the sun. In Lewiston, Maine, the site of the second contest with Liston, the radicalization effect is not discussed but acted out by a group of black teenagers performing a psychodrama at the behest of a white teacher. It begins as a playful recreation of an pre-fight press conference (one student plays a cocky, shirtless Ali, another a journalist) and ends with spirited calls for black power and equality. Ten years later in Africa, the earthy, inspirational image of Ali is juxtaposed with the false magnanimity and authoritarian ubiquity of Zairean President Mobutu, who one cannot help but liken to the parasitic American fight promotors shown earlier. The strong insinuation is that no matter the color of their skin, a champion of the people will always run counter to the oppressor, and ultimately upstage him.

The most audacious of Klein's allusive tactics (and the second of the stylistic contrivances that distinguish his film) is the omission of any footage from the three featured fights. Usage was likely was not allowed due to copyright issues, but the director uses the restriction to his advantage, eschewing the ready-made climax of the title bout. He imaginatively fills in the gaps where the fight would have been shown, with iconic still photographs, flickering ringside montage that imitates flashbulbs but obscures the melee, even boastful, morning-after recollections from the fighter himself. More than a creative way of reframing the traditional sports documentary that demands action, Klein shifts focus to the profound depths of Muhammed Ali as a man, struggling against particularly difficult odds and times. The effect makes the viewer wonder if the film's title refers to Ali's pugilistic prowess, or something else altogether.

Review - Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's fine cinematic adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes' novella is many things at once: conflicted character study, invaluable time capsule, tasteful agitprop and timely political allegory. It centers on Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), a lethargic, intellectually inclined Cuban bourgeois kicking around Havana after his family and friends leave the country in the early days of the Castro regime. "Neither revolutionary nor counterrevolutionary," he has stayed put simply because he doesn't know what else to do. He's not particularly cut out for any of the paths open to him in a nascent communist society, and while he does feel a certain pained pride in his country's hard-fought independence, he secretly hopes that his comfortable lifestyle will not have to be sacrificed for the greater good. (It had been subsidized by rental income from private property, since disallowed by the new government.) Admittedly "Europeanized" by his American education, Sergio regards his countrymen as if through glass, generally preferring to survey them with binoculars from the veranda of his lavish top-floor apartment. In this manner, he watches as the nation transitions into autonomy, well aware that, once again, he stands to be left behind.

Shot in 1968 but set in the time between the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Missile Crisis of 1962, Alea's work is technically a period piece. Viewers will likely be too busy cherishing the sights and sounds of late 60's Cuba to notice though. Not yet frozen in time by the trade embargo and decades of isolation, Havana is a vibrant metropolis in which the protagonist and his fellow denizens go about the business of living - flirting, dancing, fighting and marching against a tropical backdrop papered with propaganda and punctuated by violence. It's far from Paris, or even Prague, but that does not stop the director from enlivening his loose narrative with unconventional elements - still photography, comic strips, candid street scenes, reportage - as well as feather-light editing and restless camerawork that could easily qualify it as the first movie of the Cuban New-Wave. Facile tags aside, the film has much to say about the place of the sedate intellectual in a fast-changing world, and of modern man's need to strike a balance between First World learnedness and Third World conviction. It's thoroughly intelligent, effortlessly stylish, and undoubtedly a landmark of Latin American cinema.

Review - China Is Near (1967)

Marco Bellocchio's second film, the follow-up to his wholly original dysfunctional family tale 'Fists in the Pocket,' is another polemic against the provincial Italian bourgeois society the director obviously knows so well. More political in nature than his first effort (and far more comedic in tone), it concerns three siblings of aristocratic lineage who dwell in a stuffy mansion filled with leather-bound books, moth-eaten finery and at least one tribute bestowed by a deceased Pope. The eldest brother Vittorio (portrayed with magnificent bluster by Glauco Mauri) is the picture of effete, impotent intellectualism, inanely spouting verse to dazzle his secretary Giovanna, then pathetically pawing at her when she ignores his advances. Sister Elena (to the mortification of Vittorio) mainly busies herself by bedding men from town then refusing to marry any of them for fear of losing her elite status, while youngest brother Camillo is a Catholic church acolyte by day and a Maoist radical by night. Because of his patina of respectability, the utterly unqualified Vittorio is chosen to run for office as the head of the local Socialist chapter, exasperating party hopeful Carlo, who happens to be Giovanna's lover, and who is hired by the candidate to help orchestrate his campaign. The working-class couple are corrupted, gradually transforming into conniving social climbers and pairing off with the brother and sister with designs to marry into their wealth. Meanwhile, the overzealous Camillo does everything he can to disrupt his brother's election efforts, going as far as to sic a pack of dogs on him as he delivers a speech, and planting a bomb in the Socialists' headquarters.

Of a pair with Bernardo Bertolucci's 'Before the Revolution,' another study of conflicted Italian bourgeoisie in the years leading up to the upheavals of 1968, Bellocchio's sardonic satire is patently autobiographical, drawing on the filmmaker's rural upbringing and leftist affiliations. Also, like Bertolucci's film it's less concerned with the resolution of the plot than with the novelistic recreation of a stifling milieu, filled with empty societal rituals, religious ineptitude, sexual frustration and an overhanging pall of political unrest that implicates members of every class, and forces them into conflict. The loose, episodic narrative is tiresome for stretches as one waits for familial intrigues to unfold, but several farcical scenes keep it going, almost all of which center on Vittorio; he harangues his pious old aunts at dinner for not voting for him, is fallen upon and beaten by toothless proletariat at his first public appearance, and gleefully bounces a ball like a child. There's also the bumbling exploits of Camillo and his sorry communist cell, whose immature ideologies, absurd seriousness and petty vandalisms (painting the film's title on a wall) recall Godard's 'La Chinoise' in small, subplot scale. Visually, Bellocchio retains the uncontrived look of his debut, to which cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli adds an appropriately decadent sheen. Composer Ennio Morricone contributes a brisk, almost martial theme.

Review - Cocksucker Blues (1972)

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Notes on... L'été (1968)

[This is the first entry in a four-part post on Marcel Hanoun's 'Les Saisons' tetralogy]

To the dismay of the already initiated, the remarkably original filmmaker Marcel Hanoun (1929-2012) remains almost completely unknown, even to the average so-called "film buff." A contemporary and sometimes-collaborator of the French New Wave, his debut 'Un Simple Histoire' (1959) won the Eurovision prize at Cannes, the follow-up 'Le Huitième Jour' (1960) starred Emmanuelle Riva of 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' fame, and 'L'authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung' (1966) was partially funded by Jean-Luc Godard, and featured a cameo from Jean Eustache. Even with the support and regard of his voguish peers, his films had little traction with audiences or critics, and by 1968 he had all but vanished into obscurity. At present, the name Marcel Hanoun is much more likely to draw blank stares than wide-eyed admiration. Almost single-handedly leading the charge to rectify this gross undervaluation is Re:Voir, Paris-based distributor and purveyor of experimental cinema, which is promptly releasing his texts (in French), as well as his notoriously hard to find features. After a first-rate 'Carl-Emmanuel Jung' DVD in 2015, this April they issued a veritable holy grail: his 'Les Saisons' tetralogy in a four-disc set, restored and subtitled in English. Made between 1968 to 1972, the films contained within constitute the director's greatest artistic achievements, and they expound a filmic philosophy on par with the brightest cinematic minds of his generation. One can only hope that that the angelic example of Re:Voir is followed by other distributors. Even on a small scale, more home releases from his extensive filmography will lead to more critical attention, and inevitably, an improved standing for Hanoun among forward-thinking filmmakers of the 60's, 70's and beyond.

The first entry in Hanoun's film cycle based on the seasons, 'L'été' (1968) follows a woman (Graziella Buci, in her only acting role) who escapes to a friend's farmhouse in Normandy from Paris following the events of May '68. Craving a break from the political turmoil, she stays there alone for a number of days, debating whether she should reunite with a lover, Jean-Luc, with whom she took part in the demonstrations. She idles her time away, listening to music, reading, exploring the surrounding countryside and corresponding with a pen-pal abroad. Like Rimbaud's Season in Hell, her Summer sojourn is a sort of limbo; trapped between the aura of failed revolution in the city, the fleetingness of her idyllic interlude and an unforeseeable future, she clings increasingly to idea of the messianic Jean-Luc, who may or may not be coming to rescue her.

'L'été' can be interpreted in a number of ways, all critical to understanding the artistic trajectory of Hanoun in this period. From a political viewpoint, it can be seen as the director's rather poetic statement on the aftermath of May '68. As his colleague Jean Eustache would poignantly recall some years later in his elegiac masterwork 'La Maman et la Putain' (1973), the time following the occupation of Paris by students and workers (and the successful, albeit brief ousting of de Gaulle) was one of great disillusionment, a collective come-down for the men and women in the street when they realized that the social structures they had shaken so were not going to topple. Unlike Eustache, whose temporal distance from the events allowed for more thoughtful reflection (as well as a measure of self-deprecating humor that leavened the melancholic mood), Hanoun made his film a scant three months later, in August. Enough time had passed that protesters could perceivably see the fault in their naive logic, but their ideological defeat was still quite fresh. Accordingly, the female protagonist's reaction to the encroachment of current affairs on her getaway (represented by images of protest graffiti in Paris, radio reportage of the Soviet reaction to the Prague Spring and mentions of armed struggles in Vietnam and Biafra) is not galvanization, but weariness, and a curious detachment from the ongoings. The rural, almost-utopian backdrop of her idyll (suggestive of a farming cooperative) does little to comfort her either, and when her lover (functioning as a sort of revolutionary savior) fails to appear, she realizes that her peace of mind lies in a deeper introspection.

Similarly, with 'L'été' and his seasons tetralogy, Hanoun's art would turn inward, transitioning from the social and political to issues more personal and philosophical in nature. Much like his protagonist, he would abandon the more popular themes in pursuit of an artistic ideal, and an original style would emerge. His first feature 'Un Simple Histoire' was a tale of a single mother desperately searching for a job that drew notably from Italian neo-realism, 'Le Huitième Jour,' a kitchen-sink style social drama and 'L'authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung,' a wordy, Brechtian dissertation on the Nazi horror (made in a style eerily prescient of Straub-Huillet). Thematically, 'L'été' sees this sort of topical concern replaced by meditation and self-absorption, and stylistically, it announces the director's newly-matured methodology. Hanoun's works would subsequently center on thinly-veiled autobiographical characters who grapple with the nature of art, specifically the cinema. They do so by means of cerebral dialogue, but also through pious contemplation of the high-arts, particularly European paintings, religious iconography and classical music. Indeed, when the unnamed woman exalts her latest musical discovery (Bach's Ich Habe Genug cantata) in a letter, it's almost as if she were suggesting it as a viable alternative to politics, religion, and other systems of belief.

'L'été' also introduces Hanoun's completely singular editing style, an audio-visual patchwork that characterizes and unifies the four Season films. Like a musical fugue (a comparison the director would plainly make at the beginning of 'L'hiver'), motifs are woven throughout the cinematic composition, reappearing often and in varied forms. The image that dominates this film is that of the face. The mysterious countenance of the lead actress is shown from every imaginable angle, close up and mid-range, in motion and in still photographs. Similar to Bresson (who he was favorably compared to by Godard in his review of 'Un Simple Histoire'), Hanoun's fascination with faces is almost purely aesthetic, likely derived from his own work as a photographer. Other recurring visual elements include the protagonist's nude body displayed in various poses, repetitious running shots, and bucolic nature scenes. As he does with images, snippets of dialogue, sounds and music are removed from their diegetic context and repeated, overlain in an intricate, almost mathematical design that suggests fine filigree or an orchestral arrangement, even more so when punctuated by the measured, but brisk cuts. The rhythmic quality of the editing, seemingly at odds with the non-action Hanoun trains his camera on, produces a hypnotic effect that works independently of the narrative. The mastery of montage is the director's first step towards a cinema that is, through its inherent poetry and rigour, an end in itself.

Like the titular season, 'L'été' is brief but eventful, filled with intimations of endings and beginnings. For Hanoun, it marked the end of his devotion to the puerile political causes of May '68 (a creative and intellectual dead-end, he felt), as well as the beginning of a meaningful, very personal cinematic dialectic, the culmination of which would be his defining works. In between these revelations, as is expected in the Summer months, is a fair amount of soul searching, much biding of time, and more than a little ambivalence about it all.

Review - Black Girl (1966)

Ousmane Sembène's debut feature - notably the first full-length film from a native African filmmaker - is the tragic story of Diouana, a young woman who travels from her home in Senegal to Antibes to serve as nanny for a bourgeois French couple. Instead of stepping into the cosmopolitan European existence she always dreamed of, she finds herself imprisoned in their high-rise apartment, cut off from family and the outside world, demeaned and treated as a lowly maid, a fate she refuses to accept.

The important issues of neocolonialism, paternalism and immigrant labor are not treated as political talking points or morality cues, as they might have been by directors with less proximity. For Sembène, a former soldier in the French army and migrant dock worker, these deeply ingrained institutions were a part of everyday life, and his familiarity with them (and the psychology behind them) is evident in the nuanced characterization of his female lead. Neither helpless lamb nor fiery dissident, Diouana is more complex; headstrong and impulsive, she's naive enough to be seduced by her patroness's promises of luxury, but smart enough to realize almost immediately why she was sent for. She's also fiercely independent, rejecting oppression in all forms, not just from her employers but also from a suitor who attempts to weigh in on her future. Portrayed with dignified bearing by first-time actress Mbissine Thérèse Diop, the gravity of her performance anchors the film, and ensures that it transcends mere allegory.

Sembène presents a refreshingly unsensationalized depiction of the Senegalse capital of Dakar, but when the story shifts to the French high-rise he takes poetic liberties with the mise en scène, rendering the the sparse, harshly lit apartment as uninhabitable as the surface of the moon. Framed against this arid, lifeless backdrop, the ebony-skinned heroine might as well be a fish out of water.