Ill Stills

FILM HEAVEN

[theillstills]

In Heaven, as it is on Earth:  The Holy Places of To the Wonder

It’s been a full year since Terrence Malick’s newest opus, To the Wonder, premiered at Venice, and half a year since its limited American debut.  Seemingly untethered by structure, though, like the cinema of Kubrick, Malick’s dreamy existential meditations adhere ardently to the three-act framework of theater, the film proved as divisive as ever.  Even I had misgivings, having left the movie suffocated, not exalted, among two friends who felt similarly (one had walked out, then back in, then out again before the finale).  We argued passionately on the drive home.  With whom did we sympathize?  Was the execution half-hearted?  What, if anything, did To the Wonder have to say about relationships, about love?  Roger Ebert, in his beautiful, final piece of film criticism, argued that To the Wonder attempted to reach beneath the surface to “find the soul in need.”  My soul was heavy, exhausted, having strained for catharsis that never came, as if the movie refused to be consumed and discarded so easily.  The film is a primer for itself, demanding to be revisited, reexamined, relived.

The second viewing is a dance.  Relaxed, I give in to its trajectory.   We are less clumsy.  The film’s abrasive opening frames, digital, a whiplash of nature from the vantage of a speeding train, the landscape indecipherable, establishe the movie’s central binary of inside/outside.  The outside is intimidating, but Malick and collaborating cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki place the viewer in a rare POV shot, one from a hand-held camera, operated by Neil (Ben Affleck), a man of science, a man of control.  Behind his camera, he finds authority over the images he captures, but more importantly, he finds safety from the teeming chaos of nature, and from the volatile beauty of his lover, Marina (Olga Kurylenko). He hides.

“Newborn,” says Marina.  “I open my eyes.  I melt into the eternal night.”  She has surrendered to the uncertainty of space, like water filling a cup (in contrast to Neil, a man of earth, who spends much of the film taking samples of soil), rejecting control, but this too is problematic.  She waits for love to be thrust upon her, for Neil to demand that she spend her life with him in his Oklahoma home.  She lacks definition, and because of this, the things she wants most of all slip away from her, or vice versa, as she eddies past, longing for something solid.

Oklahoma, one of those great American planes where you can say “God’s country” and actually mean it, further complicates the relationship of space, by conflating inside and outside, rendering human sphere and the sphere of nature almost indistinguishable.  The earth, majestic and grand, the temple to which Malick has spent his career praying, is here literally poisonous, as Neil (as well as the viewer) attempts to discern causality between the samples he is collecting, and a seemingly pervasive sickness among the locals.  “My garden died,” says one man.  “I got stuff on my house.  Kids acting strange.”  Has nature been so polluted that it can no longer be looked toward for sustenance, for guidance?

There is a retreat to personal fields, to structures erected by humans designed to keep the outside out, but Neil and Marina’s house oozes toxicity as well.   It is the shell of a home, empty (almost completely bare and aggressively bland), a product of mass production, and the couple struggles to fill the space with love.  There are fleeting moments of sensual connection, but as Marina muses, one must always come down from these highs, back to the languid embrace of quotidian banality.

Then there is Father Quintana (Javier Bardem, giving a powerfully nuanced performance), whose proselytizing gives him no solace during his own times of need, searching for meaning in the empty church after morning sermons, or among the poverty stricken, the homeless, the sick.  The church janitor describes his ecstatic relationship with God (“Hey!  The power hits you, brother!”), and Quintana can only look on with longing, jealousy.  In To the Wonder’s most heartbreaking moment, Quintana hides inside his home from a woman seeking his council, rather than face her, and his, desperation.  How can these people look to me for answers, he seems to ask, when I myself so intensely need fulfillment?  Where can God’s love be found?

Is it among the dazzling neon lights of corporate structure?  An amusement park shines in the night sky, its colors bold, effervescent, and wild.  The sign for a Sonic (a fast food chain that brings its food outside, only to have you eat it in your car) hums in a muted parking lot.  Marina’s daughter even finds joy in the endless repetition of the supermarket isles, its cleanliness and illusion of choice.  Perhaps the love is hidden in plain sight, and one needs only to step back to feel its presence.  Buffalo graze in a field.  Horses gallop together in fantastic waves.  A flower blooms.  There is still growth. There is still life.  Quintana gives communion to the incarcerated, and for an instant, the cell is a holy place, and there is comfort for both men.

Whatever the moment may be, in whatever space it thrives, it cannot be obtained passively.  No!  Grace will not be handed to you.  You must seek it out, no matter how difficult the journey, and the journey will be difficult.  Open your eyes in the dark.  Let them adjust.  Sanctuary may be miles ahead, at the end of a long beach, but it exists, as tangible as you and me.  Perhaps it’s right in front of you, on the other side of your computer screen, a quiet confirmation of the sublime.  You may have passed it by already, but this is fine.  It’s never too late to go back.  It’s never too late.  Go back.

[theillstills]

The Usual Suspects (1995, Bryan Singer; Cinematographer: Newton Thomas Sigel) “And like that, he’s gone.”

Ill Stills 2011-2013.

[theillstills]

Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage and Power as Negative Space Bad things will happen, Robert Miller explains to a news journalist in the opening scene of Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage, though he’s not worried. Bad things happen all the time, and they do not necessitate loss, because loss is a swimming shark, and until the shark has stopped swimming, it is not dead. In the finance world, this is called an arbitrage, in which the difference of market prices means a shark never has to stop swimming, and taking a hit in one corner might just mean turning a profit in another. The money stays shuffling, and no one loses. Ideally. Miller (Richard Gere) is the arbitrageur of Jarecki’s film, and manipulating finances in and out of accounts and hedge funds in his own self-interest is the character’s raison d'être, but Jarecki is also concerned with the arbitrage of power, who has it, who is pretending to have it, and the stratagems necessary to sustain it. When Miller commits manslaughter and flees the scene, he immediately begins moving pieces off his life around, acquiring new confidants, burying his weakness, and steadily moving forward, eyes always on the prize. During a scene in which rugged detective Bryer (a composed, threatening Tim Roth) interrogates Miller for the first time, Miller’s tells are more than obvious, jittery nerves, inconsistent story, and a throbbing side he can’t help clutching. Bryer knows, but that’s okay, too, because that market, the criminal investigation market, it only has a fraction of a sliver of a window of time to make a power grab, and by then, Miller will have reallocated and moved on. Besides, sometimes an arbitrageur needs only to appear to hide a weakness. If a major business executive is unable to fill a $412,000 gap of misappropriated funds, well, then jettison the business to someone else. They will, of course, notice, but a deal is a deal, after all, and besides, that business can just be moved again. The bluff is infinite; everything else is expendable. In all the chaos of contextualization, determining who, if anybody, in Jarecki’s film has the upper hand, becomes exceedingly difficult to parse. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, whose masterful work on 2010’s Carlos inspired the very first Ill Stills, revels in this confusion, deconstructing traditional visual binaries of power (who’s sitting/standing, who’s driving/riding) in moments of narrative tension in order to make the viewer question the impact of environment on control, and vice versa. When Miller meets with his daughter, Brooke (Brit Marling) in Central Park, she refuses to sit with him, a classic business bluff, but Le Saux keeps his camera on Miller, and Brook's head is decapitated from the frame. There is no question as to who will come out above water. Elsewhere, Le Saux deftly complicates the power dynamics inside vehicles through light filters and askew angles. Are those who drive more powerful than those who ride? In one situation, say, a police officer who has picked up a suspect, yes, but when the environment changes, so do the rules, and a weakness (not being in control), becomes a strength (the luxury of knowing how control is limited). This is how Miller scapegoat, Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), the getaway driver, and Jimmy Grant, the police suspect, locked in the back of Bryer’s car (or Miller's car), can occupy the same sphere of limited agency, and how Miller, cruising along behind the wheel, just before a horrific car accident, can later become Miller, plotting in the back of a limousine with his lawyer. The plot? To uncover Bryer’s manipulation of a traffic camera photo that would have pinned Jimmy Grant as Miller’s getaway driver. The pieces shift and shift, and the bubble strains, but does not burst. The film’s climactic exchange isn’t between Miller and Bryer, or Miller and Jimmy, but between Miller and his wife, Ellen (Susan Sarandon), in their bedroom. Ellen knows everything, and threatens to expose Miller to the police if he does not sign away his company. Miller contemplates his options like a true financier. Which market offers more stability, the domestic or the legal?  Will Ellen risk conflation of the two, or is she bluffing? Jarecki and Le Saux again volley the question back to the audience with the film’s most striking image, the couple, in their stark white room, divided by their marriage bed, as Miller considers the contract. The negative space between them is overwhelmingly present, a maelstrom of terrible power with no shape, and no direction, hovering between the film’s final two players. Jarecki’s dénouement offers no catharsis. Miller and family are at a benefit dinner in his honor. It’s impossible to tell who has folded to whom, but one thing is certain, in this environment, suited up, among colleagues, among money, Miller is God. He kisses his scorned wife and daughter, who struggle to keep smiling in the face of such blatant hypocrisy, and he strides to the podium, his back to Le Saux’s camera. Miller is centered, and his is steady, and the people in the crowd, well, they’re just pieces, ready to be moved. Le Saux switches to a medium shot, and facing the lens, Miller’s bravado is uncanny. Even now, he is swimming, thriving. He goes to speak. Cut to black.

[theillstills]

The Perks (and Burdens) of Being a Wallflower “She was not equal to her own writing. And, on the highway like this, speeding toward some tawdry destination, she had the sudden terrible conviction that language itself didn’t matter and that nothing mattered ultimately except the body, the human body and the bodies of other creatures and objects; what else existed?” - Joyce Carol Oates (“Accomplished Desires”) “You think too much.” I get this all the time, from bosses who don’t comprehend the miasma of hazardous conditions on the road from point A to point B, from women who’d like to experience a moment of closeness without the derisive nitpicking of every look or kiss, from friends who worry. This thing that is essentially me, this cleverness and aptitude for analysis, not just of films, or novels, or art, but of people and situations, it’s also a trap. The ability to construct with language and the hypersensitivity to the sensations of existence, it spills over. To “be” becomes a verb for another, imaginably happier, set of people. As the title suggests, Stephen Chbosky’s film adaptation of his breakout, young adult novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, situates the artist, budding author and high school freshman, Charlie (Logan Lerman), firmly at the fringe of society, as someone who watches, takes in, but can never partake. His friends, a homosexual, a punker, a “slut,” theater kids similarly living fringe existences, watch with him, their gazes equal parts contempt and longing, their minds, tail eating snakes of damaged logic that compound rejection and guilt in ways only hormonal adolescents, or writers, can. They are Charlie’s family, and they “get” him, but The Perks of Being a Wallflower is also Charlie’s narrative, the novel and film being constructed as a series of letters Charlie writes (to himself, or to his psychologist) in an attempt to understand his role as cerebral spectator of a world that refuses to acknowledge him, and this is where Chbosky’s romansbildung finds its complexity and sadness. In order to act as medium between reader and world, Charlie must disappear, become nothing. Charlie’s story then, is one of inaction. His first relationship, with entitled punk princess Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman, her?), is a one-way conversation, signified by Charlie’s long absences during Mary Elizabeth’s phone calls, in which Charlie relegates himself to a boyfriend-as-concept, a character who knows when to hold hands, or to fool around awkwardly after dances.  He is a prop, and Mary Elizabeth is merely a simulacrum for another love, one that hasn’t yet happened, or has, but was sullied, or is impossible in the way that love often seems to be. The true object of Charlie’s unrequited affection is Sam (Emma Watson), whose raw effervescence, and penchant for spontaneous bursts of emotion, seems to transcend the boundary between thought and being. Charlie, high for the first time, watches Sam as she stands in the back of a pickup truck, her arms outstretched, blissful, as it rockets through a tunnel  He says he feels “infinite.” He thinks he is a part of that bliss, and maybe he is, but he’s still only watching. Throughout the second and third act of Wallflower, Charlie will take everything vibrant about Sam and distill it through his thoughts and letters, until she’s nothing but a series of contradictions on the page. This is the only way he can have her, he believes, can have anything. In his world of words, he finds understanding. He interprets, but does not live. It’s a problematic approach that not only leads to further alienation, but depression and questions of accountability. Charlie’s burden, the burden of being a wallflower, a man of inaction, is one of guilt, the feeling that if he had only done something, anything, he could have saved the day. He harbors guilt as a victim of a childhood incident of molestation by his aunt, and blames himself for her death, a car crash, because of the resentment he’d built up in the aftermath of his premature sexual awakening. He could understand his aunt’s pain, but could do nothing to alleviate her malady, the ramifications of which would negatively impact his entire young adult life. It’s interesting to note that during Charlie’s one moment of heroism, physically defending his gay friend against a closeted lover, his mind goes completely blank – a blackout. It’s what Charlie has always wanted, in a way, to live without process, without analysis, or reinterpretation, but his blackouts, symptomatic of his swelling depression, terrify him, as if the only thing worse than too much control is none at all. When Charlie attempts suicide following the reemergence of his repressed sexual memories, a shot of his typewriter, alone, detached from its author, presents itself as a chilling indication of Charlie’s desire for, and fear of, total selfhood. There is hope in this image, as well, though, the hope of connection, that perhaps through interpretation, Charlie acts for all of those on the fringe unable to articulate their own fears and dreams, and there are a lot of us, aren’t there? On the fringe, I mean. This is why Stephen Chbosky’s quirky coming-of-age novel amassed such a following in the first place, how it became one of 2012’s most critically lauded films. Drugs, alcohol, neuroses, despair, violence, and sexual turbulence might not be in the dictionary next to classic childhood experiences, but guess what? That’s life. Most of us didn’t get to be the prom queen. Most of us cried and thrashed in bed the night before, working up the courage to even go to prom, to face the masses of young women and men who didn’t understand us, and who we, in turn, didn’t understand. So we dressed up, and we sipped from flasks, and we pined, and we hated it, and we danced, but then again, maybe we didn’t.

[theillstills]

Warrior: The Intimate Spaces of Pugilism Two men circle and jab, lock bodies, and careen to the floor. Sweat drips over swollen eyes. Lungs take desperate, cutting breaths. Bones bend to fracture. The audience, seething swells of testosterone and rage, goad annihilation. Nervous television viewers strain through their hi-def, through the snark of announcers and roar of the crowd, through the thin, wire cage, where blood is spraying, jonesing for a drop of immediacy. Inside that cage, one man will rise victorious and one will not, simple as that. Outside, the city bricks ooze poverty and rancor, and the spaces in which a human being can face another human being recede to point zero. This is the America of Gavin O’Conner’s Warrior, an America in which the men who fought to the bone integrating themselves into this country never learned to stop beating the shit out of each other, while the country industrialized, digitalized, moved on. The film’s two protagonists (antagonists?) are estranged brothers, Tommy and Brendan (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton), but the film’s singular title is no misnomer. The essence of mixed martial arts is reductive. There is no place for convolution, no time for the battery of tangled relationships that exist outside of the cage. A warrior’s opponent is nothing, a momentary blip in a solipsistic ascension to Godhood, and even in defeat, he is safely inside himself. These cages, the warrior needs them. Tommy is the warrior, in the reductive sense, AWOL from the Marine Corp, refusing to engage with anybody, with any conflict, that threatens to become emotionally present. Tommy’s deadbeat, alcoholic father, Paddy (Nick Nolte, whose beautiful sad-sackery makes me rue the cancellation of HBO’s Luck all the more), on the road to recovery, struggles for reconciliation with his sons, but for Tommy, Paddy is merely a tool toward his end goal.  For Brendan, Paddy is a non-entity, the bad taste of a past that’s best forgotten. Brendan, who, surprise, surprise, will oppose Tommy in the film’s decisive MMA competition, is the warrior’s antithesis, a man so multifaceted that he is ruled by the emotion that combat requires necessary to jettison. His is a plural existence, one of the family, supporting and connecting with a wife and daughter, connecting to students, connecting to friends, and one as a fighter, alone, hurtling toward decimation, or redemption. Masanobu Takayanagi, Warrior’s director of photography, finds an aesthetic niche in the fundamental voyeurism of sport, extending the scopophilic yearning, and its inherent barriers, to the fighters’ most private encounters. When Brendan confesses to his wife, Tess (Jennifer Morrison), that he’s moonlighting as a parking lot prizefighter, Takayanagi positions the camera outside the bathroom doorway, setting up an emotional bulwark between Brendan and the audience, the breaching of which becomes both an invasion of, and invitation to, his moment of intimacy and the space it occupies. Compare this to the film’s opening scene, in which Paddy returns home to find an inebriated Tommy waiting on his stoop. Despite the fact that this is the only glimpse of each other the men have had since Tommy’s childhood, O’Conner and Takayanagi are careful not to include the two in focus in the same shot. The film’s title card, bold white lettering that appears after Paddy invites Tommy inside, alerts the viewer that this is the film’s first bout, and one that perhaps takes precedent over sport. The camera here, and throughout the entirety of the movie, is handheld, personal, but isolating. The audience dances around the cage, rarely inside. Of course, there is redemption, both for Tommy and Paddy, and Tommy and Brendan, through battle. Tommy’s admonishment of Paddy in a casino puts Paddy back on the wagon (the Paddy wagon?), which is what Tommy has subconsciously wanted from moment one, to return home to find the villain he left, and face, and overcome him. Paddy as born-again twelve-stepper was unexpected to, unacceptable for, Tommy, so he keeps Paddy at arm’s length, until Paddy is roped back for the KO. Paddy’s relapse is a disheartening moment, or would be if the same tactics that O’Conner has utilized to distance his audience in the film’s first two acts hadn’t sterilized its characters completely, complicated by the fact that at the moment of Paddy’s defeat, Tommy embraces his father, for the first time, perhaps ever, and comforts him at the nadir of his malady. Tommy has won, and he moves forward, on to Brendan, toward actualization, in only way actualization is understood by impoverished young males – fighting. Brendan forces his empathy into the cage with Tommy, despite Brendan’s trainer screaming that Tommy is not his brother, and that Brendan should do right by the warrior’s credo and destroy with prejudice the object that stands in his way. To Brendan, as warrior, there can be no familial past with Tommy, because there can be no Tommy-as-person, but when Brendan takes his brother to the floor, he offers up love, in the immediate sense, apart from any sort of biased forgiveness of past wrongs.  Tommy taps. Again, through defeat, there is rapprochement. The brothers exit the cage, Brendan’s arm around Tommy, compassionate.  They move straight toward the camera, one that has found stability, until they are past it, and that final barrier to connection is overcome.  The two share the frame, pointedly.  Bloodied and shaking, they are exhausted, but unified.

[theillstills]

Ivan’s Childhood: Reflections Beyond the River There are things that will always be out of our grasps. Some of these things are tangible objects, a beautiful man or woman, a better job, more money, and the struggle seems all the more fruitless because you know, deep inside, these things can be obtained, have been by others. But not you. Then, there are those dreams for which we reach that we will never touch, impossible goals, conceivable, but, ultimately unattainable, and the struggle seems all the more beautiful for it. Andrey Tarkovskiy’s Ivan’s Childhood exists in this dreamscape. It is a film of smoke, of water, of substances that refuse to take shape. It is the past that can never be altered. It is the future that will never come. Still, we reach. Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) is a child of war, a soldier, courageous and agile and headstrong the way only an adolescent can be. He crosses through enemy swamps undetected. He refuses to cough up answers. Around him, his temporary guardians plot to send Ivan to military school, away from the front, and the inherent dangers of the battlefield, but Ivan will not be swayed. He has no concept of Ivan as child. There are vague recollections of youth that come to him in dreams, in which he’s playing with his mother, or a young girl who might be his sister, but these moments are gone. These people are dead. Ivan finds counterpoint in the company of adults. Will he be the braggadocios Captain Kholin? Or, perhaps he is more like the young Galtsev. Director of Photography Vadim Yusov shoots Galtsev and Ivan as equals from the moment the two are introduced, and Ivan stands tall in frame against Galtsev’s interrogations. Ivan meets his gaze. They are doubles. Later, as Ivan tells his story of escape from boarding school, Galtsev is seen in the mirror, listening intently, as if he, himself, is Ivan, reflecting back a decade, to some distant past, when he was someone else entirely. Or maybe Ivan will turn out like the derelict he meets while attempting to go AWOL. The man is a crazy soul in wont of a nail, which he has misplaced ages ago. Still, he searches amongst the rubble of the house where his family, like Ivan’s, has been killed. “Oh, Lord,” he says. “When will this all end?” He locks himself behind what’s left of his gate. For him the war is lost. It has been for some time. When Ivan dreams, he is staring down a well with his mother, looking at the impossible reflection of a star in the shape of a cross. He reaches, and his hands are in the water, so close, but the star is a mirage. Even in his sweetest dreams of youth, salvation is an abstract concept. “You needn’t get so worked up over the smallest things,” a voice advises, and now Ivan’s mother is gone, too, has become a symbol, far above Ivan, who, trapped by his longings, cannot escape the well he’s crawled into. Ivan is a symbol, though, too. He is youth, and he is vitality, and for this reason Kholin (Valentin Zubkov), against all better judgment of, hey, having a prepubescent boy on the front-line fighting Germans is a stupid idea, keeps him close. When Ivan is around, there is still some semblance of hope and innocence. He is a glimpse beyond the war, perhaps to Kholin’s own childhood, when things were simpler. Kholin is trapped also, exhausted by battle, by disappointment and death. A beautiful nurse, Masha (Valentina Malyavina), catches his eye and Kholin pursues her in the woods, but there is nothing genial about his seduction. He is verbally aggressive, physically imposing. When the two kiss, it is against Masha’s will, and Kholin holds her tight, above a deep crevasse, as if, could he will himself to let go, she would disappear forever, perhaps never having existed to begin with. A song, played in a devastated bunker on a battered phonograph, reminds the men of her. “They tell Masha not to go beyond the river” a voice croons, as Kholin and Galtsev sit in silence. “They tell Masha not to love the young man.” It is a song of transgression, of lost innocence, an innocence which Kholin destroyed in the woods, which the war destroyed in Kholin. The real Masha enters the room while the song plays, but Masha is being transferred, and Ivan has disappeared, and only the record is there to comfort them that, yes, at one time, there was more to life than this terrible bunker, this omnipresence of war, the quantity of which can only be measured by its own stinking void of loss. The film ends with two juxtaposing sequences. The first is documentary footage of the aftermath of World War II, blown out buildings, corpses lining the street. The wife and daughters of the infamous Nazi, Joseph Goebbels, whom he poisoned with cyanide, lay next to his charred body. Ivan is now just a photograph in on a report, disposed from whatever file it was kept in. He’s been captured, tortured, killed. What did they expect? Part of Ivan, though, is elsewhere, on a pristine beach, with his mother.  He drinks from a bucket, a body of water easily consumed, contained, not like the well with its illusion of heaven, or the river of the song with its mysterious dangers, or the swamp, which looks so much like the sexual awaking of the woods, but offers only gunfire and bloodshed, or the ocean Ivan runs along in his dream, or in his death, chasing a young girl, his sister, his mother, Masha, until he outruns her (and what’s he chasing now?), his arm outstretched, so pathetic, so inexperienced, and we see ourselves in him, and he is real.

[theillstills]

Real Talk: Before Sunrise and the Connection of Nostalgia Three months into 2013, and already one of the most buzzed about films of the year is Richard Linklater’s long awaited follow up to his Sunrise trilogy, Before Midnight. Do I care? It’s been over a decade since I first fell in love with Linklater’s vérité style of urgent philosophizing, characters frustrated with identity, and society, and growing up, and wanting to talk endlessly about it all. Like a lot of high school students, I connected deeply with this search, and knew that somewhere inside the confluent streams of ideas and voices, maybe there would be answers, maybe even the, capital-A, Answer. So, I bought every Linklater film available, most of which I still own, The Newton Boys gathering dust in a stack against the wall, and subjected my closest friends to repeated basement screenings of Waking Life and Dazed and Confused. I shelled out forty pounds and took a date to the premier of Fast Food Nation (terrible, terrible idea), and sat rapt at an inspirational lecture Linklater gave on filmmaking. When I finished Before Sunset, one rainy afternoon my freshman year of college, I was inflicted with a strange melancholia that lasted for days, and thought, yes, this is love. Smash cut, 2013. Linklater hasn’t made an interesting film in six years, and I’m staring at a snap-case DVD edition of Before Sunrise (there’s even a full screen option!). Ethan Hawke’s disgusting 90s goatee lurches dangerously close to Julie Delpy’s face, and seems to be a terrible harbinger for a one-night-stand, philosophical or otherwise. What did I see in these two? Was this romantic in the 90s? Did it move me then? Would it now? What was the deal with goatees? And the DVD is in, and the train is moving, and an old German couple are arguing, and it’s jarring because there’s no subtitles, and Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) are about to begin a romance that will span three films. The two put aside their pretentious novels and get to talking in the dining car, and despite looking like a junkie from a 1950s PSA, Jesse convinces Celine that she should impetuously get off the train and hang out with him in Vienna until morning. I guess charisma goes a long way. Delpy is the much stronger actor of the two, as Hawke sort of mugs and makes awkward transitions between thoughts, but for some reason I’m completely engaged in these two young lovers, younger than me now, who are so hungry for self-discovery they throw caution to the wind at every chance. Let’s talk to strangers and visit a graveyard and make out, because who knows about anything? Life is a swirling orgasm of excitement and ennui and you might as well get your kicks in while you can because the other three hundred and sixty four days you’ll probably be parked in front of MTV with a bong and a bowl of cereal watching popular music piss itself down the drain. Ah, to be young again. Sunrise has more to offer than nostalgia, however. Though Jesse and Celine’s colloquies, which are often fascinating in themselves, take up ninety percent of the screen time, Linklater uses subtle visual and editing techniques to explore the nature of communication in a vague though impactful manner. The tactic of dropping an audience into the film during a foreign conversation is given extra merit midway through the movie at a restaurant filled with foreign conversation. Cinematographer Lee Daniel, whose perfunctory work on Linklater’s walking and talking pictures always keeps dialogue in the foreground, lingers on various couples speaking French and German and English, each exchange as important as the last. While this is a trick that emulates a similar scene in Linklater’s breakout, Slacker, the global setting of Before Sunrise, and the restaurant in particular, takes the film briefly out of its own closed circuit. In the morning, a sterile tracking shot, indicative of the couple’s reemergence into “real time,” follows Jesse and Celine to a cellar window where, inside, a man is playing Bach on a harpsichord. The camera cuts to the couple’s POV, in their naïve voyeurism, and the sense of magic is rekindled. Celine and Jesse dance to his music, and the man plays away, unaware that right above him hearts are beating in ¾ time. Perhaps this isn’t an accurate depiction of life, or love. It’s not the life, or love, I know, anyhow, with its miasmas of antagonism and confusion. Love, as a whole, is too complex for one night of romance, too complex for romance in general, probably. Jesse and Celine aren’t in love, no, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t truth in their infatuation, in their passion for life, and each other, and themselves. This is just one moment, a marvelous moment when two people meet and anything can happen, when the mystery of life seems to contradict everything else, every harsh reality, every disappointment, and open itself up, and in six months, in ten years, in twenty years, who knows? Who knows about anything?

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OSCAR MONTH BONUS ROUND: G.O.A.T. EDITION If given the list of all the Academy Award nominees for each category, what would a greatest Academy Awards of all time look like? Weeding out the minor categories, who would take home the coveted trophies? Would Celia Johnson have a leg up on Jodie Foster? Can Roger Deakins compare to Freddie Young? Film fans, I present to you, my real dream picks, a cross section of some of the finest acting, directing, and cinematography the Academy has ever recognized. And just think of the backstage drama… Picture All About Eve Chinatown The Godfather, Pt. 2 The Last Picture Show Lawrence of Arabia Network Raging Bull Sunrise, A Song of Two Humans There Will Be Blood The Thin Red Line Winner – Raging Bull Director Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window Akira Kurosawa, Ran David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia Jane Campion, The Piano Orson Welles, Citizen Kane Winner – Orson Welles Actor Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot Nicolas Cage, Adaptation Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront Peter O’Toole , Lawrence of Arabia Rober De Niro, Raging Bull Winner –Nicholas Cage Actress Bette Davis, All About Eve Celia Johnson, Brief Encounter Ellen Burstyn, Requiem for a Dream Francis McDormand, Fargo Jodie Foster, Silence of the Lambs Winner –Bette Davis Screenplay, Adapted Charlie Kafuman (and Donald!), Adaptation John Michael Hayes, Rear Window Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich, The Last Picture Show Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia Wolfgang Peterson, Das Boot Winner, Those Fabulous Kaufman Brothers Screenplay, Original Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad Cameron Crowe, Almost Famous Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander Paddy Chayefsky, Network Woody Allen, Interiors Winner – Paddy Chayefsky Cinematography Emmanuel Lubezki, The New World Freddie Young, Lawrence of Arabia Michael Chapman, Raging Bull Roger Deakins, True Grit Vilmos Zsigmond, The River Winner –Emmanuel Lubezki Visual Effects 2001: A Space Odyssey The Abyss The Thief of Bagdad Winner - 2001: A Space Odyssey Foreign Language Film 8 1/2 Fanny and Alexander Knife in the Water Mon Oncle Raise the Red Lantern Winner (Tie) – Fanny and Alexander and Mon Oncle Documentary Burma VJ For All Mankind Man on Wire Promises Woodstock Winner – For All Mankind

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Ill Stills Episode Six – The Grand Oscar Month Podcast

In episode six, Kevin Hinman and Arison Cain give Oscar Month a glorious send off by venting their frustrations about Argo, the Academy’s penchant for blandness, and why the sassy old man archetype is as uninspired as a little kid who swears. Also, bad puns galore and a third act twist that’s sure to disappoint almost everyone.  It's an Ill Stills podcast for the ages!

Spoiler level: none.

Rebel Without a Pulse, Kevin Hinman

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OSCAR MONTH: DREAM PICKS Picture – Amour Director – Michael Haneke, Amour Actress – Emmanuelle Riva, Amour Actor – Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln S. Actress – Sally Field, Lincoln S. Actor – Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained Adapted Screenplay – Lincoln Original Screenplay – Moonrise Kingdom Cinematography – Anna Karenina Costume Design – Anna Karenina Editing – Lincoln Score – Skyfall Song – Adele, Skyfall Production Design – Anna Karenina Sound Editing – Django Unchained Sound Mixing – Skyfall Visual Effects – Life of Pi Documentary – The Invisible War Foreign Language – Amour Animated Short – Fresh Guacamole

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OSCAR MONTH: BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY NOMINEE 2012 – SKYFALL Nobody did it better than Roger Deakins. At sixteen years old, when I saw The Man Who Wasn’t There, saw a hubcap floating off a tire in slow motion in beautiful black and white, I understood for the first time that film could be art. Deakins’ style was so prominent that, for a blossoming cinephile, it became easy to connect the dots. Of course the lavish Kundun and the stark Jarhead, and the mesmerizing Jesse James were all shot by the same genius of composition and lighting. Look at the golden hues. Look at those unwavering close ups. Roger Deakins kept the Coen’s grounded and breathed life into the often questionable projects of Sam Mendes. On Mendes’ Skyfall, Deakins’ cinematographic aptitude does an incredible amount of heavy lifting, and helps elevate the latest entry in the James Bond franchise to something resembling, though not quite, art, but swept up in the changing tide of blockbuster aesthetics, the cinematographer abandons his stamp of confident nuance, delivering a film that is discernibly gorgeous, though, too often, stylistically derivative. Skyfall’s abominable script-by-committee pits a rather lugubrious James Bond (Daniel Craig) against Javier Bardem’s Silva, a *yawn* former MI6 agent who attempts to kill M (Judi Dench) through *ug* cyber-terrorism. Oh, and Silva has a secret island. High five. Mendes and Deakins’ all but shove the script to the background, doubling down on the melancholy sexuality that has become a staple of Craig’s 007 projects. Deakins’ new penchant for the lightweight Arri Alexa digital camera gives the film a detached, voyeuristic look, rejecting the tired element of wish-fulfillment that has long been crucial to the James Bond franchise. The Skyfall audience only gets to watch Bond, never gets to be Bond and lose itself in the fabrication of the action hero archetype, but this approach is nothing new. The superhero movie has changed, and yeah, Bond is a superhero, and alienation is the new wish fulfillment, and murky is the new sleek, and this is all standard operating procedure for the genre post-Nolan, post-Pfister. The Dark Knight looms mightily over Skyfall, in its textual grit and cynicism, in its protagonist’s laconic dread, and most importantly, in its visual pallet. Wally Pfister’s influence has been creeping into action cinema steadily since his game-changing involvement in Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot, and on Skyfall, it almost threatens to overwhelm Deakins. Bond’s arrival on Silva’s secret island (high five...come on, don't leave me hanging), a low angle shot that slowly rises as well-dressed men with pistols fill the frame, could have been any number of scenes from Inception. Bond standing atop the new MI6 building as a flag waves in the background is the iconic Batman redemption moment. During Skyfall’s climax, Deakins even takes pains to replicate the grit of film, which Nolan and Pfister insist on using, juxtaposing jarring source lights (a helicopter spotlight, bright yellow bulbs, a blazing red fire) against the pitch black of the Scottish countryside. Pfister shot on IMAX. Deakins blew up high-res images in post. When it’s not Pfister and Nolan whom Deakins is aping, it’s Christopher Doyle and Wong Kar-Wai. Skyfall’s most impressive scene, in which Bond tracks an assassin through the dreamy lighting of a Shanghai skyscraper, would be even more impressive if it wasn’t so obviously imitative of Doyle’s work on Fallen Angels and 2046. Shooting through neon soaked glass, the endless reflection of bright greens and blues, it’s all stunning, but it’s not Deakins, it’s Doyle. The courtroom shoot-up? It’s Pfister. Deakins tries out every hat in the book only to lose his voice in the blockbuster realm, as if the project is too unwieldy, too haphazard, to adhere to any concept of auteurship. Where is Sam Mendes in this mess? A knockout Judi Dench performance gets shuffled from inane plot point A to inane plot point B. Craig looks absolutely miserable. Only the sound crew seems to be having fun. I almost changed the above still when I looked back at my True Grit write up and realized the Deakins’ shots I’d chosen for both films were almost identical. A single, warm light source illuminates a dead body, or bodies, capturing the quiet of death, the almost unperceivable change that occurs in the air when a life is lost. In a film buckling under the weight of influence, it’s a moment that’s pure Roger Deakins, and a reminder of why I fell in love with his body of work in the first place. Will I be frustrated if the Academy hands Deakins the award on Sunday? No. The cinematography is consistently striking. It’s not as if Roger Deakins has lost his talent, not one iota. The framing is perfect, and the lighting is perfect, but that natural evolution of an artist whose vision has towered over his peers for so long is missing. Like Skyfall is so keen to reiterate, sometimes the old ways are best.

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OSCAR MONTH: BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY NOMINEE 2012 – ANNA KARENINA In 2007, director Joe Wright and collaborating cinematographer Seamus McGarvey delivered one of the finest long takes that film had seen in quite some time, a five minute ballet of violence on a war-torn beach, the centerpiece of Atonement. McGarvey was nominated for an Academy Award, but as fate would have it, he was in contention against Janusz Kaminski, Robert Elswit, and Roger Deakins, twice. Any other year, it would have been a fighting battle, but 2007 was an uncanny testament to visual storytelling. This year, Seamus McGarvey is back in the ring with Anna Karenina, Joe Wright’s latest, and while the odds are stacked against him (again in the form of Kaminski and Deakins), McGarvey deserves the win, having pulled out all the stops to turn a thrifty, set-locked period piece into a tour de force of movement and momentum, rivaling anything in the lauded Atonement, five-minute Steadicam shot included. Wright, taking a break from the stark pallet of The Soloist and Hanna, reaches back to his David Lean and Baz Luhrmann inspired roots, indulging in a bevy of color and sound, elevating Leo Tolstoy’s emotionally complex story of adultery and faith to operatic heights. Whereas to achieve the unique visual rhythm of Life of Pi, Ang Lee and Claudio Miranda experimented with several aspect ratios, Wright and McGarvey’s method utilizes the small, but elaborate, set designs of Katie Spencer to frame the characters in shot. Anna (Keira Knightley, a woman made to be on screen, aesthetically, like some lost beauty from the French New Wave) plays with her sister’s daughter in a miniature palace, the walls of which appear to box Anna into the standard 1.37:1, a suffocating square of domestic space. McGarvey’s camera reveals restraint in every room, in the rectangles of doorways, in the calculated gaze of Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), through the crook of a statue, as he watches a group of young girls leave a schoolhouse. In the thinnest of bedroom mirrors, Anna is waif-like, a sliver of the woman she once thought she was. When the film cuts to a party or a horse race, there is the suggestion of space, but as McGarvey’s dollies continue to remind the audience, the entire world of Anna Karenina is a set. For the eponymous heroine, escape is impossible. There is no better illustration of this than during the spectacular ball at which Anna first gives herself over to the sexual wiles of the scumstachioed Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on the dance floor. In another long take, and the film often gives the impression of being a succession of long takes, as set pieces are repeatedly removed, and erected, on screen to make way, and articulate, the fluidity of McGarvey’s camera, the lovers glide effortlessly through a room of dancers, frozen in anticipation, who dare to move only when the couple, and the scandal, has passed. Vronsky lifts Anna, and the camera rotates (and there is nothing obnoxious or reckless about it, there is only McGarvey’s elegance and composure) and moves in for a close-up on Anna, her features boiling with erotic tension, before pulling back to reveal a void. The dancers have left, the light dims, and there is only Vronsky and Anna in the dark, and etiquette be damned because for a brief interlude, it is perfect. Then the crowd rushes back and scorned Kitty (Alicia Vikander) is sick with anger, and her stares are whips, whips, whips of the camera, and everyone is gossiping, and their moment of abandon is now fraught with confusion and tension, and yes, suffocation. Anna breaks off (mid-song, total faux pas), and storms out, but there’s that mirror, and its distorted reflection, and what’s that noise? It sounds like a train. It sounds powerful, phallic, and unstoppable. However, there is space for one, Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), lovelorn landlord and Tolstoy surrogate, a character who exists outside of the restrictive sets, in the vast planes of the country where he pines and toils and comes to understand himself and God. After Kitty rejects Levin’s awkward marriage proposal, the suitor steps out onto the stage and, finding the theater empty, turns his back with defiance. The rear doors open and Levin is outside, in the snow, heading toward his humble country home, while around him, peasants schlep bundles of hay, and he searches for a connection in their eyes. There is freedom in his loneliness, and if he could only step far enough away, past the limits of society where Anna and Vronsky live locked, trapped, struggling in vain against social mores, the world could finally embrace him, and he it. The last image of the film is one of the most striking of the year. Anna’s husband, Alexi (Jude Law) enjoys a contemplative day in the country with his two children. The sky is blue and the pale green grass, flecked with white flowers, sways lazily in the breeze. Then, McGarvey cuts to a wide shot, the theater, overflowing with country grass and flowers, singing with country wind. The rear doors are open, and Alexi’s moment of peace is contextualized beyond the stage, a stage that will always exist, but one that is ever changing, ever evolving, with new sets and costumes and actresses, with new rules. The play goes on and on, indefinitely, hurtling with an ageless momentum, but every once in a great while it nurtures a spark of life, and there is something like silence in the air, a pause in the proceedings, and outside the sun is shining, and inside the sun is shining.

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OSCAR MONTH: BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY NOMINEE 2012 – LIFE OF PI “What are you looking at?” Asks Pi. “Talk to me,” he says. “Tell me what you see.” The tiger turns. He has been watching the heavens, staring into the blackness of night. Perhaps he is contemplating their vastness, their depth, or perhaps, like the starving, shipwrecked boy, he is waiting. Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is a Rorschach test of a film, an opaque pool of religions and philosophies, to be stared at, into, deciphered, or ignored. It is an adventure of the soul, a two and a half hour digital vision quest, a heroic dose, but to what end? What do we find in the darkness? Perhaps there is no “we.” Perhaps it is a journey of self, for self. Will you see God? Do you want to? Claudio Miranda, whose last foray into the Oscar tide was 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, another film existing almost solely in the digital realm, has the enormous talent of composition foresight. He understands how to frame Brad Pitt’s face even when Brad Pitt’s face won’t enter the picture well into post-production, and he can construct a convincing visual parallel between Pi and his tiger when the tiger, and the water, and the weather, are miles down the road. He sees the forest for the trees. Much of this precognition is attributable to Ang Lee, who since film school desired to push moviemaking outside of its visual template, which meant for Life of Pi, utilizing a wide array of aspect ratios to compliment the film’s 3D format, as well as its thematic notions of unexpected enlightenment. A school of fish, flying through the air in a wondrous rush is given the horizontal space to “wow” in 2.35:1, and Lee’s knowledge of the spherical process of film printing allows his digital creatures to exist off the frame, in the area of 35mm normally wasted when shooting widescreen. Later, an overhead shot of Pi and the tiger sleeping on the boat while, unknown to them, a magnificent whale glides underneath the water, is presented in a standard 1.33:1 ratio, infusing the scene with a raw, provocative power that calls attention to the true nature of Pi’s isolation. When the film cuts back to 1.85:1, Miranda’s camera has moved into a close-up of the protagonist on his side, reciting the infinite digits of pi in a whisper. Boundaries are an illusion, it seems to say. Everything is connected. “Tell me what you see.” The tiger looks into the ocean, and so does Pi (Suraj Sharma), and between the two erupts a multitude of essence, of life, and love, and beauty. One whale diverges into an entire zoo, the zoo from Pi’s youth, which sank with the ship what now seems a lifetime ago. The camera pushes deeper, past lights and stars and Gods, and Pi’s lost love, and her bindi, and her Ajna, which conceals all the wisdom of tragedy and peace, and when it finally emerges, it is through the eyes of Pi, and he is the tiger, his gaze is the tiger’s gaze when the scene began, but he is also more than that, much more, because when the camera cuts again, the tiger’s gaze is now on Pi. They have completed the circle. Tell me what you see. A carnivorous island in the shape of Vishnu? One man saved from the great flood? The Nirvana that exists just under our feet, if we would only look? Tell me if you see a boy who, through storytelling, learned to cope with the worst trauma of his life, pushing out the demons of human suffering and replacing them with unparalleled feats of heroism and marvel? Tell me you saw the animal that made Pi lose his faith in God return to restore it. Tell me you saw guardian angels. Tell me you saw rebirth. Tell me you saw magic, not some nickel and dime show skullduggery, but real magic, the kind that makes your skin flush and head woozy, the kind that makes you want grip the hand of the person sitting next to you in the theater and never let go, not ever. Tell me you saw it in widescreen. Tell me you saw it in full screen. Tell me you saw it in the glory of IMAX at twenty dollars a pop. Tell me you saw it in three dimensions and that it made you weep. But don’t tell me you saw nothing. Just don’t. There’s no room for that.

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OSCAR MONTH: BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY NOMINEE 2012 – DJANGO UNCHAINED Quentin Tarantino never met a rotating shot he didn’t like. Straight out the box, Reservoir Dogs, scene one – rotating shot. Jackie Brown, mall heist – rotating shot. Kill Bill, Grindhouse, yep. Django Unchained features two of the horrible things, and the second one, in the film’s final act, when Django (Jamie Foxx) is lying his way out of capture, is as obnoxious as anything Tarantino has ever done, and it’s probably the most obnoxious shot of cinematographer Robert Richardson‘s career, and the man worked with Oliver Stone. In 2012, Richardson took home the Best Cinematography award for his groundbreaking work on Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, the visual style of which took director and camera crew well out of their comfort zones. The same can’t be said for Django Unchained, which offers up more of the stylized violence and madcap Basterdsesque exploitation that has long been Tarantino’s bread and butter, but the director is relentless, and he never stops throwing everything in his arsenal against the wall, and everything in Tarantino’s arsenal? Well, that’s pretty damn entertaining. No, the rotating shot of Django and his abductors doesn’t work, it’s far too tight, and lasts about a minute too long, but in the madness of Django Unchained, in its cojones-for-days frenetic pace, it can be forgiven. Without that madness, there would be no fast dolly of Django, rifle held high above his head, speeding toward his love on a stolen horse as a fire blazes in the background. There would be no whip toward a group of startled children in a window immediately before Django does some whipping of his own. There would be no epic overhead pull back during Django’s surrender (to the sound of Richie Havens’ Freedom!), a pull back that replicates Michael Chapman’s famous take from the climax of Taxi Driver with the love of a true film geek. Beginning with a wide shot of Django emerging from under a pile of furniture used for rifle cover, behind a pair of corpses and a blood stained foyer entrance that would spook the elevators from The Shining, Richardson moves tighter, to a medium shot of the hero as he tears off his coat, a moment that echoes the film’s opening sequence in which a newly freed Django tosses off his slave blanket. Here, when he casts off his jacket, it is the jacket of a free man, and when the shot cuts to Walton Goggins’ Billy Crash with a pistol pressed to the forehead of Django’s wife, Hilda (an underutilized Kerry Washington), the choice is clear. No matter the outcome, Django will die, but if Hilda dies with him, his quest will mean nothing. Django steps forward, deliberately into capture, and Richardson’s camera pulls back and then upward (of course, while rotating 90 degrees) to reveal a bloodbath, the bodies Django has left in his wake on his road to emancipation. Yesterday, we examined Lincoln and the moment of profundity which falls upon the president when he witnesses the battlefield for the first time. There is more blood in every millimeter of Django’s film stock than there is in the entirety of Spielberg’s biopic, but this overhead shot, which holds its final stillness, manages to find a delicacy, amid the dizzying onslaught of action and gleeful splatter, akin to Lincoln’s moment of grief for the dead, a few seconds to reflect on the cost of freedom. Or, maybe not. Maybe the film says nothing about the cost of freedom, and the shot is homage to Taxi Driver, and little more. Maybe Tarantino’s work has become something of a celluloid Ouroboros of genre nods and navel gazing, of aesthetics and formalism, off on its own axis of cinema, remote from anything resembling humanity.  In my series of write-ups for Kill Bill in 2011, I praised the director for keeping alive the spectacle of cinema without any cheap tricks, but then again, Kill Bill climaxed in a moment of unexpected contemplation, and Django Unchained is one House of Leaves showdown after another.  Still, I'd like to think there's room for growth, that Tarantino will find some sort of purpose for his brilliance beyond the love for shallow excess. I'd like to think that the glass is half full.  Or, in the vernacular of the grindhouse, that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

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OSCAR MONTH: BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY NOMINEE 2012 – LINCOLN

Last year, Steven Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s work on War Horse reached a level of visual excellence that towered over the other nominees for Best Cinematography. The canvas was lush, hallucinatory, and sweeping, and, when given space beyond the saccharine plotting and oppressive John Williams’ score, pure cinema. The duo’s follow-up, Lincoln, takes a decidedly more naturalistic tone, in pacing, in lighting, and the difference is apparent immediately. Jettisoning the bold hues and impressionistic set designs of the War Horse battlefield, Lincoln’s opening scene and, surprisingly, its only scene of conflict, is an unceremonious affair, not quite the 90 degree shutter and image shaking pandemonium Kaminski employed in Saving Private Ryan, but sloppy, brutal, and dark, with no apparent use of lighting rigs. Though, to some, the scene wafts the air of a perfunctory biopic establishing shot (how will the audience know it’s the Civil War unless we force it down their throats?), the short battle sequence makes explicit the primary point of Democratic contention against the 13th Amendment. Every day peace is not negotiated, more men die.

It’s important that the audience be struck with this harsh fact from point one, long before even Lincoln (the incomparable Daniel Day-Lewis) fully comprehends the enormity of the carnage outside of its political ramifications. For Lincoln, the battle on the field and the battle in the House are, have to be, wholly separate.  Confronted with the truth, how could he not buckle under its severity?  Instead, the President tells his jovial stories and parables to rebuke statistics, and Kaminski keeps Day-Lewis’ face in the shadows, as the man keeps the truth at bay, all the while striving for the greater good. This is the sacrifice of the American Civil War, the sacrifice for which Spielberg’s reverence of Abraham Lincoln comes across in every frame of film. If War Horse is about the tenacity of the human spirit, Lincoln is about the conscious surrender of that spirit, of the individual, even when the individual is myriad, to the possibility of the human concept.

There are consequences, however, as there always are. Lincoln’s wife, the already unstable Mary Todd (Sally Field), threatens to come apart at the seams when her eldest son, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) returns home from college to enlist in the Union army. She’s already lost a son, William, and unlike Abraham, she’s never been able to compartmentalize that loss. Her grief is immediate and constant. Like the soldiers slain in the film's opening sequence, William’s ghost hangs over every waking moment, an agonistic throb, as fitting a harbinger as any. When Abraham and Mary Todd’s argument comes to its climax, the president confesses that he never permitted himself to grieve for William, that his sorrow is so tremendous that every day, he wants to “crawl under the earth, into the vault with his coffin.” “Don’t speak to me about grief,” he tells her, as Kaminski’s camera slowly zooms in on Lincoln’s face. For an instant of disturbing clarity, Mary Todd, as well as the audience, is forced to recognize the weight of his horrible burden.

In a key sequence, when Lincoln and Robert visit a hospital for wounded soldiers, in part an attempt by Lincoln to damper the boy’s enthusiasm for battle, the president makes his rounds, greeting the amputated, learning their names. He doesn’t talk about the war, or acknowledge the soldier’s deformities, out of politeness and respect, but just behind the hospital is a pit of limbs, a loaded image that Spielberg, as a chronicler of the Holocaust, presents with intent to unnerve and unman. Robert, his curiosity having led him to the scene, turns his back, but finds himself unable to roll his cigarette, his tobacco carried off by a sudden wind.

Then there is Tad, Lincoln’s youngest son, played by Gulliver McGrath. When Lincoln finds Tad asleep next to photograph plates from slave auctions, he has them taken away, deeming them too distressing for the boy’s perusal. “I’ll have worse nightmares if you don’t let me look,” Tad whines, his thinking running parallel to Robert's. “Perhaps,” Lincoln responds, for he well acquainted with nightmares, and with what can happen to a man who turns his back on his fear. It is Tad who Spielberg and Kaminski are with when Lincoln is slain, when a stranger steps on stage (the boy is also at a theater house) and announces the president’s assassination. Tad's face is pale in the darkness.  He screams, and it fills the theater, which is so much like that other theater, but not quite, because Tad is not there to have witnessed it. What dreams plagued Tad’s sleep the night Lincoln surrendered his spirit to the cause absolutely? The spirits of his family, did he surrender them, too?

When Lincoln does look, after all, once peace has been drawn and the 13th Amendment ratified, upon the decimation of the battlefield, at the young men slumped in heaps, their insides nothing more than hollow caves, the coats that cloak the soldiers are the same dull color.  Lincoln takes his hat off, allowing in, finally, all the muddy waves of grief. When Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris) tells Lincoln he looks like a man who has aged ten years in one, Lincoln nods. “I’ve never seen the like of it before,” the president insists.

“You always knew that,” Grant replies, “what this was going to be, intimate and ugly.”  Lincoln wavers, a great man for the first time face to face with his choices, and their repercussions.  Is he culpable in these deaths, did he know, really, and does that fact mar his greatness?  Given a chance, would he have done the same again?  In the film’s final scene, a flashback to his second inaugural speech, Lincoln reminds the audience that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous, altogether.”  There is a pause after "righteous," and the last word seems to be a reassurance of sorts, not only for the grieving American people, but for himself.  Altogether.  After so much hopelessness, it is a word much needed.

[theillstills]

OSCAR MONTH: BEST COLOR CINEMATOGRAPHY 1966 – A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons opens on The King’s Beasts, stone engravings of lion, dogs, and dragons, monuments of power and virility. Commissioned by Henry VIII in 1536 to celebrate his long, and hopefully fruitful, marriage to Jane Seymour, The King’s Beasts have survived countless reigns, complete obliteration and reconstruction, and a rather garish repainting, while the King and his wives are, of course, long dead. Flesh is only flesh, but stone is stone. Elsewhere, a man rots in a cell in the Tower of London, the walls cold and immutable. He is Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and he has clung to his beliefs and his faith and has lost everything, his job, his church, his family. Only the Tower remains.

Ted Moore, the cinematographer whose sleek aesthetics shaped the look of the early Bond films, shoots A Man for All Seasons with a controlled confidence, eschewing the 007 bombast in favor of methodical pans and zooms that creep around the film’s protagonists as they talk, as they think and plot. Political and religious processions move at a snail’s pace and Moore captures them at great distances, the humanity of these moments lost in the ritual. Thomas More’s appointment to chancellor is filmed in one take, a crane shot that slowly descends toward More as he is donned with the ceremonial gold chain of office. The shot ends on the chain, not the man. More doesn’t know it yet, but the office is little more than an elaborate bribe, and More is worth only as much as his loyalty to that bribe.

More’s devotions are to his faith, to God and to the Papacy, and his naïve refusal to get into bed with Church and State leads to his imprisonment, and finally his execution. The Roman Catholic Church finally awarded More the honorable title of sainthood in 1935, only 400 years too late to be of any use to More or his suffering family. Despite this, Zinnemann and playwright Robert Bolt lionize the “man for all seasons,” a motif that’s visualized by a short time-lapse shot of the prisoner’s view from the Tower of London.

Thomas More is beheaded in the spring, a season of renewal and rebirth. It is, Zinnemann implies, the righteous death of a martyr, and Scofield’s More is at peace, knowing that heaven will hold him close, because flesh is only flesh. As the executioner’s axe comes down, the camera tilts skyward, promising a kingdom far vaster than any in England, and a legacy not beholden to crowns or to stones. Ted More’s final shots, however, are of stone, The King’s Beasts, as the sky darkens ominously, and an emotionless voiceover describes the heretical immolation, corruption, and further beheadings that followed More’s execution.

Like, can I get an Amen?

[theillstills]

OSCAR MONTH: BEST BLACK & WHITE CINEMATOGRAPHY 1954 – ON THE WATERFRONT

Proving that integrity still had some sway in the Academy following the game changing introduction of widescreen, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, bursting with urban grit in the standard ratio of 1.37:1, swept the Oscars in 1955, taking home eight awards, including Best Black & White Cinematography. Director of photography Boris Kaufman (who would later work with lead Marlon Brando in Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind) finds incredible strength in subtlety, never forcing a real moment in favor of technique, allowing each scene to unfold naturally before his lens. Critics site Kaufman’s cool ease during the taxicab confrontation, and his use of angles during Karl Malden’s famous monologue as examples of the quintessential Waterfront style, but the essence of Kaufman’s approach, and Kazan’s direction, is in the set-up, and this is nowhere better illuminated than in Brando’s one on one scenes with Eva Marie Saint in which convivial conversation barely masks the couple’s grief, rage, and desire.

After whisking Edie (Marie Saint) away from a brutal political bust-up by corrupt union workers, Terry (Brando) probes Edie with innocuous questions about her parochial schooling, as if men weren’t bleeding in the streets a few hundred yards away, as if Terry wasn’t partly responsible for the death of Edie’s brother, Joey. A homeless man approaches, stopping between the two, and asks for change. He recognizes Edie, and gives condolences, and he recognizes Terry, and knows what he’s done. He calls Terry a bum. It’s a small world, and everyone is connected, and this fact wedges itself between Terry and Edie from the first moment. Terry can bridge this gap only by denying the horrible truth, to Edie and to himself.

When the two are finally alone, at the fence above the PATH tracks, Terry is able to exert his nonchalant machismo in full force, a machismo which ignites Edie’s blossoming sexuality. When Terry recedes into the background, Kaufman’s camera stays with Edie, her mind a whir of conflicting emotions. Edie eventually, cautiously, joins him, but as one scene dissolves into the next, she looks back at the camera, to the safe distance at which she was standing only a minute before.

Later, in a dank gangster swill-hole, after Edie has downed her first whiskey, Terry expounds on his nihilistic philosophies. Here, Terry is raw, and the smoldering power he employed above the train tracks, where his raised arm threatened to embrace Edie at any moment, has almost completely dissipated. When Terry abruptly denies culpability in Joey’s murder, Edie begins to break down, but so does Terry, as he kneels by Edie’s side imploring her to drink her beer. The scene parallels a similar offer at Waterfront’s opening, when Terry’s brother Charlie attempts to buy Terry a drink immediately after Joey’s death. It’s an offer of compliance, to play “deaf and dumb” and cool it with that morality talk. Get drunk. Stay quiet.

Boris Kaufman keeps Brando in sharp focus, lingering on his pained face as he tries to force Edie to drink, physically raising the glass to her lips, but Edie is unresponsive and Marie Saint’s foreground image is blurred. Her grief is both enigmatic and eerily familiar to Terry, who lets the glass down pathetically as he struggles to comprehend this woman sitting in front of him. The shot cuts back to Edie briefly before she gets up, assured that Terry would help the situation if he could. Terry, alone, still kneeling, broods with humiliation and anger.

The turning point in the relationship occurs on the train tracks, beyond the fence at which Terry and Edie's casual flirtation previously halted. Terry implicates himself in Joey’s murder and Kazan and Kauffman pull out all the stylistic stops as the tension that’s been building between Terry and Edie finally breaks open. Beginning with a wide shot of the two standing at odds behind a heap of rubble, Kauffman goes in for a series of close-ups, a technique used only sparingly up to this point. Steam hisses violently, drowning out a confession the audience doesn’t need repeated. Edie covers her ears, the noise is too much, and she covers her mouth, a twisted call back to the “deaf and dumb” motto of the dockworkers, and maybe she screams, but we can’t hear it over all that cacophony.

This is the genius of On the Waterfront, its set-ups of unpredictable stillness, quiet scenes pregnant with violence, violent ones pregnant with meaning. The film ends on a bombastic high note, one that might not be entirely earned, but rousing nonetheless, as the noise and the passion and the angst come colliding together in a spectacular show of defiance. “Am I on my feet?” Terry asks in the finale, as he staggers forward, bloodied but not broken. He is sure of only one thing now – integrity at every cost. nb – the stills presented above are from a widescreen presentation of On the Waterfront, and do not accurately represent the image as originally intended.