Film Atlas (Venezuela): Araya

Country: Venezuela

Title: Araya (1959)

For 400 years Araya has been the site of one of the world’s largest salt mines. A small Venezuelan town sits on tip of the Araya peninsula overlooking a vast stretch of sand, salt flats and lagoons where no trees or crops can grow. The community survives on fish and the meager income from their endless toil harvesting, transporting and washing salt. 

Araya the documentary begins in the small hours of the morning and follows a handful of families through their harsh, thankless daily routines. One family sifts, dries, carts, carries and bags the salt leaving it in 40 foot high pyramids that line the coast and await boats to ship it around the world. They walk barefoot and develop ulcers on their feet. The sun beats down on them and by midday they must take the long trek home for the only sleep they’ll get. In the night, they will begin again. Throughout the day the camera leaves them to follow a father and son harvesting chunks of salt from a lagoon, a group of fishers drawing in nets full of sea creatures and the women’s labor selling fish, collecting kindling and cooking.

Margot Benacerraf’s film is a major work, transcending the confines of the ethnographic documentary through its poetic sensibility. The lives of the people of Araya are intrinsically fascinating in themselves, and the task of mining salt, too, is interesting stuff, thoroughly explored by the film. Benacerraf ‘single-day’ structure not only clearly lays out all the steps in the process but gives us an insight into the mind-numbing repetition and taxing difficulty of labor. But the film itself is never mind-numbing or taxing, because Benacerraf’s graceful cinematography captures the alien beauty of the region while her editing gives us a holistic view of the community’s bare subsistence. 

She allows her camera to wander; to take breaks from its implicit ‘job’ to follow tiny but unforgettable details like a child collecting seashells for a graveside bouquet. The narration attempts neither scientific detachment nor angry condemnation (but make no mistake, these salt mines are exploitation at its most soul-crushing), and instead adopts a compassionate, lyrical approach towards understanding a voiceless corner of the world.

My Favorites:

Araya

The Smoking Fish / El Pez que Fuma

Oriana

Major Directors:

Roman Chalbaud

Film Atlas (Sweden): The Magician

Country: Sweden

Title: The Magician / Ansiktet (1958)

Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theater, a traveling magic show, rides by carriage through a twilight forest in 19^thcentury Sweden. It leaves behind it an indefinite string of run-ins with the law. Ahead are towns full of suckers and sightseers on whom the troupe plans to ply their trade. The company consists of mute magician Albert Emanuel Vogler (Max von Sydow), his male assistant Aman (played by actress Ingrid Thulin), his sly grandmother and the smooth-talking carnival barker Johan. Along the way they pick up a sickly alcoholic actor. The tormented Vogler, it seems, observes with morbid fascination the exact moment of his death. 

Arriving at the local consul’s inn, they are received with a mixture of skepticism, excitement, curiosity and contempt. The consul, police superintendent and minister of health, knowing something of Vogler’s disrepute, demand an exhibition of their talents before permitting them to perform in public. Dr. Vergerus, a prominent man of science and campaigner against superstitious, spiritual and supernatural beliefs, treats Vogler with cruel disdain but is secretly unnerved. Meanwhile the consul’s wife claims to ‘recognize’ Vogler and, desperate and infatuated, begs him to explain the senseless death of her child.

That night a series of upstairs/downstairs encounters take place in bedrooms, kitchens and laundry sheds, with the servants drinking and making love while the magicians prepare and perform their act. However the show is a disastrous travesty: Vogler’s magic is laughably fake, the police chief is flagrantly humiliated and the final act ends with a shocking death. The malevolent Dr. Vergerus takes the corpse into the attic to conduct an autopsy and, in the film’s most harrowing sequence, is terrified by spectral visions. But the morning comes and with it the discovery that nothing is what it seemed, including the fortune of the outcast troupe.

Made only a year after Bergman’s best known masterpieces (‘The Seventh Seal,’ where a disillusioned crusader plays a game of chess with Death as a plague sweeps Europe and Wild Strawberries, in which an elderly doctor comes to terms with his misspent life during a cross-country road trip), ‘The Magician’ has been sadly neglected, if not outright eclipsed. Bergman, one of cinema’s greatest directors, spent much of his career preoccupied with somber themes like spiritual crisis, failed relationships, unhappy families, shame, frustration, loneliness and the struggle for meaning in an imperfect and perhaps godless world. The Magician dabbles in that arena, particularly evident in Vogler’s tormented silence as he wrestles with spiritual and vocational demons, the tension between natural and supernatural explanations and the psychic pain of rejection and death in their various manifestations. 

But The Magician also shows Bergman’s lesser-seen and rarely-discussed sunny side: his love of farce, romance, wicked comedy and playful ironies. These are expressed through the parallel stories of the servants (including the inimitable blonde-bombshell Bibi Andersson), coachmen and the easy-to-overlook mischievous grandmother, whose offhand mysticism is a lot closer to real magic than Vogler’s conjuring tricks. Bergman’s frequent collaborators are almost all in attendance (Sydow, Andersson, Thulin, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Erland Josephson) with the moody black-and-white cinematography courtesy of Gunnar Fischer in one of his last Bergman partnerships before the equally sharper-eyed Sven Nykvist took over. The Magician may not be Bergman’s best work (my favorites are his more intense and experimental psychological studies ‘Cries and Whispers’ and ‘Persona’), but with its twists, turns and tonal shifts it’s certainly one of his most fun.

My Favorites:

Cries and Whispers

Raven's End

Scenes from a Marriage
Force Majeure

Persona

A Swedish Love Story
Girl with Hyacinths

Involuntary

The Seventh Seal

Wild Strawberries

Together (2000)
Here's Your Life

Shame (1968)

The Magician (1958)

The Emigrants

The Saga of Gosta Berling

The Magic Flute (1975)

Songs from the Second Floor

Major Directors:

Ingmar Bergman, Lasse Hallstrom, Lukas Moodysson, Ruben Ostlund, Alf Sjoberg, Victor Sjostrom, Mauritz Stiller, Jan Troell, Bo Widerberg

Film Atlas (Indonesia): Tiger from Tjampa

Country: Indonesia

Film: Tiger from Tjampa / Harimau Tjampa (1953)

Lukman is a young man who comes to West Sumatra circa 1930 with three goals in mind: 1) learn pencak silat, Indonesian martial arts, 2) discover his father's murderer and 3) take revenge. He first applies to Datuk Langit, the corrupt local governor, who rejects him as a pupil because he cannot afford to pay the 1-buffalo entrance fee. Moving on, Lukman catches sight of an old man who is beset by highwaymen but defends himself without batting an eye. Lukman introduces himself and learns that this is Pak, a strict but modest master of pencak silat, who accepts Lukman as a student on condition that he only use his newfound skills in self-defense. Lukman quickly becomes adept, but he's dangerously hotheaded, particularly with regard to his love-interest Kiah and her bullying henchmen brother Biran, who frequently draws him into fights. Frustrated by his failure to learn patience and tranquility, Pak finally kicks Lukman out and the young man continues along his downward trajectory until he ends up killing Biran over a gambling quarrel. Lukman is sent to jail where he learns from a thuggish inmate that Datuk Langit, soon to be wed to Kiah against her will, killed his father. Unable to tolerate further injustice, Lukman escapes and confronts Datuk. The film ends on a mixed note, with both of them being sent to prison for their respective crimes, but Kiah promising to wait for him.

Tiger of Tjampa is a rather strange artifact of its era and its hybrid of Indonesian, Islamic and Dutch influences (the latter's colonial rule having ended only four years earlier). Outwardly patterned identically to countless other young-man-out-to-avenge-his-father films made in the US, Hong Kong and elsewhere, Tiger of Tjampa seems genuinely conflicted about whether pacifism or violence is the better path, and is all the more interesting for its vacillation. Although Pak clearly occupies the moral high ground he's also unsympathetically content with Datuk's exploitive rule (and by extension, the off-screen occupation of the Dutch) while the proactive Lukman is easier to cheer for, but commits the film's only murder (this is by no means a high body count action film!) under ignominious and petty circumstances, ultimately wrecking his own life. The film does not present a right answer, reflecting in many ways the double-bind of oppression in which morality and freedom are potentially incompatible.

There's also an almost-interesting echo of this no-right-answer theme in the romantic subplot, with Lukman realizing that a woman other than Kiah has nursed a secret love for him, but nothing much comes of it. Depending on your tolerance for movie romances conveyed entirely by furtive glances and shy smiles, the love triangle will feel pretty underdeveloped. The fight scenes, for the 1950s, are pretty good (though nothing like the high-octane pencak silat in more recent films like The Raid: Redemption) and retain the spirit of the film’s celebration of local culture which also includes wedding dances, handmade sarongs, a liberal smattering of regional proverbs and, most notably, sung narration that accompanies the film in the style of a traditional Indonesian choral ballad.

My Favorites:

Opera Jawa

Tiger from Tjampa

The Raid: Redemption

Major Directors:

Joko Anwar, Garin Nugroho

Film Atlas (Greece): A Matter of Dignity

Country: Greece

Title: A Matter of Dignity / To Teleftaio Psema (1957)

The Pella family is wrapping up one of their regular late-evening parties. Mrs. Pella is playing a porch-side game of cards with her neighbors, all firmly upper-middle class. She asks Chloe, her only child, if there is any whisky left as the maid has ‘forgotten’ to buy more. Chloe fills up an empty bottle with tap water and then ‘trips’ and shatters it. She lingers at the card game, helping her mother win a hand using a few long-established signals. Meanwhile, Mr. Pella sits in darkness at his office staring sadly at nothing. It isn’t hard to figure out the truth: the Pellas are on the verge of bankruptcy. The shopkeepers no longer extend them credit. But Mrs. Pella insists, as a matter of dignity, that they maintain the illusion of their waning class status. 

Chloe, a classy, sharp-witted belle with no shortage of suitors, doesn’t have to be told that she may be her family’s only hope of salvation. Though worn out by deceit, Chloe is driven by filial duty and habituated privilege to begin calculatingly courting Dritsas, a rich American émigré from her social set, much to the chagrin of lovelorn Markos (“the eternal best friend”) and newcomer Gelanos, a heart-stealing widower. Her romantic schemes are interrupted by an accident involving Vasilakis, son of their long-suffering maid Katerina, who has loyally guarded the family secret disgrace and gone without pay for months. Now she needs money to foot the hospital bills and is deeply hurt to discover the extent of her employer’s selfishness.

A Matter of Dignity is a morality play structured around a tragic romance, not surprising given the country’s literary legacy. Director Michael Cacoyannis (best known for Zorba the Greek and Stella) would later go on to adapt three ancient Greek tragedies (Electra, The Trojan Women and Iphigenia), but this modern fable, an almost sympathetic take on the crumbling social mores of the 1950’s, is perhaps his most penetrating and affecting. 

The film is anchored by three strong female performance: (1) Chloe (Ellie Lambeti, Cacoyannis’s early-career muse), whose old-before-her-time cynicism and economic survival instincts conflict with her essentially generous nature, (2) her mother, whose warped commitment to appearances trumps her husband’s weak-spirited preference for honesty, and (3) Katerina, whose salt-of-the-earth working-class dignity contrasts sharply with the Pellas’s skin-deep sham. Cacoyannis makes frequent use of in media res, not just by jumping right to the tail-end of the opening banquet, but by skipping ahead at other times too. An obvious example is a scene that starts with the camera close on Chloe’s freshly ringed hand before pulling out to a medium shot while a man’s voice says, “You can open your eyes now.” Who needs anything else to understand the situation? This technique also initiates us into the film’s bold finale, where instead of wrapping up loose ends we are thrust into a crowd of strangers and left to flail for a while before recognizable faces emerge. Meanwhile our genre expectations are subverted by the film’s abrupt abandonment of its seemingly central romantic question (which of the three suitors will Chloe choose?) in favor of an ambiguous act of atonement that offers us something more substantial, if less savory, to chew on.

My Favorites:

The Counterfeit Coin (1955)
Ulysses' Gaze
The Photograph (1987)

The Travelling Players

A Matter of Dignity
Eternity and a Day

Euridice BA 2O37

Landscape in the Mist

The Drunkard

Major Directors:

Theo Angelopoulos, Yorgos Javellas, Mihalis Kakogiannis, Giorgos Lanthimos, Nikos Nikolaidis

Film Atlas (Finland): The White Reindeer

Country: Finland

Title: The White Reindeer / Valkoinen Peura (1952)

The White Reindeer opens with a pregnant woman, a witch or so the narrator tells us, fleeing across an inhospitable snowscape pursued by wolves. She gives birth and dies, not a very auspicious start for Pirita, our cursed anti-hero. She grows into a beautiful young woman and catches the eye of handsome Aslak during a sledding race. The two are soon married but Aslak, a reindeer shepherd, is frequently away from home leaving Pirita at the mercy of loneliness, boredom and depression.

Seeking greater romantic fulfillment, Pirita visits an alcoholic shaman who encourages her to sacrifice the first living thing she sees on her way home to a pagan god. The first living thing she sees, unfortunately, is her husband and their pet albino reindeer doe. She slaughters the doe, becoming irresistible to men as part of the bargain, but the cost is high: she turns into a shape-shifting reindeer vampire and gradually succumbs to her unnatural hunger.

Few places lend themselves to black and white cinematography like Lapland and its unbroken canvas of snowy hillsides. The landscape alone is enough to hold one’s attention, but the primary interest of The White Reindeer is two-fold: it works as both an ethnographic slice-of-life into a rural Finnish past (where skiing and reindeer are the primary modes of transportation and, I would hazard, you’ve never seen so many reindeer!)  and as an old-fashion though oddly effective horror story in the tradition of fairytales and folklore.

Perhaps the peak of the latter experience is the scene in which Pirita makes her sacrifice before the pagan altar, a twisted monument of antler and bone shot from unexpected angles, before passing out into nightmare visions. Below these surface layers is a rather ambiguous interplay of feminist and patriarchal themes that touch upon topics of marriage, sex, domestic life and the role of women without any clear agenda, except perhaps a growing fear at the breakdown of “traditional” values.

My Favorites:

The White Reindeer

Inspector Palmu's Error

Stolen Death

The Man without a Past

Frozen Land

Major Directors:

Aki Kaurismaki, Mika Kaurismäki

Film Atlas (Egypt): Cairo Station

Country: Egypt

Film: Cairo Station / The Iron Gate / Bab el Hadid (1958)

Madbouli, our oft-absent narrator, is a newsagent in Cairo's bustling central train station who claims to have seen many stories strangers than those he sells. This one began when he took in Qinawi, a crippled street urchin without a past and little hope for a future. Qinawi defends himself with a desperate sense of humor, but he's lonely, sexually frustrated and the butt of many jokes cast down from the higher social strata. He longingly spies on a pair of young lovers that rendezvous at the station, and dreams of marriage with Hannouma (Hind Rostom, the "Marilyn Monroe of the East"), a fiery, flirtatious eye-catcher who sells cold drinks without a permit. She strings Qinawi along so he'll hide her beverage bucket during police raids and because she considers him essentially harmless and amusing, but in reality she is engaged to Abu Serih, a handsome labor organizer and born leader on the cusp of winning better pay for the station porters.

Unable to accept the growing reality that Hannouma will soon marry another and leave, Qinawi loses his grip on reality and latches onto a murder story of grisly dismemberment being covered by the very papers he peddles. He clumsily lures Hannouma to the station warehouse, but she senses something is up (she thinks he is trying yet again to seduce her) and sends a friend, who Qinawi, in the dark, stabs and stuffs into a trunk. He later tries to blame Abu Serih, but his erratic behavior doesn't allow him to fool anyone for long. As night falls, he corners Hannouma in the rail yard and chases her among the trains as the police surround the area. Madbouli steps forward and tries to calm down Qinawi, now totally insane, by describing his imminent wedding festivities. Asking him to don his bridegroom robes, several men slip on a straightjacket.

Egypt was already one of the centers of Middle Eastern cinema by the 1930s, but few had any interest in challenging the prevailing popular comedic and romantic formulas until prolific director Youssef Chahine emerged in the 1950s. The result of his interest in sordid tragedy among the lower castes, Cairo Station, was a domestic failure but a rare international breakthrough. Chahine himself took on the difficult and rather unflattering role of Qinawi, a character too pathetic to hate, but too ominous to like; something between a scrappy underdog and a creepy stalker (a fresh and shocking character type in 1958). Chahine builds up an ill-omened tension around Qinawi by, in keeping with his tendency to lurk, conspicuously not revealing his face for the first ten minutes. In the shack where he lives, Qinawi pins up images of scantily clad women cut from the papers he sells, an ordinary enough act of sexual sublimation that grows darker as the film progresses; he later draws a bucket on the arm of a favorite picture and finally, after hearing about a sensational killing, almost absent-mindedly clips off the head and limbs of a pinup. His conflation of image, imagination and reality and his tendency to escape into voyeurism and fantasy, makes him something of a prototype for the deranged antiheroes of the 1960s and 70s (think Peeping Tom, Psycho or Taxi Driver), but it's a credit to Chahine's minimal-dialog performance and the carefully selected class-conscious scenes of his daily routine that he remains oddly sympathetic.

Chahine also proves himself one of the most interesting cinematographers of the era, with extremely dynamic compositions that incorporate camera movement, staging along criss-crossing diagonals and constant interplay between foreground and background elements. He frequently shoots through windows, around corners and in shifting crowds, always keeping the essential information clear while pushing the boundary of what he can fit in the frame. One of my favorite examples is Qinawi buying a knife at a cutlery stand (the first screenshot of this post), a scene sliced up by the verticals of dangling, swaying blades in front and the prison-like iron bars of a gate behind. Another winner is the climactic nighttime chase, with its chiaroscuro lighting and metallic labyrinth of engines, carriages and rails, shot with all the noirish authority of an Orson Welles finale.

My Favorites:

Cairo Station

The Nightingale's Prayer / The Curfew's Cry

The Mummy
The Square (2013)

Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story

Major Directors:

Henry Barakat, Youssef Chahine

Film Atlas (Croatia): H-8

Country: Croatia

Film: H-8... (1958)

At 8:33 pm on April 14, 1957 along a stretch of highway between Zagreb and Belgrade a car driven by an unknown driver caused a wreck between a bus and a truck carrying sheet metal. 8 people were killed. The car shut off its lights so that no one could read its license plate beyond "H8..." and then drove off. Director Nikola Tanhofer takes this true life incident and begins in reportage style, giving us times, statistics, weather conditions and all the other known facts. We are told that the vehicles will crash. We are told how many people will die. We are even told which seats belong to the casualties. The only thing he holds back is who will be sitting in them. What follows is an extrapolation of the final two hours aboard the vehicles as we get to know the passengers, their pasts, personalities and plans. We learn to like some and not others. We find ourselves understanding, rooting for or wondering about them as the tension of knowing what hangs over them builds to an unbearable pitch.

Tanhofer plays a tricky, macabre and potentially tasteless game: he shows you most of his cards, tells you what's going to happen and then asks you to care for a large cast of characters despite knowing that some subset of them will be killed for no fault of their own. There are a lot of characters to develop and relatively little time for us to form opinions and emotional connections concerning them, and at the same time this has to be merely a typical bus ride without excessive drama, unmotivated seat-changing or misguided symbolism. Thankfully, and impressively, the acting, writing and directing all rise to the occasion. This is a fantastic example of efficiency, nuance and variety, with a knack for choosing which little moments to leave in and what long expositions can be cut out. Tanhofer never includes a flashback. Important elements from the past are implied or come up naturally through conversations, observations and interactions are also serving other purposes. The forward continuity also preserves the morbid tension, the sense of a implacable countdown that makes us lean in at every glimpse of a clock or mention of the time.

Crafting this suspense is undeniably exploitive, but Tanhofer actually cares for his characters and has more on his mind than just a genre exercise. The ending, a poetic montage of consequences and what-ifs, drives home the arbitrariness and cruelty of death. Tanhofer dedicates the film to the unknown driver, unharmed and unseen, almost as if he hopes his film will restore a conscience, a sense of responsibility, or at least guilt, to those who can cause death and then move on. H8 works superbly as a suspense film and ensemble piece, but it also strikes me as, on a deeper level, an anti-war movie, a troubling exploration of who dies and why and what does that mean.

My Favorites:

H-8

Don't Look Back My Son

Fine Dead Girls

Rondo

The Birch Tree / Breza

Major Directors:

Branko Bauer, Nikola Tanhofer

Review of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

While coming up with candidates for the character meme a little bit ago, it struck me that Bunuel movies came to mind quicker than expected (“Belle de Jour,” “The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz” and the recently Criterionized “Simon of the Desert” amongst others). After all, Luis Bunuel isn’t exactly what I would call a character-driven storyteller in the traditional sense, but maybe his non-traditional approach is what makes his work all the more memorable.

Bunuel doesn’t round out his characters with the type of psychological realism that explains all their actions and makes them seem like real, rational people. He often leaves motivation ambiguous and behavior erratic (“The Young and the Damned,” “Belle de Jour,” “This Strange Passion”) or uses characters as primarily symbolic vessels (his early shorts, “The Exterminating Angel,” “Phantom of Liberty,” “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”). In extreme cases like “That Obscure Object of Desire,” he managed to do both, undermining familiar notions of character access and identification by casting two actresses in the role of the fickle female lead.

But what makes Bunuel’s characters so great is that when he chooses to get inside their head, he literally brings their mind to life. His ability to plumb the depths of repression, fantasy and fixation and then visualize it on film is amazing. It made for characters that may make little sense within our everyday reality, but which fit logically into an often nightmarish neighboring surreality whose very contrast forced viewers to think about conventions, institutions and personal habits that Bunuel felt were too easily accepted or outright wrong. Sometimes this led to controversy, sometimes to laughter, and often to both.

One of my favorite Bunuel characters, to whom I was only recently introduced, is Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ernesto Alonso) of the ironically-titled “The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz” (1955). Like many men in Bunuel films, his dominant trait is an unhealthy sexual obsession, in this case merged with a murderous compulsion. Archibaldo believes himself to be a serial killer, and very early in the film he turns himself in and confesses as such, but luck (good? bad? tough to tell…) has condemned him to innocence.

[Image: Archibaldo with razor.]

As a spoiled rich kid during the Mexican revolution, Archibaldo was reluctantly raised by a pretty governess with whom he frequently clashed. One day his parents give him a music box and the governess tells him a fairy-tale about how the original owner could play the tune and then strike enemies dead through thought alone. As she speaks, Archibaldo opens the music box and a stray gunshot from the fighting outside snuffs out her life. Archibaldo is thereafter convinced that he is a cold-blooded killer, a fixation confirmed by a string of similarly fatal coincidences throughout his life.

Archibaldo oscillates humorously between wanting to satisfy his criminal and sexual desires and wanting salvation from them. He sees women merely as a means to gratification or redemption and he pursues stunning beauties towards both ends, but without satisfaction. They step on his pride, he vows revenge, and they inevitably die before he can kill them.

Archibaldo still blames himself for their deaths, and so he’s plagued with ever mounting guilt. He remains blind to his true crimes, pride and selfishness, and ultimately lacks remorse. Bunuel, who never fails to get the last laugh, flaunts the legal verdict as equivalent to moral one, rewarding Archibaldo with a happy ending that implies the possibility of an unearned romance.

The irony is not merely that Archibaldo thinks he’s a killer and isn’t. It’s also that society thinks he’s an upstanding citizen and he isn’t. The local clergy, the government and the social elite all pat him on the back and hold him up as an exemplary member of the community. What’s especially subversive is that they continue to hold their high opinion of him even after he’s confessed what a troubled, volatile and dangerous person he is under the façade. Society is shown to be absolutely complicit in Archibaldo’s misguided honor system and to care little for anything but outward appearances and deference to decorum. (In some ways, I’m reminded of the critique of superficiality in “American Psycho.”)

[Image: Few people dream about their wedding nights in quite the same way as Archibaldo.]

“The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz” has fewer of Bunuel signature surrealist sequences than some of his better known works. There are several scenes where we see Archibaldo carry out murderous plots (which are often symbolically loaded and a little weird), which we later discover take place only in his imagination. These scenes are absent the non-sequitur cuts and freeform imagery of dream sequences, as Bunuel intentionally makes them disturbingly indistinguishable from reality.

The only exception is a fantasy that takes place in a featureless fog, perhaps a way to show how absorbed Archibaldo becomes when overcome by his compulsions. Perhaps my favorite surreal touch is the music box tune that rises unbidden in Archibaldo’s mind and sounds like its off-key, slow-motion and underwater.

[Image: The victim in one of Archibaldo’s pitch black visions of imagined murder, serving milk. Our puritanical hero is fond of saying “I don’t touch alcohol.”]

I suspect that Bunuel was managing to fit enough of his satire into the literal narrative that he didn’t feel the need for as many of fantastical digressions. Indeed, the film works pretty well as both comedy and thriller in a way less jarring (if less exciting) than his more eccentric work.

[Image: Years later, the music box rediscovered!]

The black and white cinematography is highly polished, demonstrating a higher budget than Bunuel had managed prior to the 1950’s. Like “This Strange Passion” (1953) before, “The Criminal Life…” makes heavy use of architecture (though less Dali-esque here), particularly Archibaldo’s cavernous estate and the ritzy nightclubs and gambling joints that he frequents. In keeping with his inability to form sincere human relationships, Archibaldo is defined largely by setting and inanimate objects. The luxuries that surround him in his mansion, his tailored suits and his sports car mark his as a member of the wealthy elite, but his music box, razorblade and a manikin replica of one of his intended victims all give physical expression to his warped perspective.

[Images: Archibaldo, torn between a dummy and the real thing. He tries to pretend like he’s being playful, but he’s also stoking his kiln between smooches in preparation for a postcoital cremation.]

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz” is available on a DVD set that also includes “Land Without Bread,” “The Young and the Damned” and “This Strange Passion.” It’s a great deal. I noted that the box and DVDs were prominently labeled region 2, but they played on two region 1 machines I tested. You can also wait for Criterion to put it out, which isn’t currently on their agenda, but they’ve gone on Bunuel-releasing rampages before (“Simon of the Desert” and “The Exterminating Angel” most recently). Personally, I find it comforting that there still remains many Bunuel films I’ve yet to experience and that it’s only a matter of time…*

Walrus Rating: 8.0

* Of course, if there are any distributers out there reading, I’d prefer sooner rather than later.

[Image: "I assure you that morbid sensation gave me a certain pleasure."]

Iceberg Arena: Time-Traveling Czech Entertainment

Czech SF was featured in an Iceberg Arena comparison previously (“Ikarie XB-1” vs. “The End of August at the Hotel Ozone” vs. “Dinner for Adele”), but I can’t resist a rematch of sorts, this time with a specifically time-travel theme. Two of the directors return, Jindritch Polack (“Ikarie XB-1”) and Oldrich Lipsky (“Lemonade Joe,” “Dinner for Adele”) from the previous competition, and even the third auteur, Karl Zeman (“Baron Prasil”), is a Film Walrus alumni. Here are the contenders for this round:

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
I Killed Einstein, Gentleman (1970)
Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)

The three films all involved travel back in time, though each focuses on very different destinations. They’re all pretty light-hearted affairs, if not outright comedies, quite different from the solemn, scientific, action-driven films that often mark the subgenre. I guess you could think of these as Czech precursors to “Back to the Future” or even “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures.”


Journey to the Beginning of Time

“Journey to the Beginning of Time” is an edutainment adventure about four boys who find themselves on a river flowing backwards through time towards creation. The scale is in the millions of years and the starting point is the second ice age, so most of the film deals with prehistoric life such as dinosaurs. Doc, the oldest and most scientifically rigorous of the crew, takes notes and gives lengthy speeches describing each epoch’s flora and fauna.

The setup would seem ripe for rousing action, but the general format stays pretty stiff: one of the boys, usually the youngest, will get separated from the group and the others will look for him, often ending with a quick dash to the boat with a carnivorous animal in pursuit. The chipper lads aren’t confused or even frightened by their journey (they frequently mention that “they can always find their way back”), demonstrating a gung-ho uniformity that makes them seem a bit like Boy Scout caricatures.

These faults with the plot and characters certainly won’t bother youngsters, clearly the intended audience of the film. And they’ll be absolutely fascinated by the stop-motion work and set design, the real heroes of “Journey.” As usual, Zeman pulls out every trick in his hat, using stop motion models, clay, puppets, monster suits, full-size props, forced perspective, mattes and painted backdrops to make immaculate replicas of bygone eras on a relatively small budget. His creatures look impressively real for 1955, a product of the crew’s diligent research and attention to detail, but what makes them really come to life is the way they move and sound.

Karl Zeman had been working in the industry for more then a decade, producing innovative shorts like the delicate glassmation “Inspiration” (1949), before making his debut feature film. “Journey to the Beginning of Time” established Zeman as a major stop-motion and effects giant, although it didn’t land on American shores until nine years later when William Cayton recut it. He added a framing device that makes the adventure a dream experienced by four American boys visiting the Museum of Natural History in New York City. This version makes very little sense (the boys apparently have no parents or guardians and inexplicably bring canned food and axes on the museum visit), but it seems to be the predominate edition available. I’d love to see the original (with subtitles rather than the goofy dub) and reassess it.

I Killed Einstein, Gentleman!

Oldrich Lipsky, up to his usual wacky antics, weaves one of his most ambitious and silly projects in this time-traveling farce. In the distant future terrorists have invented an advanced bomb that causes women to grow facial hair, precipitating a global crisis. The government rejects a high-tech shaving robot in favor of a more radical plan: going back in time to assassinate Albert Einstein during his 1911 visit to Prague and thus preventing modern physics from ever developing advanced bombs in the first place.

Giacometti (Svatopluk Benes), Robert and Gwen are assigned to the mission, along with an accidental fourth companion: a mischievous kitten. Robert meets his father, Gwen falls in love with the hapless target and Giacometti utterly botches the job during a madcap party where a chandelier is suppose to fall on Einstein’s head. They go back for a second try, but this time they are foiled by the future terrorists who use the cat as a spy and soon recruit the love-struck Gwen. It doesn’t take long before history has been altered, but the results aren’t quite what anyone expected.

Lipsky throws science and gender politics out the window and aims straight for the funnybone, ultimately creating a high-speed anarchic comedy that’s bizarre even by his own standards. While he’s not too highbrow to indulge in slapstick and striptease, the sheer creativity of his narrative gives a unique specificity to the broad laughs. The escalating chaos throughout the film eventually hits a critical point at which the rhythm and humor really clicks, and the resulting confusion helps mask the liberal dosage of nonsense on display. Still, Lipsky obeys enough of the time-travel precepts to pull out an amusing and rather extended ending that’s half predictable and half insane.

The performances are pretty good, especially Petr Cepek (“Valley of the Bees”) as the humble Einstein and Jana Brejchova as Gwen, who do an admirable job establishing chemistry (and ending physics) in their brief, frenzied romantic entanglement. Of particular interest is the 60’s-kitsch futuristic design (architecture, costumes and even the hairstyles don’t escape unscathed) and even the Edwardian scenes, with their ornate wood furniture and ostentatious dresses, are a pleasure to behold. None of this will change the fact that Lipsky’s work is a love-it-or-hate-it affair, but there’s certainly nothing else quite like it.

Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea

Though I like all three titles in today’s arena, there’s no question that the verbosely declarative “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea” is my favorite. The titular event serves as the origin point in a series of complicated loops back and forth through time that can be hard to keep up with but pretty easy to follow. The delightfully contrived plot introduces Jan Bures, whose identical twin brother Karel works as a pilot for a time-traveling tourism company.

Karel is something of a bad apple, negotiating with a group of aging-resistant neo-Nazis to deliver a modern atomic bomb to Hitler just as his defeat draws nigh. But the morning before his plot goes into action, Karel chokes to death on his breakfast (and Jan scalds himself with tea). The tongue-tied Jan semi-intentionally impersonates his roguish brother to save Karel’s fiancé, who Jan also loves, from a broken heart. The masquerade serves his own interests, too, but obliges him to pilot the nefarious villains along Karel’s scheduled WWII cruise. Once they hijack the history-hopper, Hitler hijinks ensue (say that three times fast).

Ironically, the Nazi bad guys include Film Walrus favorite Vladimir Mensik (“Cassandra Cat,” “Who Wants to Kill Jesse?” etc.) and Svatopluk Benes who had momentarily pondered killing a pre-political Hitler in “I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen,” made seven years earlier.

Jindrich Polack’s “Ikarie XB-1” (1963) proved he could handle hard SF with a professional aplomb that was still relatively rare in the genre, but “Tomorrow… Tea” is evidence that Polack was equally adept at creating imaginative comedies. Petr Kostka is wonderful in the dual role of Jan and Karel Bures, capturing the opposite personalities of the bumbling underdog and scheming scoundrel with equal relish. We rely on Kostka to provide a reference point in the shifting versions of past and future while also anchoring the love story, the screwball comedy, the hectic action and social satire (note that Karel, the opportunistic capitalist, is aligned with Nazism); not an easy role.

Writers Josef Nesvadbas and Milos Macourek also deserve a round of applause for tying such a convoluted narrative knot and then unraveling it into a conclusion that has the superb symmetry of a cat’s cradle. There are certainly more than a couple of plot holes left lingering about, but Polack makes it clear that the focus is on the character’s growth and not the story’s soundness.


Conclusion

Today’s batch has to be one of the funnest sets I’ve done, and I’m certain the three films would make an unbeatable triple feature for Czech and/or time-travel loving cinephiles. However, I suspect that even seeing an uncut and fully restored edition of “Journey to the Beginning of Time” wouldn’t give it the necessary push to beat the other two films. “I Killed Einstein” has some really golden moments, but it isn’t quite first-rate Lipsky and will probably leave some viewers scratching their heads at the Euro-humor. My pick for the winner, therefore, has to be returning-champion Jindrich Polack and his underrated SF diamond.

Winner: “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea”

Iceberg Arena: Ants!

While a lot of sci-fi is based around mind-boggling concepts like alternative worlds, time-travel, intergalactic politics, technology singularities and post-human evolution, it’s occasionally nice to revisit SF’s most simple and familiar premise: an attack by something very large. It might be a giant ape evolved in isolation or an alien invader from space, but ever since 1954’s “Godzilla,” atomic mutation has become the culprit of choice.

In mediocre films for the past sixty years humanity has been assailed by enormous lizards, 50 foot women, praying mantises, venus flytraps, killer tomatoes, spiders, wasps, slugs, shrews, crabs, cacti and much more. Collectively, I’ll refer to these as “Attack of the X” or “Giant X” films. Today we’ll be looking at one particular foe: ants.

Perhaps because of their steadfast industrial workaholic nature, ants are quite capable of inspiring resentment, if not particularly fear. Their vast numbers, hierarchical society and constructed cities make them popular metaphors for, or rivals of, human civilization. Their collective-before-individual behavior made them suitable cinematic stand-ins for the presumed inhumanity of communism during the Cold War.

Today’s Iceberg Arena will force three ant armies to square off, hailing from the films “Them!” “Phase IV” and “Empire of the Ants.”



Them! (1954)

After finding a little girl wandering the desert in a state of shock, the New Mexico police begin an investigation, quickly discovering a shredded trailer and a general store ransacked for sugar. A wise entomologist and his partner/daughter suspect giant ants, a hypothesis soon proven correct when they are attacked by a patrol. The government manages to locate the nest in the desert and flamethrower troopers are sent in to wipe it out, Unfortunately, two queens fly out in time to start new hives, one that must be scuttled in a cargo ship transporting sugar while the other gets dramatically purged from the underground maze of the L.A. sewer system.

“Them!” was one of the earliest Giant X films, and its effective combination of SF and horror was highly influential on the countless waves of knockoffs. The original story by George Worthing Yates is the primary asset, hurrying the action through several stages and maintaining the suspense even as the “shocking” revelations are dispensed with and the stakes escalated. Lesser monster films delay the action for too long (as if the posters and trailers hadn’t already spoiled the anticipated creatures) and wade through viscous filler before going all-out in the last ten minutes.

The cheap-but-distinctive sets help sell the situation whether they're exploiting the exposure of the open desert or the claustrophobia of the hive tunnels and sewer nests. The giant ants themselves are mean and plentiful, gnashing their jaws, waving their antennae and emitting high pitched whines and clicks. Action scenes are frequent, with ants biting people in half or getting fried to a crisp.

None of this should be taken to mean that the film is realistic or scary. The serious tone, oversized ant puppets and scientific babble makes for vintage cheese. “Them!” endures as solid entertainment today because it provides retro silliness without the poor pacing and embarrassing incompetence of duds like "The Wasp Woman" or "The Giant Gila Monster."

Phase IV (1974)

“Phase IV” is something of exception amongst ant films and Giant X cinema more generally, because, well, the ants aren’t giant. A secluded research dome is set up to with a two man skeleton crew to monitor unusually aggressive ant colonies that have been terrorizing a small town and even making geometric crop circles. The film wastes no time having the local population either evacuate or die, leaving the two scientists and an orphaned girl to match their wits against a diabolic ant siege.

Saul Bass is better known for his graphic design work (he created the logos for AT&T and several major airlines) and innovative title sequences (like the paper cut-outs in “Anatomy of a Murder” and the moving text in “Vertigo”) than this singular feature film effort. Yet despite setting out with a pedestrian premise and miniscule budget, Bass’s work is closer to an existential art film than a B-movie monster flick. After a rambling, garbled kickoff, the film gradually begins to convert snickers to shivers with its eerie sun-scorched cinematography and unrelenting conviction.

It’s clear from the dogmatic dialog and clunky performances that Bass wasn’t an “actor’s director,” but his extensive deployment of ant macro photography, far beyond the usual stock-footage inserts, manages to put the hive and humanity on equal footing. This unusual amount of insect screen time actually goes a long way towards making the story work, especially in vignettes showing the self-sacrificing ants adapting to a yellow chemical spray or attempting to single-handedly destroy some electronic equipment while being hunted by a mantis.

The tenacity and resourcefulness of the ants is ultimately a convincing depiction of how armies of tiny creatures could conquer the planet. Combined with Dick Bush’s coldly observant cinematography and the weird, pessimistic finale, this certainly makes for one of the most chilling and underappreciated monster movies of its era. I also find it interesting to note, especially given Bass’s background as a title designer, that the title does not appear until the arresting final image.

Empire of the Ants (1977)

If the exposition in “Phase IV” is a limping misfire, then the grueling snoozefest at the start of “Empire of the Ants” is something far worse. Why we must listen to the petulant yammering of crudely-developed caricatures destined to be indiscriminately dished out as ant bait is beyond me. These are the type of characters that you hope will die; men who pointlessly suggest that the group split up and woman who would rather spend their last ten minutes screaming than outpacing the glacial monster-dolls being waved about by some poor schmuck just offscreen. Sadly, that passes for an FX-packed money shot in a film where the insects are made to look giant by – and I wish I were making this up – filming ants crawling on still photos of the sets.

I should talk about the plot, but I got sidetracked with frustration. Anyway, the story is about a group of prospective real estate buyers who are stranded on a tropical island where radiation has caused giant ants to take over. The queen ant uses pheromones to turn nearby townspeople into zombie slaves and forces them to harvest a king’s ransom in sugar cane.

The film stars a pre-“Dynasty” Joan Collins, who would later leave this title off her resume. The acting is atrocious, the pacing unbearable and the cinematography flat. Yet somehow I found this film nightmare inducing as a youngster, though to provide some context I was also frightened of brontosauruses and Ronald McDonald.

We happened to own this film on VHS because a cardiac medicine vendor mailed my father a series of “video classics” that had promotional infomercials for experimental medications in the place of trailers. I always wondered if some physician out there was really so grateful to own a copy of “The Graduate” or "Midnight Cowboys" that they actually prescribed their patients FDA-unapproved drugs. I don’t think my dad has ever gotten around to watching the film (or the infomercial), but for some reason I’ve seen it three times now.

Conclusion

This is actually kind of a hard choice. “Empire of the Ants” is so impossibly bad that it almost might be the most fun to watch if you have a group of MST3K-type friends, but then again, all three of these films work well for humorous camp and the others are much more entertaining.

“Phase IV” is really the film I’d like to declare the winner, for its wildly disproportionate ambition if nothing else. It’s worth checking out if you're even slightly curious and definitely deserves a cult following. Still, I think the answer has to be “Them!,” which is just so classically fun and alarmist. It remains a staple of retro-SF cinema and stands a head above most of its brethren.

Winner: Them!