The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: R. Emmet Sweeney

R. Emmet Sweeney

A pratfall can be a work of art, a study in disruptive motion, a klutz’s ballet. This choreography of humiliation is perhaps the least garlanded act in contemporary film, as no Oscars will ever be won for kicks to the groin or tumbles down the stairs...

Contributed to:  Village Voice, Senses of Cinema, Termite Art ("blog with Matt Singer)", The Reeler ("RIP"), IFC News, The Rumpus, The Believer, Movie Morlocks, Director's Guild of America Quarterly, Film Comment, Time Out Chicago, Time Out New York, Moving Image Source, Indiewire, The Brooklyn Rail, The L Magazine, La Furia Umana, Baseball Prospectus, MUBI, The Poetry Foundation. He's collected his work here: r-emmetsweeney.com

Also did these DVD liner notes: Liverpool (Kino Lorber), Bells of St. Mary's (Olive Films), John Ford: The Columbia Films Collection (TCM/Sony)

Noted Championed of: Paul W.S. Anderson, Milla Jovovich, William Witney, Adam McKay/Will Ferrell, Allan Dwan, Raoul Walsh, William Dieterle, Delmer Daves, Leo McCarey, Jason Statham, Robert Mulligan, Anna Faris, Nobuhiro Yamashita, Johnnie To, Celina Murga, The Farrelly Brothers, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Edward L. Cahn, Mamoru Hosoda, DTV action movies, the Buffalo Bills.

Influences: Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Dave Kehr, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman, Dennis Lim, Martin C. Dillon, David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson.

Robert Emmet Sweeney (February 8th, 1981-) grew up in Buffalo, NY before moving "to NYC to get a very lucrative Masters in Cinema Studies from NYU. Matt Singer was a classmate and good friend, who helped to get me an internship at the Village Voice, where the legend Dennis Lim was the film editor. The interns included a shocking number of great writers: Singer, Ben Kenigsberg, Akiva Gottlieb, Josh Land, Pete L'Official and many others.  Lim allowed me to write some of those short blurb reviews in the back of the section. You can blame him for everything I've done after in the film critical arts."

Sweeney has an unpretentious style, acting equally well as historian and critic. He's clear about action, technique and context, hooking you early and filling in every imaginable blank. It's impossible to stop once you've started one of his pieces. The clarity of his prose is accessible even to non-obsessive cinephiles. Sweeney has been a vital chronicler in film's descent into internet-based distribution especially for classic films. His column at TCM's Movie Morlocks is a reliable source for how/what to watch and what it means for film preservation. He's as curious and concerned about every step we take toward the future as he is connected to the history of the medium and the other voices who've covered the same ground. He'll open his reviews up with quotes from the performers, directors and other critics, drawing a roadmap through cinema for perspective travelers to rely on. He largely removes himself from the stories but when he does make them personal, as in a recent study of a newly renovated Buffalo movie palace, the result is awesomely affecting. As Adam Cook put it on twitter just hours ago: "It needs to be said and it should be said often that R. Emmet Sweeney is one of the best film critics right now."

On William Witney:
Film director William Witney changed the way movie punches were thrown. It has become a cliché to say that fight scenes are like dances, but for Witney this was just common sense. He saw Busby Berkeley working on a stage spectacle, and adapted that regimented method to action sequences, essentially inventing the job of stunt choreographer. Witney honed this approach over a forty-year career directing an astonishing variety of low-budget action movies, from 1930s adventure serials to 1970s Blaxploitation comedies....Witney spent the majority of his career in the hills outside Lone Pine, shooting Westerns in a week or two with Roy Rogers, creating a cohesive body of work out of bodies tumbling to the ground.

On The Prowler:
The protagonists of this sleazy little drama are Webb Gardner (Van Heflin), an oafish cop fueled by class resentment, and Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), a plasticine blonde bored with her milquetoast husband. Or, as Manny Farber described them, “an amoral rookie cop” and a “hot, dumb, average American babe.” Either way, they were born to torment each other. In the opening shot, Susan stares off camera, shrieks, and pulls down the shades. There’s a prowler outside, and we’re out there with him. After this self-reflexive jape, literally putting us in the shoes of a voyeur and jokingly incriminating the whole movie-going enterprise, Losey pulls back to the larger narrative....Sweeping the grounds outside, Webb circles around to the window in her bathroom. In a reversal of the opening shot, the camera is placed inside the window looking out, and Van Heflin takes our offending place where the peeper was first spotted. It establishes his perversity – he’s got a smarmy grin on his face – and re-enforces the possibility of ours. It’s the first of many shots where Webb is shown in transitional spaces – doorways, hallways and windows. The problem is that he always gets closer.

On Leo McCarey:
McCarey understood people, as Renoir said, and was able to convey this knowledge through his rapport with actors. His training in the pantomime of the silent era and method of spontaneous scene-building pushed his performers to physically expressive heights unmatched in classical Hollywood. He could compress a lifetime of repressed emotion into one delicate close-up of Bergman's incandescent face, or indicate a priest's mild subversiveness by having Crosby take a hop over a hedgerow. These little gestures over the course of his career constructed entire inner worlds, so each character is recognizably human, recognizably flawed. This made McCarey's comedies sad and his tragedies funny; that is, they contained the world in all its frustrating contradictions.

source: email interview

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: James Kang & Critics Round Up

James Kang & Critics Round Up

Noted Champion of: MUBI's Notebook, Reverse Shot, Cinema Scope, LOLA, Senses of Cinema, desistfilm, La Furia Umana.

Influences: "On my approach to aggregation: David Hudson, Tom Spurgeon. 
Formative influences on my taste in film: Roger Ebert, A. O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell. 
Current strongest influences on the way I interpret films: Richard Brody, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Michael Sicinski.
Favorite critics no longer with us: Manny Farber, James Agee, Jay Scott."

Critics Round Up is the brainchild of James Kang (1985-) who is very careful in maintaining his personal privacy, which is why fewer details about him are available. CRU is a vital, incredibly valuable resource for both casual and serious moviegoers. Those who have longed for a more discerning alternative to critic aggregates like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, which don't question or interpret their sources, can rest easy that someone has finally made a site that cares about the nature of criticism. Kang trusts critics with reputations and serious cinephiles using the film diary website Letterboxd. 

From the sites statement of intent: Critics Round Up is the first movie review aggregator to select critics and publications based on merit instead of popularity. Merit, on this site, is defined as generally being friendly to arthouse and international cinema and resisting stagnant ways of thinking.

The purpose of CRU in a nutshell: "GOAL #1 To provide an alternative to the aggregated numbers of more popular sites....GOAL #2 To serve as a link archive." And on that score, Kang posts excerpts from and links to every review he includes, as well as news about new releases and the actors and directors orbiting them. Kang has a detailed set of guidelines for CRU which explain how the site works and what makes it different from other aggregators. 


source: email interview

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: David Cairns

David Cairns 

...they not only conjure psychological states on the screen, but languish exultantly in them, only seizing the narrative ribbon as its last trailing tatters whisk past.

Known for: The Forgotten, LimerWrecks, Shadowplay, Natan.

Contributed to: Cineaste, Sight & Sound, The Believer, Criterion, Masters of Cinema, Arrow Video, Mubi, The Chiseler, Senses of Cinema, Electric Sheep. 

Noted champion of: Mitchell Leisen, Richard Lester, Lindsay Anderson, Ken Russell, Joseph Losey, Kathleen Byron, Frank Borzage, Julien Duvivier, Jean Epstein, Jean Grémillon, Lon Chaney, Victor Sjöström, Orson Welles, Bernard Natan.

Influences: "My only real influences in criticism, apart from everybody, are Colin McLaren, screenwriter, who taught me the joy of words, and B. Kite, who taught me (1) the joy of ideas and (2) what criticism is. Or at least he tried."

Scottish David Cairns (October 10th, 1967-) seems to never stop consuming and writing. Regular readers know he's got a new film to talk about in entertaining, brisk detail nearly every day. He says everything he needs to and before you know it you're scanning the backpages of his blog, Shadowplay, looking for more of his addicting prose. He devours books and films with uncommon speed, rarely letting a day pass without an update on what he's been taken with lately. But criticism came after filmmaking. He graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art, where he now teaches. His first film was a short called The Three Hunchbacks, which was the start of his award-laden first career. His 2001 film Cry For Bobo won approximately 23 awards from international film festivals, allowing him to make two more short films, write feature screenplays (one of which has just been produced) and opened the door for "a somewhat unhappy stint in kids' TV." His latest film is Natan, co-directed with Paul Duane, about the defamed innovator/producer Bernard Natan, who was almost single-handedly responsible for buttressing the French film industry after WWI as well as ushering the medium into modernity. Natan's story is incredible and tragic and he and Duane tell it splendidly. On the filmmaking: Paul Duane invited me into Natan since he discovered the story through my blog. Was never sure why he thought he needed me but I did my best to pull my weight.

Natan is just one example of the new, exciting ways Cairns engages with films. On his new foray into documentary and video essays: Through video essays and documentaries I'm now trying to combine the filmmaking and criticism. It's in progress, but shows promise. Needs to get a bit more fictional. He also contributes limericks that summarize films and size up performers at LimerWrecks. He recently studied Citizen Kane extensively, going from point-of-view to point-of-view, sizing up its many virtues in typically unique fashion. For several years he's been writing The Forgotten a now fortnightly column about movies that have fallen into obscurity, where he does some of his best writing. Cairns' writing is ruthlessly smart and dangerously witty; his pans are unparalleled in their mixture of Wilde-worthy bons mot, dark, often sexual humour, cheerful disregard for conventional logic that nods towards surrealism and a directness that can shock. His diction allows for no misinterpretation and often verges on poetic confession, all the better to let the reader into his world. He certainly uses parenthesis better than almost anyone. 

On The Love Parade:
In the film’s most daring number, he laments “But Nobody’s Using it Now,” perhaps the only time in musical history the leading man has been permitted to sing a tender love song (basically) about his own penis. And lubricious Lubitsch slips this, and much else, past those policing the nation’s screens, using the power of suggestion so that he could always blame any perceived salaciousness on the censors’ own dirty minds....Every time Lubitsch scored a hit like this (and he virtually reinvented screen comedy every five years or so), critics and audiences thought he had taken the form as far as it could go, but the best was always yet to come.

On Cinema Circus (a personal favourite -ed.):

Meanwhile, more hideous outsized masks are sported, embodying movie stars too authentically famous to be roped into this sideshow: Clark Gable comes first, Technicolor transforming his latex features to the cyanate blue of the freshly asphyxiated....Eddie Cantor (I think), eyes starting from their spheres in shocked reaction to some unseen cheese-wire garrote....The script, a drunken miscellany churned out with obvious contempt for audience and performers alike, allows for only the most disappointing kind of entertainment. Lee Tracy actually gets laughs, but only when delivering straight lines: whenever forced to deliver some broken-backed pun, he must call on all his reserves of self-belief just to get through it without organ failure. Likewise, the set-up to a tired joke-shop prank involving Jack La Rue and his dates (but not involving the shy baby chimp in Alice Faye's arms: he's just there, for no reason) allows La Rue to display courtly boredom and incomprehension at the serried acrobats displaying overhead, a joy soon fractured by the conscious attempt at humor.... Animatronic clowns, a vast inflatable blimp bestiary, Boris Karloff pumping smoke from his retinas, and Mickey Rooney, perhaps concealing even then, in the back pocket of his gorilla costume, his good-luck photograph of a naked, masturbating Judy Garland (to be revealed, decades later, to a dumbfounded Bruce Dern)... somehow the phantasmagorical, shrill, random and ugly cut-up poetry of the circus ring has been ramped up to a higher pitch of mania.

source: email interview

The '68 Comeback Special: Peppermint Frappé

And so we come to end of this particular experiment, fittingly on one of the more experimental films that played the 1968 Cannes Film Festival. David Cairns and I have now written about every film in competition, re-throwing the cursed Fest in the theatres of our mind. I admit it's tough to feel too bad for Carlos Saura, whose autumnal wet dream Peppermint Frappé is the subject of the final review of the '68 Comeback Special, as he seemed to have a film at every other festival. Pity Geraldine Chaplin who may very well have walked off with Best Actress. She isn't my pick (Lisa Gastoni gets my vote for making that celluloid califig Grazie Zia, a film otherwise barely preferable to suicide, worth watching) but she undoubtedly would have been the talk of the press. She plays two women who have to represent the split halves of a dentist's retarded sexual ideal (Buñuel tried this a decade later in That Obscure Object of Desire, which is less fun, if also less kitschy). She's meek and passive as the dentist's assistant, passionate and unknowable as his friend's lover. She has to be simultaneously hot and cold as the temptress and drowned as the frump; the issue isn't that she's not great, simply that Saura isn't asking all that much of her. Being too afraid to say no on the one hand and on the other so full of sexual energy that you dance spontaneously every few scenes isn't really all that difficult a range to grasp. Saura's probably making a point about the man they orbit, a barely repressed bourgeoise meant as a stand-in for the worst of the Franco-ite Spanish aristocracy, but it does limit Chaplin from really earning best actress, at least to this false juror.

Give Saura this: Chaplin has maybe the best introduction any character's ever been had:

I really do need to watch more of Saura's films. Working under Franco meant masking his rage in symbolism, which makes for fascinating, if occasionally too cool viewing. Cria Cuervos doesn't quite hit me the same way Spirit of the Beehive does. It wasn't until the 80s that he was allowed to make his kind of movie without worrying about an 'editor' standing behind him looking for subtext. The issue then became that his fellow countryman hated what he did with himself after Franco died because the subject matter felt too typically Spanish, or anyway the kind of Spanish Franco wanted from the national artists. Making bold, lusty musicals with a battery of flamenco dancers was seen as regressive and a slap in the face to artists who suffered under Fascism. Poor Saura had been making anti-fascist films the whole time and just wanted to speak above a whisper for once. For what it's worth his interest in song and dance is foregrounded here. As I mentioned Chaplin dances Many many times, with the dentist (played by rather unappealing José Luis López Vázquez) and without. As subtext it doesn't always work but as an opportunity for Saura to freely indulge in something that appealed to him, instead of all the Freudian tiptoeing around the Generalisimo, it's really pretty touching. It excuses more hamfisted skulduggery like when our man makes his lady friend work out in a prototype exercise rowboat. It boggles in the moment but in hindsight it's tough not to smirk at. The incisive and the ridiculous dance almost as much as Chaplin, and it's compelling until you think too hard about it. I might be more fond of his 1960 Cannes entry Los Golfos, a neo realist gang film that meets between Los Olvidados, Rebel Without A Cause and I Vitelloni, but there's no denying the haunting effulgence of Peppermint Frappé.

And it just wouldn't be the '68 Comeback Special if I didn't take a moment to relate Saura's covert politicking with the cancellation of its one outlet. Saura did so much to nestle a potentially dangerous X-Ray of Spanish society into an erotic psychodrama and how did the supposed revolutionaries minding the shop react? By ignoring the possibility that he had anything to say. Infuriating, no? I may have issues with Peppermint Frappé as I did with a lot of the films in competition but they can't compare with my anger at the party who shut down the festival. The movement, spearheaded by established directors, didn't think for a second that the issues plaguing Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, the UK or Spain could meaningfully compete with their experience. A criminal lack of empathy from artists whose filmographies were largely founded on the political and personal problems of middle class white Parisians. That the men who made A Man and a Woman, Elevator To The Gallows, Jules and Jim and Le Chinoise would turn a blind eye to international cinema when it needed most to be seen is all the more disgusting because no one cares or talks about what went missing when the curtains closed. If the festivals showing Jafar Panahi's missives from House Arrest were cancelled, would it be so easy to stay on the side that spoke the loudest? All I hope is that we learn and that in reviewing these films David and I have made you curious enough to seek out this misplaced piece of history. I can't give the festival back to those who needed it: Saura, Jiří Menzel,  Sándor Sára, Albert Finney, Peter Collinson, Menahem Golan, the recently deceased Miklós Jancsó, Kaneto Shindō, Carlo Lizzani, Witold Leszczyński, Bahrudin Čengić, Marcello Fondato or the long gone Mai Zetterling, Valerio Zurlini, Aleksandr Zarkhi and Rudolf Noelte. Nothing can. But we can't let their art vanish. Not again.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Calum Marsh

Calum Marsh

Whether it awakens any inner psychic energies is unclear. But it does, I think, offer a way to the sublime.

Contributed to: Sight & Sound, Esquire, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Film Comment, Maxim Magazine, Cineaste, Little White Lies, Fandor, Hazlit Magazine, Mubi, Slant Magazine, The LA Review of Books, Details, Playboy The Paris Review, Reverse Shot, L Magazine, In Review Online, Film.com.

Noted Champion of: The 'Kim's Video' generation of American Independent Cinema

Though born in Doncaster, England, Calum Marsh (September 24th, 1986-) has spent a lot of his life in Canada. He majored in Film Studies and Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottowa and moved to Toronto in 2012. He wrote about film for many years before turning pro in 2013. On his professional move: "I felt inspired to write criticism after reading Jonathan Rosenbaum's reviews from the Chicago Reader, which he'd been digitizing on his personal website for several years and which for a long I read every day." A free-lancer, his first writing was for In Review Online ("unless you count my brief stint at my college newspaper, The Charlatan: I reviewed [Oliver Stone's] Alexander in 2004") and has since moved onto over a dozen publications. He has little time for expected narrative beats (Fox News called him out for his review of Lone Survivor, in which he bemoaned not only the film's pro-military stance but its reliance on tired, formulaic direction), is unafraid to pick a fight and takes particular glee in standing up for the brave and the bold in independent film. As willing to go to bat for Neveldine/Taylor and John Carpenter as Laz Diaz and Hong Sang-Soo, he loves standing up for the unloved and the undiscovered. In an article on indie actress Kate Lyn Sheil, he pays homage to an entire generation of indie filmmakers including Sophia Takal, Amy Seimetz and Alex Ross Perry, many of whom hung around and worked at Kim's, a landmark New York video store. 

His writing has a swift tempo and twists and turns in a style most redolent of rhythmic gymnastics. You can almost see the words waving like a length of ribbon caught by a strong breeze. 

On Norte, The End of History: 
It's a dark irony of revolutions that those best-educated in their rhetoric are nearly always the least equipped to carry them out; it's rarely in the temperament of the intellectual to take to the streets, however dogmatically he articulates the need to. 

On American Hustle:
Such winking, smirking, spray-tanned pageantry, such bluster, to make a point children understand. So we're all groping toward success with a fake name and a bad perm — but this is merely thesis-as-insulation against the obvious criticism, which is that the filmmaking itself is phony. Comparing this even unfavorably to Scorsese is too high a compliment. This isn't second-rate Goodfellas; it's second-rate The Cooler. This trifle, this trash, is what we're choosing to laud now? 

On Upstream Color:
It's taken nine years for Carruth to follow up on the promise of his byzantine debut, during which time he might have penned a nesting-doll epic so structurally elaborate that it couldn't be parsed without recourse to diagrammatic analysis—a practice in which Carruth's admirers would no doubt happily indulge. 

Influences: Other than Rosenbaum, "I read Ebert with some regularity in college but otherwise felt drawn more to literary and cultural critics -- Martin Amis and John Updike, especially. I subscribed for several years to The New Yorker, which I think probably shaped my style more than anything else. I am a voracious reader of fiction and have a longstanding interest in art history."

Source: Email interview

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams

....I knew there was a personality making those movies, and was instantly attracted to it.

Contributed to: Comics Journal, L Magazine, Slant Magazine, The AV Club, Esquire, Rogerebert.com, Press Play, Village Voice, The New York Press, Extended Cut.

Noted champion of: Paolo Sorrentino, Southland Tales, John Boorman, Spike Lee, Paul Verhoeven, David Cronenberg, Johnnie To, Roman Polanski.

Influences: Elvis Mitchell, Harlan Ellison, J. Hoberman.

Queens-born Simon Abrams (January 24th, 1987-) started writing for The Comics Journal before he'd graduated High School. His break-through came when he ran a cover story on Robert Kirkman before The Walking Dead TV show based on his graphic novels had aired. He wrote his first film reviews for Washington Square News and The New York Press before moving onto Slant, L Magazine and many others. Abrams currently writes for Rogerebert.com, Esquire and The Village Voice. He confidently stands up for loud and charismatic voices behind the camera like Paul Verhoeven and Spike Lee. On that score he very recently published an in-depth look at the making of RoboCop for Esquire Magazine and an interview with father and son genre directors John & Peter Hyams for The Village Voice. He doesn't suffer mediocrity gladly and is quick to cut pretenders to horror/cult infamy down to size in singularly playful fashion. That same ruthless and efficient prose is equally as engrossing when standing up for his idea of a modern masterpiece.

On You're Next:
Watching "You're Next" is like eating a tin-foil-wrapped tray of leftovers. It's a hamburger, so you shouldn't expect steak. But the contents of your tray are: a half-eaten, microwave-nuked cheeseburger; leaves of wilting, translucent lettuce; slices of yellowing, sickly tomato; and floppy, soggy french fries. Consuming this product is not entirely unpleasant since it's almost impossible to screw up such a short order...It looks like what you ordered, but it's only satisfying if you settle for much less.

On Drug War:
That ambiguity is what fuels "Drug War": there is no deal with unbreakable rules because every deal is brokered and decided on a whim. To's films are usually about macho, playful contests of wills. "Drug War" is no exception. Cops and the crooks constantly try to one up each other, as in an unsettling scene where Zhang, while undercover, has to prove his false identity by snorting cocaine. Each encounter hinges on characters' tics, like the habitual, mirthless laugh Zhang adopts in order to mimic a crook's mannerisms. In To's movies, everything's a game, and the game in "Drug War" is high-stakes poker where everyone bluffs as much as they can afford to.

source: twitter interview

True Detective: “The Secret Fate of All Life”

Fox Johnson on Episode 5 of True Detective

I had incorrectly assumed that after last week’s action packed ending sequence we’d tone things down for a while. Instead this week’s episode picks up only a few hours after the last episode. This is sort of reassuring in a series that jumps around so much and plays with time so loosely. And much like the quick pick up from last week we return to a series that has decided it’s time to utilize violence to tell its story. “Who Goes There” was absolutely a turning point for True Detective and “The Secret Fate of All Life” plays more like a sequel to that episode rather than just the next one in sequence. 

True Detective is rapidly becoming a show that has made its business blowing minds. But rather than ending episodes with cliffhangers it instead throws wrenches into every possible gear to throw off its viewers. It has self-appointed itself a series that attempts to emulate the experience of following a twisting turning murder case. Sixteen minutes into this episode we find ourselves in familiar territory. We’ve found Reggie LeDoux and have reached the point where a promised gun battle will commence. And then, just like that, it doesn’t. Hart and Cohle’s present day narration describes an intense and disorienting gunfight. Meanwhile, we watch as the ’95 Hart and Cohle sneak swiftly into LeDoux’s compound and capture him without so much as a punch thrown. But why would these men lie? And not just lying off the cuff. They’ve got a practiced corroborating story of the events that unfolded. So while you watch two men capture the man they’ve been chasing since the series began, we can’t imagine what could cause them to lie about it. Then Hart blows off half of LeDoux’s face. Two children, a dead boy and a live girl, are recovered from LeDoux’s compound and very suddenly the central case of True Detective is over.

Well, not really. The series jumps into the early 2000’s. Hart and Cohle are promoted and decorated and have moved on to other things. Though just as soon as we’re caught up on current events an interrogation of Cohle’s goes south and he begins to think they never caught the real killer. So without really being given a chance to breathe, we’re thrust once again into a now even more terrifying murder case. The Killing tried this same method in all three of its seasons. They’ve answered questions with more questions. Luckily Nic Pizzolatto does a much better job of holding it all together by having almost every event that unfolds call back to lines and twists earlier episodes. And I’m always game anytime anyone wants to nod toward Twin Peaks.

And once more we’re forced to think about True Detective’s characters, though forced isn't the right word. It’s a genuine pleasure to have a break in the action to think about these two men even further. Especially now that we know each one’s own version of justice and that they’re willing to flat out lie to preserve it. The beauty here is that this series has been playing this game all along. True Detective’s tension doesn’t come from nail biting, white knuckled scenes but instead from the knowledge that no matter what we know about someone there is always a distinct and very real possibility that lurking behind the felled monster is an even darker threat.

And that is exactly what this series has been trying to say this entire time. The killer is dispatched yet he never goes away. We hear a couple of characters liken existence to a flat circle. The idea that no matter what happens, no matter how many children’s lives are spared from rape and murder, it will absolutely happen again. This idea is the secret fate of the title and it fills Rust and Marty, not to mention the audience, with a cringe-inducing sense of doubt. Even as this comes on as some kind of stunning revelation it's disturbingly familiar. Of course LeDoux wasn’t the guy. Why should he be? The show isn’t over so of course no one is out of the woods yet. Instead it sounds like we’ve traded up. Now we’ve got a killer with the handle “The Yellow King” to contend with. And even though the episode doesn’t end with another killer long take action sequence it still moves toward its credits with a lot of momentum because now they’ve got us hooked. LeDoux was our focus for four episodes (and sixteen minutes) and now that he’s out of the way, the real chase can begin.

In Twin Peaks David Lynch and Mark Frost revealed their killer in the middle of their series (though not quite the middle of an episode like True). But where these two series differ, apart from the obvious, is that Rust Cohle is not Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper. He’s an easy target because of his nature and this is exactly where police take this outstanding case after over a decade of investigations. Rust becomes the prime suspect. And after what we’ve seen tonight, why not? He restaged a crime scene with thought and precision. And he did it quickly.  With all of True Detective’s references to the circular nature of everything it isn’t out of the question to think that perhaps we’re being given details about these men at different points in their lives because ultimately time isn’t a factor. If they do it once, they’ll do it again. And who knows? Maybe the “first” time we see them do something isn’t truly the first.

Rather than try to jam it into my article I’ll let Michael M. Hughes do more talking about The Yellow King. He wrote a fantastic article on this and it's driven me absolutely mad with questions. Sometimes obsession is a good thing.

True Detective: Who Goes There

The latest on HBO's True Detective from Tucker 'Fox' Johnson

Typically when I write these articles I’m actually writing while watching. This week however, I went into “Who Goes There” with my laptop firmly closed on my coffee table. I have my coworkers to blame or maybe thank for the focus I put into watching episode four of True Detective. Watching any show these days results in having to run the spoiler gauntlet the day after. Luckily for me only two people who I actually see on a daily basis pay attention to this series and both of them had nothing but dropped jaws as takeaways from the episode they’d seen the night before. This is always a good sign. Especially when entering an episode that has to pick up with the freeze frame ending that concluded “The Locked Room” and has thoroughly haunted my nightmares for the last two weeks.

“Who Goes There” is uncompromising. Not one thing happens in this hour of television that could be considered positive. But what occurs between the lines in this outing is a completely different story. Rust and Marty begin to find common ground with one another but at the same time the lines between them and the men they’re chasing begin to blur. The episode opens with the two interrogating a prisoner in a holding cell. The scene unfolds in the expected ways though by the end Marty is sitting next to the prisoner staring across the room at Rust while they discuss how having someone around constantly spouting crazy gibberish is enough to drive any man to bad behavior. It's a joke but the blocking pushes it into the realm of the serious and with some simple positioning we begin an episode that really starts to peel back the layers on Rust and Marty’s relationship, in a way that is rarely seen on TV. When Marty’s wife leaves him he’s distraught. So much so that he confronts her at the hospital where she works and has no problem making a scene in an attempt to win her back. Rust intervenes and takes Marty to a bar to cool off. And this is where the curve ball comes. Instead of learning something new about Rust as he opens up to Marty about a similar experience he once had we get Rust shutting Marty down. Marty wants nothing more than the wallow in his lost love and Rust will hear none of it. Instead he pushes focus to the task at hand: catching the star of last week's freeze frame Reggie Ledoux. 

Film and television are great arenas for obsession. Both mediums allow for it to mount within a character’s mind and consume their lives in a matter of a few hours or even minutes. True Detective doesn’t slouch when it faces obsession. Its depiction is the clearest I think I’ve ever seen. Rust is obsessed. But not with catching Ledoux or even being a cop. He’s obsessed with confirming all the pessimism about humanity he’s been rattling off since the outset. He goes off the reservation about as quickly as anyone could with the idea of resuming his undercover behavior that’s really only been hinted at so far. He’s excited when he sits there injecting cayenne pepper and ink into his arm to simulate tract marks. Playing a part and escaping himself, even if into the role of a violent junkie persona, is enticing to Rust. It becomes a fix for him. And it became a fix for me too. Throughout film school I was constantly told by professors to show, not tell. Film is a visual medium so take advantage of it. Well we get that here. Rust’s little box of toys is a goosebump-inspiring way of learning about his past. Automatic weapons and liquor aren’t anything out of the ordinary on television but here they echo loudly and proudly from this character’s past and I want to know every tiny detail. But writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto doesn’t falter. He stays true to his plan for telling the story of these two men and never gives you any more about them than he deems necessary.

Aside from the Rust’s obsession we see another kind of mania and that comes in the form of these two men’s passions for their jobs. By the forty-minute mark Rust and Marty are completely over each other. But they put their personal problems aside for the good of their partnership. This kind of relationship rings so true to me and it's unique to the medium. Like so much else in this series, it's refreshing.

And speaking of, “Who Goes There” provides something completely new to the series: Action. But it's not at all what we’ve been conditioned to expect. After both Marty and Rust chastise their interviewers for never having been in a real gun fight I went into this episode thinking I was about to see a protracted fire fight between two cops and their suspect. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead of a quickly cut, shaky cam shootout we got something much more interesting. A six-minute unbroken tracking shot following Rust as he enters a stash house, winds up on the wrong side of an already bad situation and has to make his way out of a neighborhood, the entire population of which is closing in around him. The sequence sustains a tension rarely seen on procedural television and it does so even while surrounding Rust with the chaos he keeps talking about. Series cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, who also shot the fabulous Top of the Lake, works magic augmenting Cary Fukunaga’s direction. Together they managed to block an incredibly complex sequence that keeps Rust as close to the lens as possible. Because of this, we’re actually a step behind the detective. He’s seeing threats even before we are and when the camera finally allows us to see what he’s already dealing with our brains furiously try to catch up. It’s a great way to make a sequence that much more tense for an audience who had no idea what they were getting themselves into. 

The majority of water cooler chit chat about “Who Goes There” will revolve around the tracking shot in the concluding minutes of the episode. And with good reason. But it should do nothing to lessen how powerful the new information we learn about Rust is. He’s rapidly become the most interesting man on television. I just pray the ends justifies the means.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Neil Young

Neil Young

I know Cosmopolis rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and left many cold — which is part of why I like it.

Known for: The website Jigsaw Lounge, Odds calculating.

Noted champion of: Project X, Stray Dogs, James Benning, Dude, Where's My Car?, Alexey Balabanov, Stray Dogs, Dennis Iliadis.

Contributed to: The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out London, The Independent, Jigsaw Lounge, A Love Supreme, Tribune, IndieWire, Sight & Sound, Mubi Notebook, BBC Radio, City Life, KINO!

Influences: An avid film-watcher from a very early age, with a particular youthful fondness for the horror films shown at weekends on British television, Young cites as key formative influences Alan Frank (Horror Films), Danny Peary (Guide for the Film Fanatic) and the collections by Pauline Kael. Other writers he points to as particularly inspiring examples include James Agee, Graham Greene and Manny Farber. Among current critics he singles out Mike D'Angelo, Michael Sicinski, Michael Pattison and Seattle's enigmatic 'Vern'. 

Easington-born, Sunderland-based Neil Young (March 5, 1971-) boasts an unorthodox background for a professional film-critic, having been employed as an official Handicapper in British flat horse-racing for 15 seasons from 1996 to 2011. Originally trained as a news reporter, he was, however, constantly writing throughout this period, initially on soccer for fan-magazine A Love Supreme and then somewhat belatedly turning his hand to film-reviews. In 2000 at the age of 29 he wrote his first reviews for the website Jigsaw Lounge (which he co-founded with Adam Maxwell), then on a paid basis for City Life in Manchester, The Independent and Time Out, both in London.

After occasional visits to British film festivals, starting in 1993, he discovered their overseas equivalents in 2001 thanks to a trip to the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia, and has since then attended well over 100 "foreign" festivals. In 2005, he started contributing on a weekly basis to the long-running British political magazine Tribune and since 2008 has been a regular reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter, often covering relatively marginal or esoteric fare for the Los Angeles-based trade magazine and contributing to the "dailies" from Berlin and Cannes.

In addition to his cinema-related journalism, he has directed a pair of mid-length experimental documentaries (Rostropovich at Tsukiji and Superflex November, both 2008) and works as a programmer and consultant for several European festivals including the Viennale. Since 2011 he has been Co-Director of the Bradford International Film Festival at the UK's National Media Museum. In 2013, he served on the jury of the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes. In 2013, he served on the jury of the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes. For the major European festivals - in a hark-back to his former métier - he provides informative betting-odds on Jigsaw Lounge for the major categories, and usually has the prize-winners among the first two or three contenders in their category.

A semi-regular contributor to BBC radio in Newcastle, he has written articles and festival reports for IndieWire, Sight & Sound, and Ljubljana periodical KINO!, and has long been particularly noted as a vociferous champion of American experimental director James Benning. His defence of such apparently "maudit" mainstream-oriented fare as Jeepers Creepers, Dude, Where's My Car? and Project X has, however, often proved more controversial among colleagues.

On The Last House On The Left:

By my reckoning, this is not only the best horror-film from any country since Satan (aka Sheitan, Kim Chapiron's berserk stew of diabolism and multi-ethnic banlieue horniness, shown at a single London cinema for a fleeting handful of screenings back in 2007) but is, as of the mid-summer mid-point of 2009, the most impressive new feature to obtain distribution in this country. 

Despite mixed-to-negative reviews in the mainstream Stateside press, several reliable observers did give advance warning that this new Last House was a pleasant surprise in terms of its merit. Though the subject-matter (rape, murder, homicidal revenge) is, as with the Craven antecedent, decidedly, relentlessly and harrowingly unpleasant.

source: Nicholas Arcane

Accident Art: The Ugly Swans

The Ugly Swans by Konstantin Lopushansky. Cinematography by Vladislav Gurtchin. Art direction by  Viktor Ivanov and Konstantin Pakhotin.

It was the best of times, it was 1968.

Over at Shadowplay, you'll find, next to a eulogy for Shirley Temple, David Cairns' latest issue of our '68 Comeback Special. This week he's got Jiří Menzel's Capricious Summer, a thing of aimless, ageless beauty. I fell hard for this film when I bought Criterion's Czech New-Wave boxset a few years ago. After the rich, politically charged farce of Closely Watched Trains, Menzel rightly felt he deserved a break from such serious cinema. Or rather, tension and plotting so fab, it plays like a splendid high-wire act. What better way to celebrate than with an actual high-wire act? Capricious Summer is about a group of men bewitched in different ways by the appearance of a magician, or rather, his voluptuous assistant. Its pleasures are myriad. Jana Preissová, the assistant, is one of the screen's most lithe and enduring sirens (Menzel sure had an eye. Try not to bond for life with Closely Watched Trains' naughty telegraphist played by Jitka Zelenohorská, whose only fault is that her name isn't Jitka Bendová like I thought it was. To be famous for having a pervy station agent stamp your butt in one of the most erotic scenes in history, you couldn't have a better name than Bendová. Alas...). 

Preissová does little but walk about collecting donations in an orange leotard and black face mask, but she's the kind of beauty you feel you've known all your life. Unsurprisingly, the three men at the heart of the story fall madly in lust with her. Watching her perform a pantomime of the high wire act in form-fitting pink cloth jumpsuit is unspeakably sensual. Watching the men watching her is an immense joy. Menzel works wonders with hidden depths. What looks like an attempted rape ends in an unexpected nap; the look on Preissová's face when she realizes what's happened is almost enough to give this film the top prize. But charming enchantments like this are rarely the sort of film that net fancy awards, for which the world is a shameful place sometimes. It's tempting to want to give Rudolf Hrusínský best actor or split the actress prize between Míla Myslíková and Preissová, for representing the problems of need vs. want so splendidly, but that prize would have to rest in Menzel's hands, who draws out their essence like a sorcerer. Hrusínský doesn't appear to have a great deal of range, playing sad, flummoxed and angry and sort of shuffling through every frame, but Menzel fits him in a world of such faded splendor, that he appears to have the dynamism of Brando at his best. And the women don't do quite enough to earn the prize, but Menzel projects them onto this backdrop in a way that renders them earthbound angels. And that is rather the heart of Capricious Summer. When you are a sad man with no ambition, a beautiful woman can be the most important thing in the world for a short time, even if your wife is, for all intents and purposes, perfect for you. On a more personal note, I cribbed a little from Capricious Summer when I made my film House of Little Deaths. I was totally in love with the way Menzel filmed his enchantress and tried to take a little of that magic for myself. That film has yet to be seen by a large audience, but here's a little look (best I could do on short notice) at what I was up to and how much I love this magical little movie. 

Kipling's Nightmare

The only thing worth remembering about Zulu Dawn is in its closing minutes. A warning is issued about what comes of Colonialism and the triumphant Zulu warriors sing as they walk away from a day full of bloodshed and arrogance. The chant, an exuberant victory cry, is infectious. It hints at a culture capable of great beauty and community, which goes some way toward thwarting the film's depiction of the Zulus as violent and unknowable. The other. Even if the villains are the un-empathetic British, as represented by sweltering, loathsome Peter O'Toole, the Zulus are never more than abstract. What colonialists always fail to recognize is that once you call a land home, no force on heaven or earth can change that. The music that serves as a coda to wholesale slaughter is a haunting reminder of spiritual ownership. Natal belongs to the Zulu (as Vietnam did to the Vietnamese) just as this song could come from the mouths of any other civilization. The film falters for a number of reasons, but not giving the Zulu a point of view, or even much screen time before they start taking back the land from the hopelessly ill-prepared British is one of its biggest. It wants to sympathize with them, but that's beyond the film's limited means. It fails to realize that Cy Endfield's Zulu had already quietly done that.

Not that anything else about Zulu is quiet. From John Barry's menacing, insistent march to the sounds of crackling rifles echoing through the arid planes of Rorke's Drift, Zulu plays heavy on the ears. Until this moment in art history, white audiences will have read about the faraway corners of 'darkest Africa' in Kipling and Conrad and seen it in photographs, but never before could they hear the sound of Africa. The film that kicked off the 50s 3D boom was a jungle-bound adventure about rogue lions called Bwana Devil. Having your personal space invaded by big cats was a strong enough advertisement for the technology that it carried the idea into craze territory (that they represent Africa, barging into the American movie house, a heretofore safe, white space, must have been equal parts enticing and terrifying). Kipling would surely have approved. It turned fear into a carnival ride and a continent into a sideshow stage. The narrative was for the taking and Africa could replace the old west as the white man's new frontier. After Zulu, films like Cornel Wilde's survival horror The Naked Prey, itself based on a tale originally concerning Blackfoot Native Americans, become possible (Imagine studios allowing that to be shot in 3D). If Zulu Dawn is the ugly, artless antithesis of the idea of Africa as a white man's sandbox (it almost feels like Italian exploitation, with its aimless miserabilism and grey direction), Zulu is a compromise, trying to respect both sides of an intractable conflict, trying to understand a whole host of national mindsets. Besides the Zulu warriors whose chief subscribes to notions of pride and fair play, there are Swedish missionaries, the wounded swiss corporal in the Natal Native Contingent, the Boer advisor who helps the British understand their Zulu enemies, and the Welsh and English men who make up the regiment. The Welsh look down on the Swiss and the English, who piss right back at the Welsh. And among the whites only the Boer considers the Zulus smart enough to be the formidable adversary they are. The Boer officer seems to understand that his hatreds are out of his hands, making him the most stubborn party. The missionaries are meant to be the voice of reason, of conscientiousness. They're dismissed not long after the fighting starts. There is no place for reason at Rorke's Drift, which quickly becomes host to a cacophonous din of violence and disarray. 

Which may account for a Swedish man of god being played by English man of drink Jack Hawkins. Hired no doubt because of the chapped velvet tenor of his voice, Hawkins begins calm but shaky, whispering to daughter Ulla Jacopson of the Zulu: "They are a great people," completely unaware that he's giving everyone the benefit of a doubt they haven't asked for. As he slowly realizes that neither the English nor the Africans will relent, he shouts into the howling wind, growing more desperate and drunk by the moment. The other voice of dissent comes from cock-eyed surgeon Patrick Magee, who takes particular glee in dressing down his charges. War is a disgusting business and he sees the officers as pigs splashing around in the muck of human failure. His slithering diction has stayed with me since childhood "Damn you Chard! And all you butchers!" his Northern Irish brogue drying out his 'R's and elongating his 'U's. Their voices together share the same qualities as the soil, as obverses Welsh private Thomas, "No moisture in it, nothing to hold a man in his grave." No surprise that their words aren't heeded. Thomas and private Owen (Neil McCarthy and Ivor Emmanuel) are the leaders of the soldiers' choir, and their dulcet harmonies stand in sharpest contrast to the sounds of war. They will be called upon to lead the men in song in defiance of the Zulu's war chant just as the light of a new day hits the combatants. The irony is that it'd take a true lack of imagination to prefer the Welsh song to that of the Zulu. 

That sound, that beautiful chanting, will likely stay with most viewers after every other detail has faded. It sounds like nothing else on earth, though the band TV On The Radio, keen-eared students of African music, have come close to achieving the peculiar tumbling whirlwind of voices. There is real power in these men coming in contact with this music, aware that the sound will be thrice as frightening to men who have no point of reference for melodies like this. It sounds alien to us because we hear it as they would. Endfield presents the incantations of the Zulus as possessing an otherworldly power, a sign of awed respect. In its opening moments we get the full majesty of Barry's score, which gives way to a familiar English (though technically Welsh) speaker: Richard Burton, patron saint of the theatre. With perfect diction and that irresistible, tightly coiled voice he informs us of the outcome of the battle of Isandlwana but he's drowned out by the sound of the aftermath. Then the Zulu singing overwhelms even that. Their song is the spirit of Natal itself and it hides in the hills. Jacobson will lose herself listening to it, completely unprepared for the overwhelming power and earthy sensuous it has. It represents a break from every myth she was told growing up with a priest for a dad. Their percussion, a ghostly rattling of spears against shields will announce the Zulu's approach before their astonishing first appearance, coating most of the skyline with their impressive numbers. A display that would shake any colonial dreamer to his core. It's the sound of the land saying "no". Kipling was in South Africa during the Boer War and wrote Poetry in favor of the Brits. Oh to have placed him within earshot of the rattling and singing. The warriors are coded with the same menace as the giant ants of THEM! or the distant drummers of I Walked With A Zombie and they are suitably terrifying when they first appear rattling their weapons up close like a thousand intruders knocking on the door. Endfield's respect for their intimidation tactics is palpable. The song starts next, one man leading and the rest responding in shocking rapidity. Their voices cut through the air like a hatchet. That they're just a decoy is all part of the plan. 

"I rather fancy that he's nobody's son and heir now." There is no honor in dying in Zulu, just as in reality many of those involved never benefited from being given the Victoria Cross. In perhaps the cruelest instance the swiss Corporal Ferdinand Schiess in reality died on a barge back from South Africa after this incident and was buried at sea. The film needs to hold onto a modicum of romance and so spares us the worst of the tragedy of Rorke's Drift without losing the big picture. The British who have second thoughts about fighting, like the buffoonish cook, are killed first. It's still a fairly vicious worldview, but if you play with fire you can't drop the match on the rug. Never underestimate your opponent. That's the movie's overwhelming theme. The constant refrain, with some variation, "We'll make an Englishmen of you yet." Once the British stop trying to pretend they can change anyone's mind, and stop using that phrase, they fare much better. Its final use, in a raid on the sickbay so tense that it still makes me hold my breath, erases any lingering sense of pride in the uniform or the crown. The Zulu are too fiercesome to be cowed, to be converted. All these men can do is respect their might. Ditto Lieutenants Chard (Stanley Baker, his deep set eyes borrowed from some bird of prey) and Bromhead ("Introducing Michael Caine," fully formed), who start at loggerheads trying to determine who should lead the defenses. Chard resents Bromhead's privelege (Caine runs perfectly, as if swaddled in bearer bonds as a child instead of blankets), Bromhead Chard's brusqueness. They drop their pretenses and prejudices when the shooting starts. What the British have to do is find their own harmony to sing in. It isn't the singing of the early dawn choir that saves them, it's the shouting of Bromhead and Chard signaling the synchronized firing of their men, a strategy that undoubtedly saves their lives. Caine and Baker's voices propel through the sound of the zulu chanting to announce the next volley of gunfire. "Front Rank! Fire!" "Free rank! Fire!" "Fire." Caine's phlegmy howl and Baker's hoarse two-tone, wildly different war cries, working in time with the sound of gunfire. It's only this song that forces the chief of the Zulu to stop underestimating the small contingent of men who stood up to him. His reply is one final song of salutation, a sign of respect. And that in the end is all anyone in Endfield's world seeks. Endfield withholds judgment on these men until the final minutes, just like the chief. Their pettiness and pride will cost lives, perhaps their own. Endfield finds them at their lowest, too tired to indulge in their worst habits, framed in a burnt-down hospital in a composition that outstrips the best of The Searchers. They're awaiting what their enemy will do next, unable to give themselves credit for what they've accomplished. It is only here that they can be rewarded, when they're incapable of considering such an outcome. This is why Zulu endears. It rewards selflessness, cooperation and respect above patriotism. The sound of men trusting each other to survive rings in your ears. The rest is just noise. 

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay

Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors, endowers of exquisite films, sects using special motion pictures for a predetermined end, all you who are taking the work as a sacred trust, I bid you God-speed.

Known For: Art of the Moving Picture (1915)

Noted Champion of: Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 

A poet and performance artist known as the 'Prairie Troubador', Springfield, Illinois-born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (November 10, 1879 – December 5, 1931) came to criticism in the middle of an illustrious career that is rumoured to have included discovering Langston Hughes. He read film reviews in magazines and journals and was conversant with popular criticism in his writing, mentioning its style in his book Art of the Moving Picture. According to critic Stanley Kauffman, Lindsay saw motion pictures as a 'Key moment in Human Consciousness.' He compared film to paintings and saw great beauty and potential in what they could achieve, predicting that in time they'd be as revered as any painting, "a permanent addition to the
household gods." Sensing he was among the first people to make analyze film in the manner of other art critics, he took great delight in appraising its artists. 

On D.W. Griffith: 
[he] is, in Intolerance, the ungrammatical Byron of the films, but certainly as magnificent as Byron...The only real war that has occurred in the films with the world's greatest war going on outside was Griffith's War Against Babylon. The rest was news.

On The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: 
The furniture, trappings, and inventions are in motion to express the haunted mind... Caligari is undoubtedly the most important imported film since that work of D'Annunzio, Cabiria...compare The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a book of Rackham or Du Lac or Dürer, or Rembrandt's etchings, and Dr. Caligari is more realistic. And [George William, Director of the Denver Art Association, and a close friend of Lindsay's] Eggers insists the whole film is replete with suggestions of the work of Pieter Breughel, the painter. Hundreds of indoor stories will be along such lines, once the merely commercial motive is eliminated, and the artist is set free.

Sources: For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, 2009, dir: Gerald Peary

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13029

The '68 Comeback Special: The Red & The White

I've been a little paralyzed lately. Great people, artists we'll never see the likes of again, keep dying. I've spent the last few days just staring into the middle distance, unable to speak coherently about the losses. Everything that can or should be said about Philip Seymour Hoffman has been said, and a good deal more besides. Many of us didn't expect to be hit this hard, but the loss is indescribable. We knew him, or anyway, we felt like we did. He was too good, at once untouchable and one of us. A revisit to The Master reveals less a movie than a spell cast upon the audience by Hoffman's self-made oligarch, all vices and flaws that we forgive because it's a pleasure to be in his presence. Sadness hiding confidence, the need to cast aside everything just to remember what real friendship feels like. He was more than an actor to many people. He was a whole cast of alluring acquaintances we wanted as friends and relatives. The best artists don't just create movies or performances, they tear a hole in reality and set up fictive constructions big enough to live in. They build houses for us to live in for the length of a film. Every decision builds ten years of life and experience for a character until we know everything we should know about them. Whole lives can be lived in two hours if the performance is good enough. Philip Seymour Hoffman was always that good. And as crushing, as unthinkable, as torturous as it is to deal with his death, it happened to come in a tidal wave of misery that also claimed the lives of Arthur Rankin Jr., Maximilian Schell, Eduardo Coutinho and Miklós Janscó. How are we supposed to soldier on after this last weekend? 

Miklós Janscó was a Hungarian director born in 1921, and if you know his name it's probably because of the higher-profile of two films he had in competition at the ill-starred 1968 Cannes Film Festival, The Red & The White. The other film, The Confrontation, may not be as monumental an achievement as its more famous brother, but it is a dazzlingly built delight. It's little wonder Janscó was the only director to ever compete against himself at the famed festival. No one ever talks about that, for some reason… Hardly anyone talks about Janscó at all. The Red & The White is an inarguable masterpiece, and yet his influence on contemporary cinema is rarely remarked upon. Watch a few of his films in a row and you can see directors entire canons springing in the wake of a couple of elegantly choreographed long takes. Béla Tarr here, Theo Angelopoulos there, Von Trier, Jodorowsky, the Peter Greenaway of The Baby of Mâcon, the Gerardo Naranjo of Miss Bala.

Jean Renoir once said that a director really only makes one film, each entry in a canon just a piece of the same puzzle. For Janscó, that film was The Red & The White, and everything else was a new interpretation of any given scene or idea from his 1967 masterpiece, chased down a new road. He was an old school auteur, each frame, each tracking shot's steadfast commitment to the fleet of dancing performers, were entirely and indisputably his. And though he traveled to France, Italy, Greece and Russia he never really left Hungary, just as he was always telling the story of a forgotten peasant class. His aim was to let the plight of the oppressed be heard through violent uprising, chanting, song, and eye-catching group dances. His films more often resembled ballet than traditionally cinematic antiwar narratives. He frequently put the lie to the "no such thing as an antiwar movie" fallacy. He rarely used squibs, or fake blood of any kind. Characters simply slump over and play dead, which is somehow more frustrating and stinging than if they exploded with some of Peckinpah's Kensington gore. He kills characters we like and whose good intentions he believes. The sound of gunfire, the flight of their abandoned bodies from the frame, and the camera glides over the spot, their lives edited out in camera. He pursued the idea of death with the rigorousness of Ingmar Bergman, though with a more firm sense of play. In his TV movie The Tyrant's Heart, a very theatrical work of myth-making, a character kills himself with a knife; then apologizes to the audience for having forgotten the fake blood. He never delighted in violence, and wanted to offer sympathetic viewers a safe place to contemplate his life's work. 

Though his break through was the very excellent The Round Up, a drama of persecution that looked to have been committed to limestone, The Red & The White is his stylistic gauntlet. Politically Janscó never veered too far from The Round-Up, in which Austrian forces torturing Hungarian guerrillas until they give up their leader, but he found himself when he made The Red & The White. Even if it were the first film in his oeuvre that you encounter (as I suspect is common) the sense of an artist freeing himself from all non essential grammar and forging a brand new path comes across with the directness of a shot of Vodka. The confidence with which he articulates his newfound language is deeply attractive. The film concerns opposing forces during the 1919 communist uprising in Russia. Hungarians and Bolsheviks joins forces against the czarists and a bloody struggle ensued. Janscó s biggest revelation was that in depicting warfare in order to make your way to the heart of war itself you must deliberately lose track of who's fighting who. All that remains is the fact of killing, the feeling of perverted order and chaos against all. You're meant to become a buoy floating between islands, uncertain who's who and what they're fighting for. There are no statements of purpose, no politicking. There are speeches, but they're callous, self-aggrandizing and almost abstract. How then could anyone glory in warfare if the only feeling the director allows us is bewilderment and loss? Of identity, of coherence, of so much life. He also discovered brilliantly choreographed long takes, which would become his stock-in-trade. You begin searching for the seams because too much happens in the takes for it to be reasonable that they worked all this out beforehand, but they did. Every time. Winter Wind, his follow-up to the defeat at Cannes, is 80 minutes long and features not many more than a dozen takes. In The Red & The White wins many small victories throughout by staging surreal dances in a wooded clearing and introducing faces we're drawn to, only to do away with them. One bathetic murder after another; it would all be too much if Janscó weren't one of the best directors alive. His sensitivity remains, not to mention his interest in theatrical superimpositions over his predominantly natural storytelling. Between the military actions where the warring sides keep experiencing reversals of favor, there are many haunting interludes like the dance in the forest, a sexual assault in a hospital, a nurse's distraction as troops arrive near a river. The warfare was set dressing and his disdain for on screen violence for its own sale lets him have his cake and eat it too. All in all, a completely bewitching exercise in the deflation of many of man's favourite lies. 

War is a man's game and Janscó refused to play it. He had for more sympathy for women and his films are lousy with earth mothers. Women who refused to be victims in a culture filled with men killing each other for ideologies they seemed to invent on the fly. Men see double crosses and conspiracy everywhere. Women are above petty suspicions. Though the nurses of The Red & The White are beguiling, strong women who are far more compelling than the male combatants, Janscó s strongest female character is the heroine of his 1974 Elektra, My Love. A post-modern restating (here Antonioni discovers many new tools: slow-motion, painted bodies, a more geometric and fanciful sense of composition to build into his famed tracking shots) of greek tragedy, it shows Elektra as a world-weary pragmatist. "I won't kill you," she says to her adversary the king, "for another will just replace you." She is never hysterical, never mocked, resigned to always being right and never being allowed to prove it. That is Janscó s underlying theme, in a nutshell. Machinations grind up the land, tyrants kill with purpose and at random and those who want the best for the people are never given the opportunity to do anything about it. Power and corruption always get in the way. After the bold, colourful The Confrontation, he kept right on working and his pace didn't markedly slow until the late 80s. In the wake of The Red & The White he had as fruitful a period of invention as Jean-Luc Godard in the 60s. Winter Wind followed mere months later, about a terrorist cell made up of Balkan agitators assisting in the assassination of French leaders. It trades The Confrontation's primary colors for drab browns and greys, the much bleaker story calling for a reduction in wonderment. It's a tug-of-war between the interests of 'the party' and sympathy for the individual, and in the mise-en-scene between unforgiving snowy zones of combat and the almost womb-like interior spaces of the barracks. Here tenderness is met with violence. Marina Vlady's conspirator keeps attempting some kind of intimate communication with a woman she hopes to keep alive, but something always interrupts her. It's a film of great mystery and one that hints at the impossibility of peace and piece of mind when you've decided to take your country's fate in your hands. 

I'm tempted to go film by film, give Janscó the proper eulogy he so richly warrants. He was after all still making films as late as 2012, at age 90, but how would we know that? He'd been all but abandoned by world cinema's tastemakers. I know for sure that I'm done making excuses for Truffaut and Godard at the '68 Cannes Film Festival. Their outrage at the firing of Henri Langlois didn't warrant them keeping works of genius from finding an audience. Janscó deserved better. He was totally committed to his definition of cinema, never giving an inch, even when given bigger budgets and access to big names. He made modern audiences come to him, rather than the other way around. He did everything, musicals, comedies, you name it. In 1971 Carlo Ponti brought him to Italy to make The Pacifist with Monica Vitti, looking for someone to fill Michelangelo Antonioni's shoes after he departed to make Zabriskie Point and The Passenger. Between the master's muse Vitti and Carlo Di Palma, Antonioni's cinematographer, with him at the helm, Janscó's images have a pastel-hued rigidity that brings bourgeoise excess and middle-class guilt, not to mention the vulpine features of his star, into sharp focus. Vitti meets angular naif Pierre Clementi and they instantly revert to a past connection they shared, only to have him taken from her by a gang of tough-as-nails karate enthusiasts who've been on a violence spree in her city. It's entirely an exercise, and his long-takes get claustrophobic in chic Italian residences, but it does feature the typically Janscóian phrase "we have to make noise to be heard," and a very different Vitti than we'd ever seen. She's an adorable wreck, far closer to today's manic pixie dream girls than her typically steely ennui sufferers. For showing us a new (blonde) side of Vitti, we can once more thank the Hungarian dynamo. When he returned to familiar territory it was to make Red Psalm, his first film to utilize experimental grammar, feeling more like a piece of theatre than the alternately ancient and intrinsically cinematic The Red & The White. Here is where he proves his willingness to try anything, his belief in our belief. From here he becomes fearless, trying anything once, even dabbling in something resembling erotica, but filtered through his robustly humane world view. That film, Private Vices, Public Pleasures [thanks for the correction, Roger], is one of the most enchanting films about sexuality ever made. A kind of anti-Salo, it follows a libertine orgy throughout the grounds of a grand estate. No film that I've seen manages to make sex organs seem as natural or beautiful. A proper bacchanalian celebration of innocent sexuality; a reprieve for humanity's worst crimes against itself. It may end, like so many of his films, with a shocking act of violence, but by then the spell is too strong to break. His films, no matter how dark, oblique or melancholy (the height of which must be his return to his homeland, 1979's exhausting but rewarding Hungarian Rhapsody), broiled with vivacity, with a rich appreciation for human creation and emotion. His characters dance across vast landscapes, through history and violence, aware that the best they can do is survive, and teach the dance to the next generation. "If I do not forget, then it is not forgotten."