Carnival of Souls (Harvey 1962)

A group of young women sit in a vehicle as a car of young men pull up, challenging them to a drag race. The young women in the car are up for the race, save one named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), a passenger who sits miserably silent in the vehicle. The race commences, arriving at a damaged bridge which both groups proceed over, only for the women to be knocked over the bridge and into the river. A search of the river turns up nothing, many onlookers commenting the car will never be found. However, out of nowhere, Mary turns up on land, a mess but alive. A week later, she leaves town for Salt Lake City for a job as a church organist, now in the driver’s seat and soon to suffer horrible visions. And that is just the beginning of the ordeal she is to suffer through.

So begins Herk Harvey’s one and only feature film, Carnival of Souls (1962), a blackly comic horror film which explores patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women just as the second wave of feminism was on the rise. While the set up of the film is simple, and as with many B-films, filled with ghastly images made on the cheap, Carnival of Souls is a highly sophisticated little film, relying not on jump scares but atmosphere, playing with narrative and traditional Hollywood conceptions and constructions of space and time.

The reason I have highlighted the start of the film is that it is the most important scene of the film whilst simultaneously being the least important scene of the film. The dramatic conflict of the film is centered on the seeming disconnect Mary feels towards herself and the world around her, being either unable or unwilling to engage with society as a whole. With the accident placed at the start of the film, and the visions Mary experiences, the reason for Mary’s disconnect would appear t be related to the accident, a point she doesn’t believe and yet is insisted upon by many other authority figures throughout the film, including a medical Doctor.

While it is true that the visions Mary experiences may be related to the accident (I will neither confirm nor deny this being the case), given the way the film is structured and the accident presented, there is no evidence that Mary’s disconnect from the world is caused by accident at all. We are never shown Mary before the accident, nor does she say anything during the whole of the race scene. Mary could very well have been as supposedly cold and distant as she is in the film before the accident as much as after, and given how Harvey presents Mary as framed apart from the other women in the car before the accident, she more than likely was.

Yet the opening accident scene is still vitally important, as it is rich in symbolic meaning as it establishes the thematic and subtextual groundwork for the rest of the film. The race is not a race between youths, but between sexes, as the male and female cars battle it out for control on the bridge. It is no mistake that it is the men who knock the women off the bridge, then afterwards try and marginalize their own role in the accident: it is this scenario which is repeated time and again between Mary and various symbols of patriarchal authority throughout the film, figures who are lampooned while still symbols of a very real systemic horror.

Each male figure in the film attempts to marginalize Mary by laying the blame for her supposed problems at her feet, be it spiritually (the pastor), scientifically (the Doctor) or “romantically” (the sleazy John Linden [Sidney Berger]). Much like the young men at the start of the film who attempt to pass on the blame for the accident, each patriarchal figure reacts with shock to Mary’s refusal to merely listen to them lecture her and play the role that they, and society, dictates, oblivious to their own role in assisting Mary’s suffering.

Even the sphere of the unknown is a site of male dominance, as Mary is haunted not by visions of women, but of well dressed men. It is no surprise then that Mary is at her most terrified when presented with situations in which she is rendered speechless, literally: twice in the film, Mary seemingly becomes invisible to the world, lacking the ability to have the world around her listen to what she has to say. This point is driven home all the more when Mary finally comes face to face with a vision of herself as a seemingly lifeless dance partner of one of the male ghouls which has haunted her throughout the film.

While the film as a whole is highly stylized and over the top, natural given the dark comedy of the film, Candace Hilligoss’ performance as Mary is magnificent, bringing a layer of legitimate psychological depth to a role that could easily have become one note. Mary’s resistance to patriarchy in the film is not an overt political resistance, but one driven by a deeply held, even primal, refusal to accept the world as is, and as such is not fully understood by Mary herself consciously. Hilligoss manages to effectively embody this struggle, with much of her performance hinging upon the subtleties of her facial expressions and physical mannerisms rather than on dialogue. No other performer in the film comes close to Hilligoss’ work, though to be fair, the rest of the cast doesn’t nearly have the level of material to work with.

Herk Harvey’s direction however deserves particular attention, transforming his budgetary limitations into strengths, as he and his crew play with Hollywood concepts of cinematic time and space in order to place the viewer into the mindset of Mary and achieve a distinctive horrific atmosphere. Scenes do not so much begin and end so much as they flow into one another or fragment off from the whole of the film, launching the viewer (and Mary) from one location to another without warning, often utilizing the soundtrack to assist in the disorienting of the viewer as the music often bounces from being diegetic to non-diegetic while the editing blends space and time together in surprising ways. This playfulness leads the viewer to distrust the very foundations of Hollywood cinematic practice, and the end result is often unsettlingly, effectively preventing any sense of any space being safe for Mary, and thus by extension, the viewer. After all, how can one escape patriarchy in a society that favours patriarchy?

Occasionally, the low budget and inexperience of the filmmakers does show. A large number of the supporting cast members are fairly stiff, and while Harvey does his best to make this work, he cannot cover it up entirely. Furthermore, Harvey allows the film to occasionally dip too far into the realm of comedy for its own good, drifting too far into an overt parody of horror films rather than playing the fine line between horror and humour and losing sight of his larger thematic goals.

Still, these are minor quibbles in an otherwise great film, and given that Carnival of Souls is such a rarity, a politically progressive feminist film in a genre that more often than not marginalizes and demonises women, these flaws serve more as a reminder of the restrictions facing the filmmakers, both financial and political. The film can be found for rent off of the Criterion Collection website, and has been made available on DVD both by Criterion and other distributors.

The Departed (Scorsese 2006)

(NOTE: Ok, so where is the Carnival of Souls review? As anyone who has followed this blog for an extended period of time knows, I have been having laptop problems, with the machine breaking down every few months. To avoid this interfering with the reviews, I decided to start writing them on the family desktop, which has been very reliable.

Until this morning, when the damn thing crashed.

As such, my review is trapped on the machine, meaning I have to rewrite from scratch rather than finish my edit. So, to keep things going here, I am posting a "classic" review from back when I just placed these things on facebook. Carnival will be posted late Monday or Tuesday, but it WILL be next.)

The most fascinating element of the Martin Scorsese film The Departed (2006)is also the element which undermines the film the most. Using the same basic storyline of Wai-keung Lau Siu Fai Mak’s Infernal Affairs (2002), in which moles for both sides of a police/organized crime conflict hunt one another, Scorsese modifies the themes of identity from the original to include a focus upon a Biblical understanding of lineage, exploring the concept of how family shapes not only our immediate self understanding, but also shapes the context of how we are received in the world. Sounds good and rich for exploring, huh?

So how can this rich thematic material be a problem as I have noted? Primarily, it is an issue of execution, resulting in a war between characters for control of the narrative. As the basic story outline would indicate, it is the moles that would seem to be the main characters: the mob mole Colin (Matt Damon), and Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), an undercover agent for the Boston police. However, The Departed unbalances the narrative by giving an almost equal amount of screen time to Jack Nicholson’s Costello, head of the Boston Irish mob, who plays surrogate father to both characters in the film. The end result is an unfocused film that doesn’t really seem overly invested in the tale it is supposedly telling.

Costello is a fascinating character, and Nicholson manages to turn in a performance that is his best in a long, long time, requiring him to turn down his Jack-isms that have become standard over the last twenty years. Scorsese paints Costello as a fraud coming apart at the seams, projecting an image of power while being literally and figuratively impotent. As the film opens, we are presented with narration from Costello, where he reveals that he always wanted to be able to impact his environment, rather than it impacting him. Certainly, he is able to achieve half of the goal, as his actions and choices simultaneously destroy and help the lives of others. However, Costello is still birthed from the violent culture around him, with the criminal elements around him helping to facilitate his dreams, and in turn he facilitates the criminal endeavours of others. Yet none of what he seeks, or produces is original. Yet even the simple ability produce an heir escapes him, and the result is an increasingly deranged man on the verge of self destruction. It is an excellent character study.

However, this does raise a big question: why wasn’t Costello the lead in his own film? Costello dominates the film so much that Colin and Costigan become one note characters in their own film. They never become living, breathing people, but stock characters who do only what the plot tells them to do, a plot which itself is mostly dictated by the Costello character.

Furthermore, in being reduced to stock characters, Colin and Costigan's identity crisis, which was supposedly the whole dramatic thrust of the film, is treated in the most superficial manner possible. The original film Infernal Affairs was more about the hell of existing without understanding one’s own identity, where death is presented not as a horrible outcome or justice, but as release from have to live a life of uncertainty. The Departed by contrast defines identity in black and white terms, with the filmmakers stacking the the deck against Colin so much that there is no sense of the identity confusion central to the original film. Colin is clearly a villain, and Costigan so clearly heroic that there is no drama. Instead, the audience sits and waits for the inevitable conclusions to be reached, and for Costello to come back on screen and do something of interest.

As such, the bounty of thematic ideas contained within the film are left undeveloped, being tossed on screen with the connecting tissue between them failing to keep the film together. The personal and political dualities never really come together in a meaningful way, resulting in a frustrating experience for the viewer. Well, at least this one.

The situation is made all the worse by the far too large supporting cast, filled with actors fighting to accomplish something of value on screen. Mark Walberg, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen are among the cast who have nothing to do in the film except go through the motions with little rhyme or reason. Walberg, for example, has little to do except curse and wait to fulfill his role at the end of the film, while Martin Sheen fails to make any impression whatsoever. Baldwin fairs a little better with his somewhat comical department head, but still the character never evolves beyond the “angry Alec” of numerous other films.

It might sound like I am being hard on the film, and perhaps I am. There are many wonderful elements in the film, from Scorsese’s visual style (a shot of a coked out Costello is perhaps the most haunting) and sequences that manage to entertain, such as an alleyway chase that is every bit the equal of the same scene in the original. But the film lives moment to moment rather than existing as a unified whole, which at two and a half hours results in allowing the viewer to reflect far too much on the flaws rather than on what works.

The most frustrating aspect of all of this though is that it was this film Scorsese won his Oscar for. Certainly, the man deserved it a long, long time ago for his previous efforts, including his most recent work before The Departed. But awarding him for this film was a serious mistake: the Oscars are (supposedly) to award the best filmmaking efforts of the year, not the lifetime body of work of an individual (unless, of course, it is a lifetime achievement Oscar). Scorsese has made better films, and will make better films. To award him for this work undermines the value of what such an award should mean to him. With any luck, he will get nominated again for a worthy film, and win this time for the right reasons.

Bad Lieutenant (Ferrara 1992)

It is safe to say that I am not a fan of Abel Ferrara’s work for the most part. While I loved his direction on the pilot for the television series Crime Story, Body Snatchers (1993), his remake for the 1950s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was mediocre at best, while King of New York (1990), along with many of his other crime films, were ultra violent attempts at mimicking Martin Scorsese’s early works.

So consider me surprised to find that I am not only impressed by his 1992 effort Bad Lieutenant, but I am willing to go as far as to say that Ferrara has made a legitimately great film. Moreover, Bad Lieutenant is a film that demonstrates a thoughtful and mature exploration of Christian faith and man’s relationship with God, regardless of where one stands on the spectrum of thought regarding God, faith and religion.

Bad Lieutenant tells the tale of a nameless New York Lieutenant (Harvey Keitel), who is just about as corrupt as they come: he is a heroine addict, a gambling addict, and and adulterer who is prone to violence and extortion when it comes to the people he meets on the job. As the Lieutenant’s life slowly unravels, his bets on a series of baseball games place him in the hole and his drug addictions grow more uncontrollable, he is presented with a shockingly brutal case. A young nun, during a break in at a church, is raped. While initially cynical and dismissive as to the horror of the event, the Lieutenant is shocked when the nun not only reveals she knows her attackers, but forgives them and refuses to give up their names. As his life falls apart, the case becomes a quest for the Lieutenant to understand the choice of the nun, and possibly find redemption for himself.

Bad Lieutenant is a film that is likely to offend viewers across the board. Conservative, religious audiences will likely be turned off by the extreme and volatile character at the center of the film, a character that we follow into the darkest of corners when it comes to his personal failings and vices. Non-religious viewers may very well be turned off by the film’s focus on spirituality and faith. Still others will likely be put off by the fact that the film is not a thriller or mystery, but a character study with little in the way of a traditional plot. All three possible rejections of the film would be a shame, as the film’s complex exploration of the possibility for personal redemption is rich and textured, asking the viewer to really engage with the issue both emotionally and intellectually.

The Lieutenant of the title is not merely a misguided individual, but a truly vile human being: a wretched father, a lousy husband, and a sickeningly horrific police officer who abuses his powers daily. The Lieutenant is the embodiment of every character an audience has ever been asked to root against. His initial reaction to the crime against the nun not only invites disgust from the audience, but elicits shock from some of his fellow officers. He cannot even fall back on the claim of being any good at his job, as the time he spends on his vices leaves little time to accomplish any form of crime fighting. About the only thing he cares about is baseball, where he seems to invest himself both financially and spiritually. By all definitions, he is an irredeemable monster, and there is no reason for us to give a damn about a monster, except for the fact that society has invested this one with power.

Oddly enough however, we do give a damn about this monster. All credit must be given to Ferrara and Keitel, because they somehow manage to find the humanity in this abomination of a character. The nameless Lieutenant is less a character than a walking, talking collection of anger, frustration, self pity and hatred, aimed at anyone and everyone. In lacking a name or much in the way of a defined existence outside of his job, Ferrara allows the viewer to project onto the character, and identify the traces of our own personal dark side within his behaviour. Keitel manages to give the best performance of his career here, portraying a man so convinced in his understanding of the world that the actions of the nun totally shatter his very core.

What differentiates this redemption narrative from others is that the redemption for the title character is of secondary importance. While certainly the Lieutenant’s own redemption comes into play, what he seeks most is to understand the choice of the nun, an understanding also sought by the audience. This search for answers, to seek to understand another point of view of life free of or base traits, ironically further unifies the viewer and the Lieutenant, connecting his attitude towards life and bad behaviour as being typical of part of our everyday lives.

It is debatable whether or not the Lieutenant is able to comprehend the answers to his and the viewers’ questions, and unlikely that all viewers will be open to accepting these answers, but the Lieutenant’s quest for knowledge leaves him by the final third of the film fully stripped of agency, belaying any power he might have over his life. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Whatever redemption the Lieutenant finds by the conclusion of the film has little to seemingly do with his own will, Ferrara and Keitel magnificently establish this redemption as one in which the character has been kicked dragging and screaming from his typical patterns of behaviour. Keitel’s performance is at its best here, as he makes a decision he clearly is tormented by, yet clearly feels he needs to do. His reconnection with humanity has left him broken and in pain, toying with the viewers’ emotions as to how to interpret the conclusion of the film. (SPOILERS OVER).

Ferrara wisely attempts to place the viewer squarely into the subjective point of view of the Lieutenant, following the character as he makes his journey from home to the streets, clubs and grimy apartments of criminals, drug dealers and prostitutes. As the Lieutenant deteriorates, so does the stability of the camera, and the end results helps to add to the grimy world from which escape is seemingly impossible, at least for the Lieutenant.

The deployment of music is also highly notable in the film, mainly for how little music is actually featured in the film. Ferrara doesn’t bother to often highlight scenes with non-diagetic music, instead allowing for the harsh collection of voices and city noise to carry entire scenes, adding a heightened tension to the film, as we lack an audio cue to help navigate just where scenes will head.

Bad Lieutenant will not be for all tastes, but it was not made to be. It is a film which relentlessly tells its tale the way it needs to be told, the audience’s reaction be damned. As such, the film is unquestionably art, and needs to be accepted on that level, along with the work that a viewer must do to understand art. Those seeking easy answers or sheer entertainment, look elsewhere.

A Review will be up tonight, just not CARNIVAL OF SOULS

Hey Everyone! The Carnival of Souls review needs a bit more time to cook to get it right, so my review of the original Bad Lieutenant will be up tonight instead.

Update: April 5th, 2010

Hey Everyone!

Boy, do I have a film to review for you: Herk Harvey's 1962 horror/black comedy Carnival of Souls. The review will be up late on April 7th.

See you then!

The End of "At the Movies" and the Failures of Mainstream Criticism

The announcement last week of the cancellation of At the Movies, American television’s longest running program dedicated to film criticism, most likely came as a surprise to no one who has followed the recent changes made to the show over the past two years, from the ill conceived, vapid and thankfully short lived era of Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz to the improved-but-still-wounded past year hosted by A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips. The show has never quite managed to find the same spark as it once had before the death of Gene Siskel in 1999, and the loss of Roger Ebert as an onscreen host more or less left the series vulnerable to the alterations and fate it now faces.

However, as important as At the Movies was to me in my youth, I can't say that the end of the series bothers me at all. The apathy on my part towards the series’ demise is rooted in more than just the loss of the famed duo that once stood at the core of the show. The main problem the series has struggled with over the past decade has been one of identity: just what is/was the point of the show?

At one time, At the Movies it was about seeing two knowledgeable, intelligent, and passionate film fans discuss the subject they loved so much. It was a show that was at the center of the cultural dialogue for serious film fans, at least in North America. While the format of the show has roughly stayed the same over the years, the passion and sense of purpose has been long gone, with its hosts going through the motions rather than feeling a desire to be hosting the program.

The inability of At the Movies to continue to hold this cultural position is due to several factors, the first and most obvious factor being the rise of the internet. I am not just talking about the democratic nature of the internet mind you, as important as it is, but also how the internet broke the rules which controlled the discussion itself. Film conversations on the web are plural, continuous, and fluid, going in several simultaneous directions at any given moment. As brilliant as At the Movies was, even at its peak it was little more than a sampling of not only the films, but of the critics' thoughts. In a half hour format with several films to get through, plus commercials, the conversations were necessarily short and would cut off just as they were getting started. It was the best we had, so we put up with it.

Not so now. In this era, the real loss would be if Roger Ebert’s blog were cut off, as it gives the man the room to let his thoughts out and engage with a series of intelligent individuals from around the globe, unfiltered. What possible function would a truncated version of this serve? While Ebert may continue to talk of starting a new review program, the purpose of such an endeavour seems murky at best, and pointless at worse. Furthermore, given the large number of voices available on the web, the idea of a single series having such influence over the cultural discourse has long since passed.

This brings us to the second key factor, the value of the "day of" review which shows such as At the Movies provide. The value of such reviews are questionable at best. Not only are such reviews generally ignored, but the format plays against the strengths of talents like Roger Ebert, whose best work is reflective and detailed, going beyond simple recomendations. We want an analysis, not a simple recomendation. While a good review may push us to see a film we may not have sought out before, if we are to be honest, if we are interested in a film, will a bad review really stop film geeks from seeing a film? Most likely, we will see a given film to add our own thoughts to the conversation going on about a given work. Since that conversation is what we often crave, we will get it even if it means sitting through a bad film.

Yet the most important factor to consider is the outright failure of mainstream press criticism and journalism in understanding my apathy towards the end of At the Movies. Pick up your local paper or watch mainstream news programs with a film critic on staff, and you will generally find vapid eye candy designed to sell whatever is released to the viewing public, or a group of individuals who are not so much interested in film but rather in showing off how clever they are to their audience.

Ask yourself: why is it that there have been no new critical “rock stars” in the past twenty years, even on the level of borderline joke Rex Reed? Mostly because the recent crop hasn’t been any good, being little more than a group of narcissists who place themselves before their subject matter. Films for this batch of critics are a means to an end, that end being their face and name in the public eye. These “critics” have little love of film, rendering their thoughts rather pointless to those who give a damn. At the Movies, when it was hosted by the “Bens” was an embodiment of such failings, and a sign of where the series would ultimately have headed again eventually were it not being cancelled now.

The cancellation of At the Movies is thus little more than the final admission that the world of film criticism for the serious film fan has been radically altered, a point which the fans themselves have known about for quite some time. Yet at the same time, given that the point of the series was to do little more than to provoke, discussion of film, nothing has really changed. The conversation is where it has always been:

Wherever the hell you are.

Welcome April!

Hello everyone!

Well, I have my laptop back, and my professional calender seems to be clearing up, so from the looks of things, this month the reviews should come out on a more regular basis again. First thing is first though: an article will be posted Saturday :)

See you then!