If Barbieland is a bright pink reinterpretation the Garden of Eden, with Barbie and Ken as the Adam and Eve figures opening the door to corruption, then where in Greta Gerwig’s piece of cinematic confectionary do we find the snake who introduces it to them? Perhaps applying biblical metaphors to Barbie is a little kind – this is not a film that asks for audiences to uncover any rich symbolism or subtext, even while it is playing on narrative archetypes set by some of humanity’s oldest stories. Quite unusually for both Gerwig and her cowriter Noah Baumbach, this screenplay would much rather plainly state its message in unambiguous feminist slogans that were expressed with far greater finesse in Lady Bird and Little Women. Still, she is keenly aware of what she is setting out to achieve, even if the artistic stakes are a little lower and the popular appeal is broader than her previous films. Armed with self-aware humour and a kitschy production design, Barbie makes for a dazzling treat, balancing its satirical interrogation of the doll’s controversial place in pop culture against the innocent joy of everything it was intended to represent.
As for where the tension arises between those two contradictory notions, then we must consider that aforementioned source of corruption in Barbie – not any external force bearing malicious intent, but rather those innate flaws which we can only excise through idealised, plastic representations of ourselves. They set the empowering standard that the originators of the Barbie doll believed women should aspire to, encouraging them to become doctors, lawyers, and writers who may never be subservient to their Kens, and yet there is also a lack of nuance in this ideological thinking which Gerwig is sharply critical towards. Sixty years on from Barbie’s invention, she has become an icon of “sexualised capitalism”, rejected by girls looking for more relatability in their role models. Therein lies the existential crisis that Barbie faces when she ventures into the real world.
It is hard to imagine a pair of actors better suited to playing Barbie and Ken than those that Gerwig casts here. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling pose, strut, and roller skate their way through the film with magnetic charm and humour, individually set on opposing visions of utopia that bring them into conflict over what this exactly means for their respective genders. There may be some comedy which misses the mark in this film, but never when it is in either of their hands, and least of all when Gosling steals the show with his 80s pop musical number ‘I’m Just Ken’.
Even beyond its high-energy dance-offs and broad slapstick though, Gerwig embraces the camp theatricality of Barbie’s pop culture status right down to its dollhouse aesthetic, cartoonishly painted across an entire city. It is fortunate that we don’t spend too long following Barbie’s journey through the real world given how much of this film’s strengths lie in the absurdly garish design of Barbieland, setting the scene for an amusing battle of the sexes across pastel-coloured beaches and streets.
From the make-believe water running out of faucets to the open-air dreamhouses that disregard walls altogether, Gerwig accomplishes a beautifully curated feat of world building here, especially drawing inspiration from the artificial city that Jacques Tati built for his 1967 French satire Playtime. Even closer comparisons can be drawn when we reach the Mattel headquarters, with our similarly naïve protagonist striding down endless rows of grey, boxy cubicles to the heart of the bureaucracy that controls her image. This set piece in its entirety is wonderfully inventive, sending Barbie up to the top floor where Will Ferrell’s ditzy CEO meets with other executives, before plunging her to its basement where the company’s ghosts live on. At the same time though, it is also indicative of a larger trend in the film that lets its smaller subplots and formal threads quietly fizzle out, including the careless disappearance of Helen Mirren’s narration by the end.
The Mattel headquarters bear more than a striking resemblance to the bureaucratic offices of the 1967 French satire Playtime – a strong line of influence in set design from Jacques Tati to Greta Gerwig.
Even so, there isn’t a second of Gerwig’s film that isn’t entirely dedicated to the love and appreciation of its central icon, revealing the depths of Barbie lore that no one besides a very niche group of fans might have suspected existed. One of the great running jokes comes in the homages to those bizarre, discontinued dolls that never quite fit the mould, yet even they find renewed purpose here as misfits whose mere existences expose the hidden prejudice of Barbieland’s rigorously high standards. The existential discomfort of being human is a small price to pay for the freedom that comes with choosing one’s own identity, and Barbie goes even further to revel in the delightful incongruency of that awkwardness against such overcooked perfection. The matriarchal paradise that Gerwig builds with careful curation and whimsy in Barbie is not a utopia to be protected from humanity’s flaws, but a dreamy vision that sees both come together in perfect, feminist union.
The loss of innocence is no small tragedy in the final instalment of Park Chan-wook’s thematic Vengeance trilogy. Whether it is eroded over time as it is for ex-convict Lee Geum-ja, or instantly annihilated as we see in her old mentor’s sadistic murders of children, its erasure is a permanent fixture that no amount of retribution can restore. Equally though, the alternative of letting those who have perpetuated such soul-destroying misery go unpunished offers no real resolution either, denying any sort of catharsis to their victims. Geum-ja has many complex reasons driving her mission to track down serial kidnapper and killer Mr. Baek, but buried deep within all of them is a corrosive melancholia, represented here not through the cool, passive hues of so many other Park films, but rather by burning crimsons that stain her journey with raw, wounded anger.
Park’s formal dedication to setting these blood red tones against clean whites in his mise-en-scene emphasises this severity even further, greeting Geum-ja with its shocking visual contrast when she is granted an early prison release. Outside those concrete walls, a group of Christian church singers dressed in Santa outfits offer her a block of tofu, traditionally symbolic of one’s redemptive decision to become pure like the snow that falls lightly on their shoulders. Her cold rejection of their proposed salvation brusquely indicates the path she has chosen. She is not looking to restore her long-lost innocence, but to turn her cruelty against the man who taught it to her, applying a striking red eyeshadow to her face as she takes on the mantle that she has spent thirteen years in prison crafting – Lady Vengeance.
Rejecting the symbolic tofu of purity and innocence from the outset – redemption is the last thing on Geum-ja’s mind.Park’s films are not without good doses of humour, introducing the red and white colour palette through the group of singing Santas as Geum-ja exits prison.The red eyeshadow is a superb design choice, marking Geum-ja with the angry colour palette that surrounds her.
As dogged as Geum-ja is in her furious efforts to hunt down Mr. Baek, there is also an elegant restraint to her navigation of such personal traumas, captured in Lee Young-ae’s sublimely balanced performance that sits somewhere between angelic and diabolic. So too does it extend to Choi Seung-hyun’s baroque score of strings and harpsichord, relentlessly pulsing along to steady, staccato rhythms that only barely hide a muted fury and sorrow.
For a long time, the source of this anguish seems mysteriously distant, as Park chooses to hide the face of the man responsible like a painfully repressed memory. Through his narrative of tightly interwoven flashbacks, it often feels as if we are seeking some reason behind his cruelty and exploitation, especially given how effortlessly it hides behind shallow displays of kindness. When Geum-ja falls pregnant at the age of 20, Mr. Baek is the first person she goes to for support, falling so much under his spell that she readily supports his kidnapping racket and takes the fall for his ‘accidental’ killing of a young boy. Within this morbid plot lies an even darker truth though – this teacher specifically targets children at the schools he works at, satiating his sadistic hatred through torture and murder. Even before we meet him directly, Mr. Baek is thoroughly built up as one of Park’s most monstrous characters, so when he is revealed as a dumpy, bespectacled man, Lady Vengeance forces us into a chilling recognition of evil’s unassuming façade.
Maybe the most despicable character of any Park film, disguised as a small, dumpy, unassuming school teacher.
If such burning hatred exists within a man as seemingly gentle as Mr. Baek, then it stands to reason that his groomed pupil is equally capable of extraordinary violence despite her youthful beauty. It is a perversion of everything we are led to believe about good and evil, even inciting a media storm that cannot reconcile the two extremes in a single person when she initially confesses to Mr. Baek’s crimes. Even beyond this dichotomy drawn through Park’s red-and-white colour palette, it also manifests in the formal relation between his grotesque subject matter and the stylish grace with which he navigates it, fluidly transitioning into flashbacks with graphic match cuts and floating the camera through scenes of brutal torture. Geum-ja cannot be solely defined by either her purity or retributive anger, but much like an avenging angel sent to deliver uncompromising, righteous justice, she is an indivisible composite of both.
Park’s visual style is elegant in its lighting, framing, colour, and camera movement, even as it runs up against its disturbing subject matter.
It is not just the thirteen years lost in prison while her daughter Jenny was growing up that she mourns, but the guilt of knowing she is responsible for her abandonment issues plagues her as well. It takes a huge amount of humility then on her part to realise that despite all this, her suffering may be the least of all Mr. Baek’s surviving victims. While she can at least accept some responsibility for it, the parents of the children he killed spend every day wrestling with the incomprehensibility and randomness of their tragedy. This revenge mission belongs not just to her, but to a whole community of mothers and fathers, now being given the ultimate decision of how to deal with the monster of their nightmares.
Split screens between Geum-ja and her daughter in the letter scene, while Park keeps formally tying in that red colour scheme.
What are any of them to take from this violent reprisal though? Going off Park’s previous film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, one might almost expect their bloodthirst to be judged with more scepticism that they are solving anything at all by perpetuating further suffering. He doesn’t entirely reject that idea here, but there is at least some therapeutic salvation in these characters deliberating the futility of their actions – no amount of vigilante justice will ever return their children. Still, they line up outside the classroom that Geum-ja has tied Mr. Baek up inside all the same, taking turns to inflict physical representations of their emotional agony on him, and confront the pitiful mortality of its source. Evil is not some invisible, demonic force, they discover, but entirely human, as regrettably intrinsic to our being as the innocence it destroys.
Creative framing and colouring as Park positions us beneath the blood-drenched plastic sheet, gazing up at Geum-ja.
Then again, perhaps there is also the potential for it to serve a more protective purpose as well. Only when Geum-ja’s innocence is gone does she appreciate its real value, and further seek to preserve it in her daughter before the psychological damage she has done becomes irreversible. As she stands with Jenny on a snowy street, she is once again gifted the symbolic tofu in the form of a white cake, offering a purification of her soul. This time, she does not brush it off, but given the heaviness of her sins, neither can she accept it. Instead, all she can do is bury her face in its soft layers, longing for the redemption that her vindictive mission has failed to deliver, despite it playing out exactly as she intended. For Geum-ja, there is no total victory in the battle between purity and corruption. Just a prolonged battle to protect one by vengefully enacting the other.
Geum-ja’s vengeance comes to an end, wiping off the red eyeshadow in this gorgeous bathroom set.Still unable to accept the symbolic tofu, Geum-ja is simply left to bury her face in its soft layers – redemption is still out of reach, even as she longs for it.
Lady Vengeance is not currently streaming in Australia.
According to Emmi’s new lover, Ali, there is an old Arabic saying that warns against insecurity as the enemy of love, and which gives Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film its name. “Fear no good. Fear eat the soul up,” he warns her when she expresses anxiety around their blossoming relationship. This fear attacks from the inside, dissolving convictions which might have already weathered the worst of the world’s pressures, and yet which eventually crumble to pieces and turn lovers against each other. Then again, perhaps it is equally the result of a social prejudice which has become so normalised around them. Douglas Sirk’s 1950s American melodramas may be the primary source of Fassbinder’s influence, but Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is just as much a product of cultural tensions in 1970s Germany, pushing the transgressive love between a middle-aged woman and young man in All That Heaven Allows even further with an interracial romance.
When Emmi and Ali first meet, they are living in the shadow of the 1972 Munich Massacre, where eight Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and kill several members of the Israeli Olympic team. On top of this, Emmi acknowledges her own family’s involvement in the Nazi party, with her late father being particularly xenophobic. This nation’s shameful history lives on in recent memory for many citizens, becoming such a part of everyday life that its true horror is easily trivialised. When Emmi takes Ali out to a fancy restaurant she has always wanted to try, the fact that it used to be Hitler’s favourite restaurant is given no more than a passing mention, and it is also no odd occurrence for racial slurs to be casually thrown at those with skin tones similar to those of the Olympic terrorists.
Powerful location shooting in Munich streets and buildings, using the worn edges and faded colours of its architecture to reveal a culture in decay.
In Fassbinder’s visuals as well, modernity hems his characters into tight corners, doorframes, archways, and narrow corridors. Many of these are as drably unadorned as the architecture lining Munich’s streets, bearing the discoloured marks of erosion and suffusing his aesthetic with an element of realism that was never present in Sirk’s highly stylised studio sets. At the same time though, Fassbinder does not resist injecting his mise-en-scène with warm bursts of blazing colour when a scene calls for it, painting the walls of Emmi’s home canary yellow and framing her between crimson drapes. In the bar where she first meets and dances with Ali right at the start of the film too, Fassbinder sheds a vibrant red light over them, saturating them in the passion of their mutual attraction and separating them from the dreariness of the outside world.
Bursts of red and yellow cut through the drab realism of Fassbinder’s mise-en-scène, radiating out from Emmi and Ali’s unconventional romance.
The greatest visual motif of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul though comes in Fassbinder’s constant return to the worn-out, winding stairwell of Emmi’s apartment building, where she sits with her neighbours and listens to their petty gossip. With Fassbinder using its uneven levels, cramped space, and wooden banister to visually isolate her, she doesn’t appear to be particularly comfortable here, and it certainly doesn’t help that these women are some of the most racist critics of her relationship with Ali. Within these uncomfortable conversations and behind these railings, she is completely trapped, confined to a liminal space between domestic and public life that refuses to separate one from the other.
Fassbinder’s greatest visual motif in this staircase connecting Emmi’s personal and public worlds, often framing her behind its railings and separated from her judgmental ‘friends’ – a brilliant segmentation of the composition.
In the movements of Fassbinder’s camera too, we often find a sharp elegance to its tracking shots, often choosing to shift into new compositions rather than cut, as we observe in the slow pan across the disgusted faces of Emmi’s children when they meet her new partner for the first time. This also ties into the larger tension at play between his melodrama and social realism, intoxicating us with his lush visual style, and then breaking it up with prickly reminders of 1970s Germany’s horrific racial intolerance.
That Emmi begins to adopt elements of that prejudice is all the more tragic, as Fassbinder pushes the All That Heaven Allows-inspired romance another step further with both lovers subconsciously internalising their harshest criticisms. From Emmi’s desire to return to a quieter, more traditional life comes her demand for Ali to stop eating couscous, while her objectification of his body in front of her friends exposes a racial fetishism even more insidiously ingrained in her social conditioning. Both look smaller than ever in Fassbinder’s narrowed frames as distances between them grow wider, leaving Ali to seek comfort outside the bonds of marriage with an old girlfriend.
Like Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder makes marvellous use of his doorways and decor to trap his characters in tight spaces, narrowing them even further when conflict arises and emotionally isolates them.
At least while these lovers were at their most devoted, they would fight back against unwelcome insults, so it is entirely heartbreaking now to see them let such comments slide by with little resistance. A genuine attempt to reconcile their misgivings as they dance together in the bar where they met tragically comes far too late – Ali suddenly collapses without warning as Emmi holds him in her arms, and is promptly diagnosed with a type of burst stomach ulcer that often comes about from undue stress among immigrants.
Colour and framing with the field of park benches, bathing lovers in a sea of bright yellow.
It might be unlikely that Emmi was a direct cause of Ali’s illness, but the possibility also can’t be written off, and thus his earlier warning of fear eating the soul is reframed as a devastating prophecy. With this symbolic turn of fate, both the melodrama and realism of Fassbinder’s interracial romance finally merge into something even grander that transcends the sum of both – an ineffable moral fable of love’s greatest weakness and persistent strength.
Fassbinder gradually zooms from Emmi’s conversation with the doctor into the mirror behind them as she walks into its view, once again framing them inside an enclosed space – it’s hard not to feel that this should have been the shot he ended on.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Unlike so many of his fellow silent filmmakers, G.W. Pabst does not grant us the luxury of clear-cut character judgements in Pandora’s Box. With her black bob hair, slim dresses, and plunging necklines, it would be tempting to lump flapper girl Lulu in with other vamps of early cinema. Given Pabst’s sympathetic recognition of her social persecution though, it isn’t quite that simple. Neither does she fit into the archetype of virginal beauties typified by Lillian Gish, especially considering how much her sly manipulations of men come as second nature to her. The black-and-white morality of the courtroom cannot be so easily applied to her circumstances, even while the prosecution frames her as that infamous mythological figure whose irresponsibility corrupted the world.
“Your honor and gentlemen of the jury. The Greek gods created a woman… Pandora. She was beautiful and charming and versed in the art of flattery. But the gods also gave her a box containing all the evils of the world. The heedless woman opened the box, and all evil was loosed upon us. Counsel, you portray the accused as a persecuted innocent. I call her Pandora, for through her all evil was brought upon Dr. Schön!”
If Lulu is indeed a Pandora for the 1920s, singlehandedly ruining lives for the sake of her own fickle curiosity, then Pabst at least has the grace to consider the decadent world which equally shaped her. Like all the great German expressionists of his time, his aggressively stylised mise-en-scène is key to unlocking these influences across high and low ends of European society, stretching from its crowded theatres and ballrooms to its rundown wharfs and hovels. No doubt she has a hand in navigating the crowds of male suitors lining up to win her heart, but in this hypocritical culture which simultaneously celebrates and punishes such behaviour, how can one blame her alone for a lack of moral integrity?
Louise Brooks gives one of the defining female performances of the silent era, challenging the vamp and virgin archetypes with a wholly complex character while lighting up the entire screen.
More than just an icon of 1920s fashion and excess, Louise Brooks becomes a truly luminous presence in Pandora’s Box, like a flame drawing curious moths to their scorching deaths. Through close-ups that rival those that D.W. Griffith was innovating a decade before, Pabst often catches the light in her twinkling eyes and traces her vivid facial expressions, which we observe in one scene shift from a brilliant smile to a petulant frown the moment she spots the fiancée of her old paramour, Schön, at her variety show. The cogs turn in her mind as she plots a sulky protest against going onstage, thus drawing their heated confrontation into a storage room where she lures him right back into her arms. With Schön’s lover barging in and discovering their embrace, the timing couldn’t be better for Lulu, whose face betrays a hint of a devilish smile. Driven to restore his honour, Schön changes tact. “Now I’ll marry Lulu,” he wearily resolves. “It will be the death of me.”
As bright and elegant as she is devilish and cunning – Brooks has a confident grip on the full range of her character’s nuances.
Much like Lulu’s playful cruelty, Pabst’s foreshadowing is not without an edge of humour to it, even as both lead us down paths towards dark, haunting tragedy. Her flouting of social norms draws eyes from across her wedding reception as she dances with another woman, Countess Augusta Geschwitz, who promptly falls in love with her, and in a back room she once again cavorts with old lovers. Behind them, Pabst hangs an unsettling wall sculpture of a contorted man grasping at the outreached hand of a much larger being, his eyes closed in either overwhelming terror or infatuation. When Schön barges in and furiously discovers his wife’s infidelity, it doesn’t just form a disturbing backdrop to his accidental murder at Lulu’s hands, but is fully integrated into his compositions as a mirror of her doomed romantic relationships.
Pabst’s mounted wall sculpture becomes the marvellous centrepiece of multiple compositions, like a reflection of Lulu’s dangerously intoxicating romances.Cluttered frames from high-class theatres to dingy gambling dens – excess and decadence surround Lulu at both ends of society.
The expressionistic aesthetic that Pabst’s cinematographer Günther Krampf crafts may not touch his legendary work in Nosferatu, and yet it continues to accompany Lulu’s fall from grace with dark foreboding, sinking the camera through the decks of a gambling ship as she descends into a seedy underworld. Even in these cramped, grimy sets, Pabst is still crowding out his shots with frame obstructions intruding on Lulu’s personal space, drawing a thread of visual oppression between the aristocracy and peasantry. Their customs may be distinct, and yet the same patriarchy rules over both, exploiting their women for all they’re worth before throwing them away.
Pabst’s camera movement physically cuts through the floor of the ship as it sinks below deck, like a descent to the criminal underworld.Stifling frame obstructions in the ship close Lulu’s world in around her.
It is a dance of manipulation that Lulu must perform to survive in this world, using her innate charm to try and climb her way back up, but indulging too much in its whimsy is a dangerous game. Turned out by high society, and now being pimped out in a crime ring by a man she thought she could trust, she is forced to escape again another rung down the social ladder. In the cold, squalid pits of London, Pabst’s dark expressionism manifests powerfully in the heavy shadows and angular construction of its rundown hovels, tragically confining her to the life of a street prostitute.
Pabst imposes a cruel irony on her when he decides to pick her story up some time later at Christmas, keeping her out in the cold as she searches for customers while her few remaining male companions find a Dickensian warmth and comfort. Though she is no longer bound by the constraints of any rigid social structures, neither are the men who dwell in darkness and inflict their lawless misogynistic violence on hapless victims.
The deeper into Pandora’s Box we get, the more Pabst submits it to classically expressionist stylings with angular sets and stark shadows.The light twinkles in Brooks’ eyes one last time even as she hits rock bottom, and right before it is snuffed out for good.
For a brief moment at the end of her life, it would appear that Lulu’s natural magnetism might be enough to appeal to the better side of the patriarchy and escape its danger one last time, though even this is not enough to quell the depraved madness of Jack the Ripper. Her coquettish charisma truly is a coin flip that in any given instance could either play to her advantage or ruin her, depending on the unpredictable temperament of her target. Though she plays fast and loose with this wily power all throughout Pandora’s Box, one could hardly blame her for the circumstances surrounding her untimely demise at the hands of London’s most famous serial killer – but then again, she wouldn’t be here in the first place were it not for her own selfish recklessness. In the delicate hands of Pabst, this fable of female scapegoating develops beguiling nuances in its thoughtful characterisations, unequivocally rejecting clear-cut labels of vamps and virgins baked into the history of mythological storytelling, yet never failing to draw us deeper into Brooks’ dazzling feminine thrall.
Pandora’s Box is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
The singular, unifying code which connects all aspects of the universe in Pi cannot be solely attained through the calculations of greedy businessmen, nor divined through religious texts. It transcends humanity and even God himself, laying out the basic foundations of existence and explaining everything there is to know. Wall Street brokers and theologians alike chase it down, believing it can predict the stock market and reveal the true name of Yahweh, and yet the prophet who has been bestowed with this knowledge is reluctant to let fall into the hands of any ideological faction. When it comes to mathematics, Max Cohen is a purist, believing that his 216-digit number is simultaneously a gift from a perfectly logical universe, and a weapon far too easily exploited by self-serving humans.
Right from the first close-up of his face squashed against his computer desk, Darren Aronofsky inhabits the mind of this reclusive number theorist with painstaking discomfort, making a debut as equally haunted by sensory and mental disturbances as his own tormented subject. Part of this has to do with the grainy monochrome aesthetic he crafts, driving a harsh distinction between the blacks and whites of each image with an enormously high contrast, and cluttering his mise-en-scène with monitors, lights, and cables running all over the set. Given how hideous this is to look at much of the time though, it would be hard to call this an unadulterated visual triumph.
Aronofsky doesn’t hold back with his camera, forcing us into uncomfortable angles right from the first shot with a close-up of Max’s face squashed against his desk.Pi is not a beautiful film in any sense, but there is an aesthetic being developed here with cluttered frames and high-contrast effect applied to the black-and-white photography.
It is rather in Pi’s pulsating, formal rhythms that Aronofsky unites his creative tools behind a wholly disorientating vision, manifesting the aggressive concoction of illnesses plaguing Max’s mind and body. Central to this is his vigorous editing, cutting fast through visual demonstrations of the mathematician’s hyperactive, stream-of-consciousness voiceover that can’t stop spilling out abstract theories. The emergence of the Fibonacci sequence in game theory, the stock market, and biological evolution supports his primary belief that patterns can be found in every facet of life and beyond, forming an objective foundation of existence that transcends the whims of humanity. Driven to equally establish order from his muddled thoughts, Max methodically lists off his assumptions in a list.
“One, mathematics is the language of nature. Two, everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three, if you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.”
Highly conceptual and rigorous in its form to a mathematical degree, connecting numbers to every facet of human existence through fast-paced montages.
Perhaps this rational stability is why he is so drawn to maths in the first place, given his own acute psychological suffering. His headaches, anxiety, and schizophrenic hallucinations frequently manifest in extreme close-ups and rapid jump cuts, and sharp mini-montages also flash through his quick downing of pills to quell these symptoms. Through a highly-strung electronic score and amplified sound design, Pi sensitises us even further to the sound and movement of its relentless, propulsive thrum, juxtaposing Max’s frenzied obsession against the cold rationality of the universe.
Industrial background architecture as character – not exactly a dominant artistic choice in Pi, but still applied here with purpose.
These editing and aural devices would later be refined in Requiem for a Dream, with Aronofsky even bringing composer Clint Mansell back to score its haunting them ‘Lux Aeterna’, but the surrealism he dabbles in here is far more detached from any reality present in that mind-bending trip. This is a character study of intensive, psychedelic focus, desperately scrabbling to make sense out of an all-encompassing chaos, yet often falling to Max’s horrific delusions. In one scene he halts as he makes his way through a subway station, coming across something that lies just behind the camera, and in the reverse shot we see his brain. As if trying to penetrate its mysteries, he pokes it with a pen, and yet each time we cut back to him flinching in shock and pain. As Aronofsky disintegrates the laws of physical space and enters an entirely unfamiliar psychological realm, reality ceases to exist, and all we are left with is the obsessive mania of this neurotic genius.
A master stoke of abstract editing, cutting between Max and his brain as he lightly prods it with a pencil, and closing the space between physical and psychological worlds.
By the time the conspiracy surrounding his cryptic 216-digit number has fully emerged, there is no holding Max back from descending right to the depths of paranoia. Lenny, a Hasidic Jew with a keen interest in number theory, is determined to take him back to his sect which believes the code will bring about the Messianic Age. Marcy Dawson, a Wall Street agent, is just as dogged in her efforts to claim the number, convinced that it is the key to manipulating the stock market. The number is relevant to every corner of society, yet only Max sees its value beyond its utility, as well as the dangerous potential for its exploitation. In this constructed narrative, he is the saviour of a world verging on apocalypse, tasked with protecting secrets no human should ever be allowed to know.
A journey down a rabbit hole of maths, economics, spirituality, and enlightenment – Aronofsky’s thematic ambitions are broad, but even more importantly they are supported by a frenetic narrative that pursues each with formal rigour.
That is, if we can take everything that he perceives at face value. Like the computer that gains consciousness the second it calculates that divine number, becomes aware of its own nature, and immediately melts down, Max is set on a parallel trajectory that erodes his mind the closer he gets to what he believes is enlightenment. Aronofsky underscores the dangers of that hubris in the formal repetition of one specific anecdote throughout the film, as Max reminisces a childhood memory of being cautioned against looking directly at the sun, disobeying the warning, and being temporarily blinded for some time after. Like Icarus from Ancient Greek mythology, his arrogant ambition was his downfall, and continues to ruin him now in his effort to transcend human knowledge.
This number has not brought Max peace in attaining greater wisdom, but rather the opposite, intensifying his headaches and even swelling a bulge on the side of his head. The David Cronenberg influence on Aronofsky is apparent, drawing a close link between bodily mutations and mental degradations, and so for Max it is only with the violent removal of the former that order can be restored to the latter.
Pi culminates in Aronofsky’s trademark body horror – deeply visceral and disturbing imagery.
It is worth questioning how much of a genius Max truly is versus how much is delusion, especially as Aronofsky laces in plenty of hints that his self-perceived intelligence is purely contrived. Regardless of whether it was self-inflicted brain damage that saved him or a humble acceptance of his own limitations though, Pi draws a surprisingly optimism from its feverish neurosis, with Max discovering an even deeper peace than he ever knew while in the throes of analytical obsession. Within Aronofsky’s acute formal interrogation of intellectual delusion, true order is found not by trying to penetrate a complicated yet rational universe, but rather by accepting its dazzling, wondrous incomprehensibility.
True peace is attained through ignorance, extracting Max from his obsession and illness.
Pi is currently available to rent or buy on Amazon Video.
Ever since his directorial debut in 2009, Warwick Thornton has positioned himself as Australia’s leading Indigenous filmmaker with a flair for genre dexterity, pivoting from harsh social realism in Samson and Delilah to a colonial western in Sweet Country. With his third solo narrative feature film, The New Boy, he defies expectations once again, this time pushing the formal boundaries of his psychological drama with an air of ethereal, magical realism.
It especially seems to emanate from the most recent arrival at Sister Eileen’s remote orphanage, located somewhere in the dry heartland of 1940s South Australia. This mute, nameless Indigenous boy is found in the sweltering wilderness with no home or family, and as such his mystical connection to the land that he apparently sprung from makes for somewhat of a mystery. From there, Thornton delicately weaves a surreal allegory for spirituality, assimilation, and colonialism’s rigid stranglehold on ancient powers far greater than any settler’s understanding, and possessing greater spiritual dimensions than any imported religion.
Next to Aswan Reid’s subtle performance as the titular ‘new boy’, Cate Blanchett offers a fascinating turn as the unofficial head of the orphanage, Sister Eileen. She sets the tone for the compassionate culture here, devoutly ensuring that each boy receives a religious education so that they may be baptised on their thirteenth birthday and sent out to work on rural sheep stations. Only when her small chapel finally receives a sculpture of Christ to hang on its empty cross does she notice strange phenomena around the new boy, who develops a strange connection to the icon. His palms develop open wounds and begin to bleed, marking him with stigmata, and soon he begins bringing animal sacrifices to its altar. For Sister Eileen, her prayers expressing divine wonder and desperate questions of what it all means turn to fearful suspicion when she is met with silence from both him and God. His merging of Christian and Indigenous iconography sits far outside the realm of her structured religious culture, leaving the boy totally ostracised within the confines of his new home.
Absolutely crucial to the complex relationship Thornton crafts here between this pair of spiritual beliefs is the ravishing beauty which encompasses them in the yellow panoramas, rushing creeks, and withering vegetation of outback Australia, characterising the land as the boy’s mystical source of power. Against burnt orange sunrises and cloudy purple sunsets, Sister Eileen’s monastery is often silhouetted as the sole manmade structure too, blessed by the warm, natural light which shines through the church’s windows in golden beams.
For as long as her small community humbly respects the formidable environment it resides within, there is harmony that exists between them, represented in the perfect union of beliefs within the new boy. When one child residing there is bitten by a snake, the new boy is the one who uses his esoteric wisdom to cure him, and so too does Thornton imply his influence over the atmosphere itself as his hand gently commands the movement of dust in the air. Like the natural world though, this power can be temperamental when it is threatened, seeing him inadvertently set a nearby hill on fire with a random lightning strike after he is chastised by the nuns for his unconventional worship of Christ.
For those colonisers who see the powerful, mystical connection that Indigenous cultures have with the Australian wilderness, unfathomable in their ancient unknowability, it becomes seemingly apparent that the only way to ensure their own survival is to tame both. Though the new boy openly adopts tenets of their faith, embodying a religious pluralism that simultaneously finds fulfilment in his Indigenous beliefs and Christianity, his extraordinary faith is not valued without total obedience to the latter.
This is obviously not easy for a nameless child who never quite learns the customs of polite society though. He would much rather slurp from his bowl than learn to use a spoon, and prefers to joyfully dance on tables rather than on the ground with the other children. His expressions of faith are unorthodox but deeply felt, even taking the Christ sculpture down from the cross, feeding him jam, and tucking him into bed in much the same way he was cared for when he arrived. He may not pray out loud, but the one word he does finally learn to say conveys it all in his perpetual repetition of “Amen.” His most personal expression of faith though is the tiny, flickering ball of light which keeps him company, like a playful spirit upholding that sacred bond between man and country.
Still, Thornton is never so heavy-handed in his narrative as to confirm the reality of the new boy’s power. For every miracle he performs, there is often a level of ambiguity regarding whether we are simply looking at the world through his eyes, just as Sister Eileen is starting to do. As his erratic behaviour and her uncertainty grow in the film’s final act, Thornton fully unleashes the surrealism he has been teasing all along, moving through long passages with minimal dialogue, and replacing it with sharp, visual storytelling of the growing rift between the two faiths. Long, dreamy dissolves marvellously bridge gaps in time that seamlessly disappear, and slow-motion photography achieves the inverse in dragging it out, all while the figure of Christ in the church appears to move in response to the new boy’s visits.
This elusive symbolism may be one of Thornton’s great strengths, especially when it comes to the melancholy resolution of this colonial fable. That said, there does come a point in its very last scene when it manifests more as vagueness, unsure of where to place its final word. In moments like these, The New Boy feels a little half-complete, not quite shading in its characters or story enough to let either reach their full potential, though the image of cultural and religious assimilation they project is nonetheless compelling. There is no divinity to be found at all in the rigid boundaries set by organised religion, Thornton posits in the closing minutes of his ethereal, psychological drama, and most of all within the kind that seeks competition and dominance instead of coexistent harmony.
True to its title, Scenes From a Marriage never sways from its tight focus on six isolated episodes of Johan and Marianne’s married life, using each to piece together a collage of a fragmenting relationship across ten years. The couple often speaks of other people who are important to them, including their unseen children and extramarital lovers, yet the only characters who ever take up a substantial amount of screen time are those who act as counterpoints to them. In one scene we watch Marianne’s mother reflect on how disconnected she felt from her late husband, while at a dinner party two married friends, Katarina and Peter, pour out a verbal stream of visceral disgust at each other.
“I find you utterly repulsive. In a physical sense, I mean. I could buy a lay from anyone just to wash you out of my genitals.”
At first, Johan and Marianne might seem like the most ideal couple of them all, and their friends even acknowledge this when considering the awkward situation that has arisen from their unbarred scorn. “It will do their souls good to catch a glimpse of the depths of hell,” they joke, but perhaps that glimpse was more of a stimulus than they realise.
An awkward dinner party with friends Peter and Katarina foreshadows the vicious conflict to come between Johan and Marianne.Bergman plays with the distance between his actors all throughout Scenes From a Marriage, emphasising their disconnection in these perfectly staged wide shots.And then bringing them together in these tightly framed, intimate close-ups.
When we first meet Johan and Marianne, they are pushing the false image of their unwavering love in a magazine interview, speaking about the ten years they have been wed. Conversation unfolds organically in Ingmar Bergman’s dialogue, painting a portrait of Marianne as a woman who is no stranger to separation. Not only has she ended a marriage once before, but she continues to see clients undergo the same experience in her profession as a divorce lawyer. Perhaps it is because she is so familiar with others’ problems, or maybe she just possesses a deep-rooted desire for stability, but clearly she has considered the subject from every angle save for a personal one. In this interview, the illusion of her marital contentment is only ever broken in the journalist’s uncomfortable interruptions, as she constantly arranges them into poses for the camera which expose the artifice behind it all.
Bergman sets his film in motion with a naturalistic conversation between Johan, Marianne, and a journalist interviewing them on their marriage, intermittently breaking up the flow with her requests to pose for the camera.
Ingmar Bergman’s writing is some of the strongest it has ever been here, dispensing with his usual traces of surrealism for a realism that confronts the awkward complexities of his characters head-on. In doing so, he is also creating his most forthright examination yet of bitter conflicts that divide once-passionate lovers, in slight contrast to almost every other film of his over the past decades which have lingered such interrogations on the edges of other more faith-based questions.
Also quite unusual for Bergman is his move to a television format, simultaneously serving the extended, episodic structure of his story, yet unfortunately compromising on his usually impeccable visual style. Even with his regular cinematographer Sven Nykvist at hand, the tiny budget that the network gave them does not allow for the sort of lush production design of Cries and Whispers.
Despite being largely contained within small, minimalist sets though, Scenes from a Marriage is anything but stage-bound, as Bergman lifts it into a cinematic realm through his reliably sharp blocking bodies of faces. By cutting between wide shots and close-ups, he paints out the flow of isolation and connection between Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Doorframes often confine them in oppressive compositions, but both actors especially excel in tightly framed shots of their faces partially concealing each other, or otherwise slightly turning away from the camera in displays of restraint.
Some very solid framing through doorways in wide shots, closing the domestic space in around them.It is just as much about how Bergman frames his actors in close-ups as it as about their expressions, at times partially concealing their faces through profile shots, and in this key scene, flipping them upside-down.
When emotional extremes run high at the climax of Marianne and Johan’s breakdown, the two collapse on the floor and begin to make love. As they finish, Bergman frames their faces resting against each other from an upside-down angle, literally turning this intimate expression of love on its head in the midst of a bitter feud. That she almost immediately tells Johan afterwards that all she felt was “lukewarm affection,” Bergman once again damages any hope that they might reconcile. Instead, it appears as if they are doomed to fluctuate between passion, civility, and loathing for eternity.
A classic Bergman composition with the parallel heads on the bed, illustrating the unity and division between lovers.Ullmann’s head partially obscures Josephson’s face in this shot, fusing them together while impeding on his physical presence.
When Bergman’s camera pulls back from close-ups, these intimate interactions effectively turn into tennis matches, staging his actors symmetrically on either side of a bed, table, or couch as they trade barbs across the court. When Marianne begins to consider how their separation might be judged by her parents and friends, Johan impatiently shuts her down, demanding that this separation remains solely about their own personal issues, though even he cannot stand by his own rules.
One thing the couple can agree on at least is that Katarina and Peter’s troubles come from not speaking the same emotional language, and Johan and Marianne are eventually forced to admit that they are guilty of this too. Despite being highly intellectual individuals, they are self-described “emotional illiterates” who don’t understand a thing about their own souls. There is certainly some therapeutic growth here in recognising this, as Marianne reads aloud self-reflections from her diary on how she has hidden her true self to please others, but when Bergman shifts his camera to Johan, the only reaction we find is his sleeping face. When he awakes, he is apologetic and Marianne offers forgiveness, but the distance between the two has only widened.
So ingrained is this mutual miscommunication that even when Johan’s affair with Paula first comes to light, Marianne expresses total disbelief that anything was ever wrong between them. Ullmann’s eyes widen in fear and anguish, but most of all it is confusion we read on her face as Bergman’s camera lingers in close-up, tracing those tiny micro-expressions that flicker and disappear within milliseconds. Only now does Johan reveal that he had been desperate to get out of this marriage for years, and when Marianne calls her friends to tell them the news, they too admit their knowledge of his cheating. Clearly the reality of this marriage was evident to everyone but those wrapped up in its raw emotions, incapable of turning their perceptive minds inwards.
Ullmann is a powerhouse in Scenes from a Marriage, even more than Josephson. It is also a very different performance from Persona with the heavy verbal acting, but the subtle facial expressions are still there.
More than just an interrogation of a relationship, Bergman dedicates his series to examining the institution of marriage itself, and how the limitations of this contract restrict their bonds rather than nourish it. No longer do Johan and Marianne feel comfortable being their natural selves as husband and wife, as these rigid roles are thrust upon them by a one-size-fits-all culture. Their identities have been warped beyond recognition, and Marianne even reflects on how little the two resemble their younger selves who got married all those years ago.
“When I think of who I used to be, that person is like a stranger. When we made love earlier, it was like sleeping with a stranger.”
When Marianne considers remarrying too, Johan cynically articulates that she will just move through the same cycles all over again, finding only disappointment. He should know as well – he has not found love with his mistress, but just another kind of loneliness worse than being alone. Paula has ultimately turned out to be little more than a distraction from the inadequacy he feels from having his identity so closely intertwined with Marianne’s, and even in that role she is failing.
Johan and Marianne find a strange unity outside the boundaries of marriage, the closest thing either will get to a resolution.
What are we to make then of the affair they conduct with each other so many years after finalising their divorce? Has the absence of a rigid contract freed them from their bitterness? There is evidently still a deep love there, as in Marianne’s sleep she is haunted by nightmares of losing her hands, and thus being unable to reach out to Johan for safety as she crosses a dangerous road. In this imagery though, she also implicitly blames herself for their separation. They might never recreate what they used to have, but there is some hope that they might forge something new outside the boundaries of marriage if they can somehow resolve the fact that they would be threatening their own current relationships. “We love each other in an earthly and imperfect way,” Johan reassures his ex-wife, putting to rest her concern that she has never felt true love.
When words can no longer do these lovers justice, all that is left for them is to sit in silence, whether it be out of contempt, understanding, or both. For all the acerbic quarrels that Scenes from a Marriage expresses so eloquently, it is through a pair of silent images that Bergman creates the most perfect representation of this relationship.
On the verge of signing their divorce papers, Johan sits across a table from Marianne with his head in his hands, and she reaches a hand out to comfort him, only to pause and withdraw before he notices. Later in the same scene as they sit on either side of a couch, he reaches out to hold her hand, and they finally make contact. Within this formal mirroring, Bergman reveals the chasm which exists between these “emotional illiterates”, turning their marriage not into a battle of husband versus wife, but rather lovers versus the space between them.
Wide gaps between Johan and Marianne, often either driving them apart or filled in a simple act of openness.
Scenes From a Marriage is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.
Beyond the apparent plotlessness of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and within its constant shifting of perspectives, there is a single, guiding figure uniting the eons of time that pass through Stanley Kubrick’s awe-inspiring cinematic vision. The monolith may only appear for less than ten minutes of screen time, and yet is our most consistent companion in this film, curiously emerging at each new leap in evolution as the human species moves steadily further away from home. It towers above them as a large, black rectangular prism, bearing no mark of its purpose or origin, yet the mystery it projects is compelling. It is as much a celestial phenomenon as the stars, planets, and moons above us, and even aligns with those astronomical bodies in perfect symmetry as if writing our biological and technological advancement into the inextricable code of the universe.
As much as primates from across the evolutionary spectrum are driven to reach out to it in wonder though, it projects a soul-shaking fear from its imposing aura. Kubrick’s decision to replace Alex North’s score with pre-existing music was harsh yet inspired, and in this instance, he associates the monolith’s unnerving presence with a haunting, atonal requiem by classical avant-garde composer György Ligeti. The first three times we encounter it, sopranos and mezzo-sopranos waver over a twenty-part chorus that almost seems to be screaming in eldritch terror, producing a dissonant tone that simultaneously beckons the human race into an unknown future and exposes the smallness of their existence.
The monolith is simple in its design but imposing in its formal majesty, marking each key moment of evolution through human history.Moons, planets, and stars align with the monolith in a series of elusive, formally recurring shots – Kubrick is deliberately keeping us at a distance from any clear understanding of its meaning, but we can feel the weight of the universe each time the pattern emerges.
The only instance we encounter the monolith without this accompanying music is in its fourth and final appearance, bookending the film with Richard Strauss’ majestic orchestral piece ‘Also sprach Zarathustra.’ More specifically, it is the opening ‘Sunrise’ fanfare that builds to a marvellous crescendo over these twin scenes of human evolution, brightening Kubrick’s austere sterility with bursts of classical artistry. Likewise, Johan Strauss II’s iconic ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz is set against a balletic montage of spacecraft twirling and drifting through outer space like dancers on a stage, imbuing these artificial constructs with a humanity that has not been lost within the centuries of scientific progress. Kubrick’s soundtrack is nothing less than ground-breaking, boldly diverging from the tradition of original scores five years before American Graffiti would correspondingly popularise using pop and rock songs as film music.
Kubrick made the right choice to use classical music for his soundtrack, bringing both ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ and ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz back into the cultural consciousness and forever associating them with outer space.It is worthing stopping to admire Kubrick’s spaceship models, envisioning humanity’s future space exploration in stunning detail.
Within 2001: A Space Odyssey though, art is not the sole bedrock of life’s essence, but just one pillar of humanity’s evolving sophistication. As much as Kubrick is branded a misanthrope for his statement on humanity’s inherent evil in A Clockwork Orange and his cold treatment of history in Barry Lyndon, his belief in our species’ potential to keep outdoing itself with enormous feats of intellect and willpower transcend all of that, tracing that lineage right back to our roots as primitive lifeforms.
This is where Kubrick’s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence opens, where our vegetarian ancestors hide from predators in caves, howl at rival clans trying to drink from the same waterhole, and live peacefully alongside tapirs. With the first arrival of the monolith also comes their initial step towards becoming the humans we are today, drastically shifting their place in this world of pure animal instinct. When one primate discovers how a bone might be used as a deadly weapon against his foes, infinite new possibilities open up – no longer do they have to simply run from danger, or feast on local plant life. By fashioning tools out of available resources, they effectively become the dominant species of their environment, and win this round in the game of natural selection.
John Alcott took over from Geoffrey Unsworth when it came to shooting the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence, capturing the primal landscapes of Earth’s prehistory.The match cut every student learns about at film school, leaping millions of years across time through a pair of technological devices.
The graphic match cut which then leaps ahead millions of years may lay claim to the single greatest edit of film history here, connecting humanity’s past to its future by a pair of technological instruments – the bone, and a satellite in orbit above the Earth. The history of an entire civilisation is economically laid out in this cut, defining these distant relatives as members of a single family bound by their instinctive drive to keep pushing boundaries beyond what their bodies are capable of on their own. That their reliance on manufactured tools threatens to erase their human warmth only concerns Kubrick to an extent. His direction of actors to communicate with the same deadpan sterility to both colleagues and family members may pose a demoralising vision of the future, but on the other hand, he also isolates something unique about humanity beyond its social relationships. Even when these characters are millions of kilometres from loved ones, the drive to simultaneously survive in the most hostile environments and pursue a deeper knowledge of the cosmos endures, defining the wondrous evolution of life at its most basic level.
Through sheer aesthetic precision and formal rigour, Kubrick adopts this ambition on every level of his film’s construction, crafting a staggering work of art that measures up to the cosmic scale it is shooting for. His regular cinematographer John Alcott may not get enough credit for the gorgeous African landscapes on display in the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence, though it is quite clearly Geoffrey Unsworth who comes out looking even better in this collaboration, coordinating the camera with revolving sets that seem to disobey all known laws of gravity. As astronauts walk up walls, across ceilings, and around the circumference of rotating sets, he and Kubrick leave us awed at sights of humans accomplishing the impossible, and lay the groundwork for the sort of mind-bending practical effects that Christopher Nolan would later innovate in Inception.
Kubrick’s rotating sets make for some spectacular practical illusions. Even just watching the behind-the-scenes of how he coordinated the camera with the stunts is mind-boggling.Creative and highly stylised production design with the red Djinn chairs in a clinical white corridor.
When oblique angles that divorce the camera from any upright orientation aren’t Kubrick’s focus, he is often using symmetrical designs as the basis of his visual style. There is even an element of silent filmmaking we find seeping into many of his shots, as he frequently returns to matte paintings and miniatures that evoke the godfather of science-fiction epics, Metropolis. Lengthy passages of time are spent in the vacuum of space gazing at these vast metallic vehicles from a distance, but even inside docking bays and on the moon’s surface we find impressively intricate models, often with tiny humans superimposed for scale. Meanwhile, neo-futurist aesthetics shape Kubrick’s geometric interiors, with red Djinn chairs decorating a stark white corridor where a group of bureaucrats meet, and rounded corridors mirroring identical textural details across both sides of the frame.
A monumental use of miniatures to create vast sets on spaceships, docking bays, and the moon, often including humans for scale. The sheer amount of detail in these designs is remarkable, and it is hard not to note the connection back to Fritz Lang’s silent science-fiction epic Metropolis.Symmetry and geometry in Kubrick’s rigorously curated mise-en-scène – some of the best in history.
The presence of red hues that Kubrick weaves through his mise-en-scène is impossible to ignore as well, flooding rooms with vibrant washes, bouncing control panel lights off the characters’ faces and helmets, and of course embodying pure danger in the terrifyingly simple design of HAL 9000. This unblinking, all-seeing crimson dot is essentially the brain of the ship that Dr. Dave Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole are travelling on to Jupiter, and is tasked with ensuring the mission’s success.
When it comes to narrative power, the ‘Jupiter Mission – 18th Months Later’ section is easily the most traditionally structured, as for the first time in the film we find characters running up against a clearcut villain. This brand of artificial intelligence is supposedly infallible, and yet when it makes a technical error Dave and Bowman are forced to consider shutting him down in a private discussion that they do not realise HAL can lipread every word of. Douglas Rain’s monotonal line deliveries as the supercomputer are chillingly calm as it reasons with utmost rationality why it must kill all humans onboard, but given the self-preservatory nature of its actions, one must also question whether HAL has developed the natural flaws and instincts of living organisms.
How strange it is that the most human-like character from 2001: A Space Odyssey is an AI supercomputer. Certainly no mistake on Kubrick’s part.
In a stroke of formal brilliance, we are reminded that Kubrick set this conflict up back in the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. Domination over other life forms is an integral part of evolution, and violence is the quickest path to achieving that, thus reflecting the ape’s murder of their rival at the waterhole in Dave and HAL’s struggle to respectively assert themselves as the superior species. Perhaps HAL has gained enough sentience to experience real fear as Dave disconnects him, or maybe he has just gathered enough insight into weaker minds to understand how one might manipulate their emotional vulnerabilities. Either way, as Dave enters the red processor core bathed in HAL’s brilliant red light, the supercomputer’s pitiful begging ironically expresses the most human sentiment of any character in the entire film.
“I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.”
The stinger in this scene is the ailing rendition of the folk song ‘Daisy’ that HAL sings as he reverts to his original settings, displaying the tiny piece of humanity contained in his basic programming which now dies with his slowing, deepening voice. Once again, the elimination of a foe has made way for our species’ climb up the evolutionary ladder, guaranteeing safe passage to Jupiter where yet another monolith waits to be discovered.
One of cinema’s most beautiful scenes inside the processor core as HAL is shut down, bathing Dave in red light pouring from every inch of the set and reflecting on his helmet.
The transition that Kubrick makes from what is a relatively straightforward plot into the most avant-garde filmmaking of his entire career is abrupt, yet exactly what we need to enter the right mindset for what’s to come. Luminous colours from all across the spectrum explode in a vortex of light as Dave is sucked through a wormhole near the Jupiter monolith, and Kubrick enlists the help of visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull to execute this psychedelic Star Gate sequence. Fluorescent dyes, smoke, folded lenses, and slit-scan photography are the primary tools in his arsenal here to create galaxies, stars, and waves of plasma swirling through space, though the exceptional beauty of this spectacle is also jarringly offset by the intercut freeze frames of Dave’s painted, contorted face as he is pulled through it all. The bizarre look of the alien planet he soon finds himself flying over is achieved through similar technical experimentation, colouring the negative film prints of skies, deserts, canyons, oceans, and mountains, as well as the extreme close-ups of his eye that change hue with each terrified blink.
Douglas Trumbull’s Stargate sequence is psychedelic and totally entrancing in its experimental construction. Almost fifty years later he would come out of retirement and recreate a more delicately spiritual version of this in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
Lasting almost ten minutes, this hypnotic montage is enough to disorientate us completely by the time we reach Dave’s last destination – the location that each monolith was pointing to along the way. The small, windowless room he lands in might almost resemble a neoclassical home with traditional furniture and art were it not for the nonsensical, inhuman design of everything else, from the lights beaming up on the floor to the clinical white palette which consumes it all. If this is where he has been led by higher alien life forms, then it could very well be the enclosure they have built for him, attempting to replicate his habitat in much the same way a zoo might for their caged animals. Foreign noises reverberate just outside the walls, indicating the presence of something observing him further, while time slips away like water. Kubrick’s editing is precise in its perspective shifts, in each instance catching the glimpse of another figure within Dave’s new home, only to discover an older version of him who we latch onto. Who should he meet at the end of his current life as well, but the monolith which has been guiding him this whole time? Just like the apes and the astronauts who found it on the moon, he reaches out, ready for whatever comes next.
Another feat of production design in the alien habitat designed for humans. Lights shine up from the floors, windows and doors are completely absent, and the whole room is almost entirely stripped of colour.
The newly reborn Star Child that Dave evolves into has the uncorrupted, infantile appearance of a human baby, and yet its wide eyes gaze upon its home planet of Earth with a knowing enlightenment, prepared for new beginnings. That this is the third and final form of humanity as depicted in Kubrick’s film is subtly crucial to the ternary structure that he has been building from the start, integrating it into the three dividing chapters, the three versions of Dave who live in the alien enclosure, and the three astronauts hibernating aboard the Jupiter ship. Even György Ligeti’s requiem plays on three separate occasions with the monolith, save for its aforementioned final pairing with ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, in which he conclusively separates it from the discordant terror of the unknown and opens us up to a wilful embrace of the transcendent. With his indisputable talent as an avant-garde storyteller, Kubrick accomplishes a level of formal perfection in 2001: A Space Odyssey that so few artists have ever come close to, boldly reaching out to touch the infinite, and revealing a glimpse of its sublime wonder as it reaches back to us.
Kubrick’s ternary structure echoes through 2001: A Space Odyssey, repeating this motif of reaching for the monolith on three separate occasions across characters and chapters.A strangely optimistic ending for Kubrick as humanity reaches its next phase of evolution, embracing their infinite potential and heading towards an unknown future.
2001: A Space Odyssey is currently streaming on SBS on Demand, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
Merely describing the vibrant colour palette that consumes the four women of Cries and Whispers as red wouldn’t quite do its richness justice. Its carpets, furniture, and drapes are shaded a deep, vibrant crimson, bleeding an arresting sensuality throughout the 19th-century Swedish manor which most of its inhabitants are incapable of expressing themselves. This is the colour of the human soul, Ingmar Bergman rationalises in his screenplay, but it also represents blood and passion, drawing this family household to the edge of its sanity where an almost fantastical dream state takes over.
The white and black tones which puncture Bergman’s neatly curated interiors offer a stylistic counterpoint to these saturated reds, though they too confine characters within a rigorous dichotomy, presenting purity and life on one side while grief and death beckon from the other. Neither Karin’s cold severity nor Maria’s flighty temperament can offer the solace that their dying sister Agnes needs in her final days, and so the spiritual strength that their housemaid Anna finds to escape this scarlet membrane brings a redemptive grace to her mortal suffering.
Cries and Whispers is simply one of the greatest displays of mise-en-scène put to screen, drifting through these powerful colour compositions of red, black, and white with masterful blocking.
The Madonna and Christ allegory which Bergman draws so delicately in his imagery is especially apparent in this relationship between Anna and Agnes, seeing the latter abandoned by all her loved ones save for a single mother figure. Through her cries and screams, she expresses the pain that others would much rather stifle in a “web of lies,” while finding maternal nourishment in Anna’s warm embrace. It isn’t hard to see where this nurturing compassion comes from either – early on we find Anna praying for her deceased daughter, simultaneously mourning her lost innocence and demonstrating an unconditional faith in God. As she bears her breast and reads from a storybook, Bergman nestles her face against Agnes’ in a tightly framed composition of profound intimacy, filling in the void that each feel in their respective losses of a biological mother and child.
Even while Bergman’s photography flourishes in its wide shots, his trademark blocking in close-ups is still very present, especially in the intimate bond between Agnes and Anna.
It is a wonder that this love abides in a household of such glacial friction, distilled so hauntingly in one dream sequence following Agnes’ death. Both she and Anna’s daughter are effectively resurrected here with Christlike parallels, as it is the sound of a young girl’s crying which leads Anna through the mansion’s red corridors to the bedroom where Agnes lies. Outside, Karin and Maria stand frozen. Agnes’ face is barely seen as she speaks to each of them, disembodying her voice as she invites them inside. “I want nothing to do with your death,” Karin cruelly asserts before exiting, while Maria’s show of affection crumbles into fear the moment her sister reaches out and grasps her hand. Only Anna is there to nurse Agnes’ frail body through the pain, as Bergman arranges them in an extraordinary tableau evoking the Pietà – the theological icon of Mary cradling Christ’s body after his descent from the cross. This is also one of the few shots in Cries and Whispers which sees Bergman relinquish his crimson palette to clean, white tones, bathing both women in a sea of spiritual purity.
A divine tableau evoking the Pietà, as Anna cradles a mortal Agnes in her arms.
Even beyond this explicitly surreal sequence, there is an atmosphere of otherworldly detachment that persists in the narrative’s quiet, languid flow, echoing Bergman’s previous film The Silence. “I hear only the wind and the ticking of clocks,” Anna remarks at one point, reflecting on the subtle, dialogue-free sound design, representing the “wind” as Agnes’ rattling gasps for air. Together, these rhythmically embody what editor Ken Dancyger describes as “the continuity of time and life,” and merge with formal cutaways to swinging pendulums and moving minute hands. The mystical pull of mortality is felt on every level of Bergman’s direction, luring us into the uneasy mind of each sister and empathising with their emotional disconnection.
“I sometimes wander through this childhood home of ours, where everything is both strange and familiar… and I feel like I’m in a dream, and some event of great importance lies in store for us.”
Bergman runs this superb formal motif of ticking clocks through his sound design and cutaways, making the passage of time fully tangible.
Key to Bergman’s construction of this reverie are those scarlet fades which elliptically bridge one scene to the next, lifting us outside the passage of time altogether. They also formally mark our escapes into his characters’ minds, pairing with close-ups of each woman’s face half-obscured in shadow and drenching them in his bloodred hue, before entering the deeper levels of their subconscious. While Anna’s thoughts manifests as a dream, Agnes, Karin, and Maria’s backstories emerge in flashbacks, blurring fantasy and memories in a magical realist style presaging Fanny and Alexander.
Bergman’s other main motif in Cries and Whispers are the elliptical red fades over close-ups, often as we slip into the dreams and flashbacks of his characters.
This is also where Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann excel in further developing the prickly weaknesses of their characters, seeing both distance themselves from their husbands to violent results. While Maria’s affair with a visiting doctor drives Joakim to feebly attempt suicide via seppuku, Karin turns a shard of shattered glass on herself in a self-mutilating display of hatred. After cutting her genitals in front of Fredrik, she smears the blood across her face with a contemptuous smile, simultaneously absorbing the red palette of her surroundings and destroying any means of sexual connection.
Viscerally uncomfortable violence and self-mutilation spills out from the silent contempt between husbands, wives, and sisters, driving each other further away.
In the present, both continue to live with the consequences of their selfishness and hatred. Karin recoils at the slightest touch of affection, paradoxically rejecting the kindness of her sister even as she craves it, and Maria is still a slave to her own fickle desire for pleasure and attention. When the doctor returns, her attempt to rekindle their affair meets nothing more than a cold description of how her appearance has festered with her apathy, and of course Bergman plays the entire monologue out in a single close-up studying every detail of Ullmann’s silent reaction.
“Look in the mirror. You’re beautiful. Perhaps even more than when we were together. But you’ve changed and I want you to see how. Now your eyes cast quick, calculating, side glances. You used to look ahead straightforwardly, openly, without disguise. Your mouth has a slightly hungry, dissatisfied expression. It used to be so soft. Your complexion is pale now. You wear makeup. Your fine, wide brow has four lines above each eye now. You can’t see them in this light, but you can in the bright of day. You know what caused those lines? Indifference. And this fine contour from your ear to your chin is no longer so finely drawn – the result of too much comfort and laziness. And there, by the bridge of your nose. Why do you sneer so often? You see that? You sneer too often. You see it? And look under your eyes. The sharp, scarcely noticeable wrinkles from your boredom and impatience.”
Liv Ullmann is on a transcendent run at this point in her career. Even though Erland Josephson is delivering this monologue, it is her face that Bergman’s camera lingers on, examining the details written into its creases and glances.
When we consider how favoured Maria was by her mother above her sisters, the psychological roots of her shallow vanity and strained family relations become evident. It is a clever formal touch from Bergman to double cast Ullmann as the mother as well in Agnes’ childhood flashbacks, suggesting that the two characters she plays are not so different, and sensitising us even further to the subjective nature of these sisters’ memories.
Within this ensemble, only Agnes seems to treat these recollections with some self-awareness, so it is fair to reason that this is why her recollections eliminate those dreamy red fades and instead play out with the pensive voiceover of her diary. Though her mother could be a “playfully cruel” paradox at times, Agnes also confesses that she understands her much better with age, empathising with “her boredom, her impatience, her longing, and her loneliness.”
Ullmann also has the brief but significant role of the mother, only ever appearing in flashbacks – it is her ghost that hangs over the sisters in the present day. This would be Harriet Andersson’s last role in a Bergman film until Fanny and Alexander in 1982, and though her screen time is far less than Ullmann or Thulin’s, she makes her mark with her tortured, dying screams.
Given how walled off Karin and Maria are from their own spiritual conscience, the redemptive peace that their sister discovers in her suffering is not one that either can grasp at this point in their troubled lives. For Agnes at least, salvation can be found just beyond the red walls of her physical confinement, as Bergman ends Cries and Whispers on a memory that is entirely free of that radiant hue. Only when we look to a happier past can we venture outside this oppressive manor and into bright, sunny gardens, as she walks with her Karin, Maria, and Anna in white dresses. In the triad of tones which form Bergman’s dominant palette, it is that colour which represents grace that lives on in Agnes’ legacy, illustrating her profound gratitude for life.
One of the few shots in the film where red is entirely absent, instead emphasising the pure whites which cloak each sister and their maid in flashback.
“Thus, the cries and whispers fall silent,” Bergman’s epitaph reads, drawing spiritual peace from humanity’s emotional and physical anguish. His wrestling with matters of faith has never been so vividly illustrated as it is here in a film that stands among the greatest uses of colour in cinema, untangling the stunted relationships and regretful insecurities of these four women through their surreal, tortured dreams.
Cries and Whispers is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV.
Akira Kurosawa’s cynical landscapes of ambition, fate, and consequences make for a perfect marriage with Shakespeare’s grand historical tragedies. “This is a wicked world. To save yourself you often first must kill,” decrees Lady Asaji to her husband General Washizu in Throne of Blood, respectively standing in for Lady and Lord Macbeth, and possessing the same cutthroat megalomania. Like their literary counterpoints, Washizu and Asaji’s futures are written out by the prophecies of mysterious, supernatural forces far beyond their comprehension, raising them to great heights before sending them plummeting back to Earth as mortals terrorised by their own guilty consciences. The formal groundwork is there for a narrative steeped in centuries-old storytelling traditions, and yet it is through Kurosawa’s adaptation of the Scottish tragedy that Throne of Blood takes on new dimensions within feudal Japanese history, warping the doomed General Washizu into a figurehead of samurai brutality.
Especially significant to this reinterpretation of Macbeth is its fresh setting during the Sengoku period – a time of civil wars through the 15th and 16th century which saw samurai clans fight for political control of Japan. The romanticised code of honour they are often nostalgically associated with bears no relevance here, and instead leaves a moral vacuum for treacherous social climbers looking to exploit weakened political structures.
Traditions and designs of feudal Japan are substantially present in Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation, using giant wooden fortresses and samurai armies for his vast scenic backdrops.
Kurosawa stages such power plays against bleak, greyscale landscapes of giant wooden fortresses and overgrown forests in Throne of Blood, spilling personal conflicts out into monumental battle scenes featuring hundreds of extras. Just because his visual stylisation doesn’t reach the level of Seven Samurai or Rashomon doesn’t mean his talent for deep focus blocking isn’t on lush display, but even more deserving of praise is his his aesthetic use of weather to confront his characters with the might of the natural world.
Thick fog constantly rolls across Kurosawa’s scenery, cloaking it in an air of supernatural mystery.
Most prominently, thick clouds of fog roll across his barren hills and valleys, obscuring horizons and disorientating Washizu as he makes his way home from war at the start of the film. It has an almost ethereal quality to it, seeming to emanate from that evil spirit which sits in a cage of bamboo and forecasts the samurai commander’s rise to power. Rather than taking the form of a witch, this soothsayer is far more ghostly in appearance, and later even wispily floats through a misty forest crowded with dense, black branches as it delivers the fateful second half of its prophecy.
The three witches are replaced with a prophetic evil spirit in Throne of Blood, and Kurosawa designs a haunting environment around him with the mist and crowded, black branches of the forest.
The other spectre who materialises in Throne of Blood belongs to Washizu’s friend, Miki, who he kills out of paranoid concern for his own security. The ghost’s supernatural arrival unfolds in one smooth dolly shot at a banquet, pushing forward past an empty seat towards Washizu’s anxious face, and then pulling back to reveal Miki’s spirit now occupying that space. Whether he is an apparition that has come to haunt his murderer or merely a psychological manifestation of guilt, his mysterious appearance heralds even severer weather, with rain whipping the castle in a violent gale and lightning flashing across the sky.
A fluid tracking shot forwards and back again to reveal Miki’s pale ghost, silently tormenting Washizu at the banquet and driving him mad with guilt.
Even Kurosawa’s direction of the final act’s foretold ‘moving forest’ arrives like a primal force of nature, emerging from the thick fog and advancing with the heavy wind towards Washizu’s fortress. It is a smart choice for Throne of Blood to omit the passage from Macbeth which plainly describes the enemy’s disguise, as Kurosawa instead hits us with the frightening sight of these trees coming to life at the exact moment that Washizu recognises his own impending mortality. His ego and power may be mighty, but even that cannot stand up against the power of the ancient, formidable powers of fate.
Kurosawa visualises the moving forest as a primal force of nature, ripped up from its roots and animated by the sheer power of prophetic destiny.
Motivated as much by fear as he is ambition and arrogance, the crazed Washizu does not waver, and neither does Toshiro Mifune in his single greatest moment as this Japanese incarnation of Macbeth. His fiery eyes light up the screen as a gleeful snarl stretches across his face, while behind him Kurosawa sets a majestic military backdrop of samurai raising flags and banners in crumbling fealty. This leads into another alteration of Shakespeare’s original text, and perhaps the most significant. With the prophecy that ‘no man of woman born can harm Macbeth’ absent, Washizu’s death is placed in the hands of his own disillusioned men, imbuing this legend with a revolutionary turmoil that grounds it even deeper in Japan’s politically unstable Sengoku period.
Throne of Blood’s single greatest composition with the backdrop of samurai behind Washizu – epic historical imagery.Toshiro Mifune’s is incredibly animated as Washizu, lighting up the screen with his crazed eyes.
In extreme contrast to Mifune’s wide, crazed eyes, Isuzu Yamada displays Lady Asaji’s expressions like wooden masks, not unlike those worn by performers of Noh theatre. The guilt she exhibits is of an entirely different kind to Mifune’s fierce insecurity – rather than lashing out, she is found delusionally trying to clean her hands of blood that isn’t there, with her face contorted into the static image of a demonic hannya mask and her honed gestures mimicking those of Noh tradition.
In contrast to Mifune’s wildly expressive autocrat, Isuzu Yamada plays a much subtler and more cunning villain – very influenced by the masked performances of Noh theatre.
Kurosawa continues to weave these elements of Japanese theatre even deeper into its structure through his austere musical bookends, summarising Throne of Blood’s narrative into a couple of short, choral verses as fog continues to roll through the grey scenery.
“Look on the ruins,
Of the castle of delusion.
Haunted now only,
By the spirits of the dead.
Once a scene of carnage,
Borne of consuming desire,
Never changing,
Now and for eternity.”
Like the music of Noh theatre, these chants are limited in tonal and dynamic range, moving through repetitive patterns that restore a sense of order to Kurosawa’s world of subversive chaos. Tradition is the bedrock of these cultures, as ingrained in their social structures as it is in the laws of a calm yet overwhelming universe, and continuing to be carried out by forces of nature and destiny when humans fail to uphold its rigorous standards. Few films have truly captured the cinematic potential of Shakespeare onscreen in the art form’s history, and perhaps none with as much creative formal finesse as Kurosawa’s cynical exposure of the treacherous dishonour entrenched in samurai history.
Throne of Blood is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
