Category: 1959

Masaki Kobayashi | 3 parts (3hr 1min – 3hr 28min)

Sympathetic soldier, prisoner, and political pacifist Kaji seems to live multiple lives across the modern odyssey that Masaki Kobayashi lays out in The Human Condition trilogy. Through several years of Kaji’s time spent in World War II, he traverses virtually every inch of Manchuria in northeast China, bearing witness to experiences from all over the spectrum of life. Over time, encounters with birth, death, love, sex, culture, grief, conflict, faith, desire, and fear build towards a greater understanding of what it means to exist on Earth – and yet the wisdom Kaji is granted does not come with some enlightening inner peace. If anything, it only threatens the humanity which resides within him, as Kobayashi piles endless tests of moral endurance upon this man who strives for the betterment of society.

Few times in the history of film has a director adapted a novel with as sweeping majesty and creative invention as Masaki Kobayashi does here, rendering entire worlds of literary prose with astonishing cinematic magnitude. The Human Condition is an accomplishment of epic proportions, matched perhaps only by Gone with the Wind or The Lord of the Rings in its equal devotion to the source material and awe-inspiring spectacle. The title itself makes a promise of daunting philosophical scope which might seem more suited to an introspective drama than a war film, and yet Kobayashi’s harrowing examination of modern civilisation at its lowest manifests these abstract ideas on a pragmatically large scale. It is here in humanity’s darkest days that its most vital essence becomes both the strongest threat to widespread injustice, as well as its greatest target, turning Kaji’s soul into the last remaining battleground of moral fortitude.

This 28-year-old idealist might not see it at the time, but these are the stakes laid out when he is first assigned to the role of supervisor at a slave-driven mining operation in Manchuria. Even the imperial Japanese authorities who place him there realise how little he is cut out for the job, and yet the report he has submitted against the exploitation of Chinese labour has nevertheless inspired them to send him off for a test of his naïve, pacifist principles. When he arrives with his newlywed wife Mochiko, he also comes with huge ambitions in tow – a revised employment system, improved working conditions, and rationing plans are just the start of it. “Take care of the men and the ore will come out,” he declares, practically bringing it all back a results-driven work ethic.

The delivery of 600 new ‘special’ workers who have been taken as prisoners-of-war becomes his first trial. The moment the train doors are unlocked, the gaunt, half-dead men come pouring out like zombies, swarming Kaji and his fellow administrators for any food or water they can get their hands on. That he is driven to violence as a means of control so early in this series immediately introduces a crushing hopelessness – if he can’t maintain peaceful leadership now, then what does this mean for him later when more pressure is inevitably applied? In the aftermath, it becomes apparent that 12 men died from overheating in the carriages, and 150 others escaped upon arrival. Failure is a companion Kaji will come to know very well in his journey.

Kobayashi has no reservations in landing us right next to him through these physical and emotional challenges either. Divided into three films respectively subtitled No Greater Love, Road to Eternity, and A Soldier’s Prayer, this ten-hour trilogy uses its length to gruelling effect, with each death and personal defeat accumulating in subtle increments towards a mountain of despair not even Kaji can bear.

Perhaps even more crucial to the vivid experience of The Human Condition than its scale is Kobayashi’s bleak, rugged photography, advancing in stylistic virtuosity with each film. Though not as widely recognised as his Japanese contemporaries Akira Kurosawa or Yasujirō Ozu, his mastery of visual composition through blocking rivals both, even as he is largely working with stark, desolate landscapes. A total dedication to building out the background of even relatively minor scenes consistently shines through the trilogy, connecting Kaji to hostile environments and enormous crowds of extras. In the labour camp setting of the first film, watchtowers frequently loom over him in low angles as he talks through barbed wire to embittered prisoners, always keeping that constant surveillance in the back of our minds. As these men are sent off to work at the mines, Kobayashi lines hundreds of them up in zig-zag paths across rocky hilltops and valleys, and pans his camera along their enormous trail from one horizon to another in a single magnificent shot.

When Kaji departs the labour camp and is forced to serve in the Japanese army, the harshness of Kobayashi’s scenery continues to transform, pitching him against new threats within yet another corrupt institution. The depth of field present in his cinematography impresses even more when we find ourselves in army camps, its rough interiors lined with wooden bunk beds upon which soldiers are staggered across all levels of the frame. The power dynamics are evident in this staging – much like at the labour camp, Kaji is ostracised for his Communist-adjacent politics, while other recruits like the similarly rebellious Shinjo and the meek Obara also find themselves targeted by their more nationalistic peers.

This instalment, Road to Eternity, clearly sets a standard of war film which would echo through history, especially providing the inspiration for Full Metal Jacket with its bifurcated structure split between boot camp and the battlefield. The suicide of the deeply tormented Private Pyle in Stanley Kubrick’s film mirrors Obara’s here too, though this death carries a tinge of bitter irony when the rifle’s misfire inspires a renewed desire to live – “Is that a sign that I shouldn’t? Yes! After all, one can die at any time” – before incidentally killing him a few seconds later.

Kobayashi’s dark sense of humour is clearly integral to his approach of such weighty material. The cruel fate which drew Obara to his tragic end is the same which leads virtually every other character along winding roads towards their inevitable destinies. For Kaji especially, there is a circular poetry to his journey that transforms him from a supervisor of a Japanese camp to a prisoner in a Soviet camp, inflicting the same inhumane punishments against him which he once sought to combat.

Kaji’s integrity has been tested many times up to this point, even seeing him brutally murder a fellow Japanese soldier to keep his hiding spot, and yet this is the first time his Communist sympathies are directly challenged. When he tries to express them to his captors, he comes up against a language barrier that the corrupt translator ensures stays in place, and the political hypocrisy of those in charge similarly weakens his resolve. The theoretical equality of this supposedly classless ideology is nowhere to be found in this punitive, hierarchal institution, and Kaji’s impassioned monologue towards those Soviets he once expected to be allies falls on deaf ears that cannot understand his Japanese.

“In your urgency, supervision grows slack. You stick to inflexible rules. Good intentions are suppressed, and evil is tolerated. The fact that socialism is better than fascism isn’t enough to keep us alive!”

In environments as aggressive as this, even the most basic human communication cannot function, leaving those who do share some level of understanding to bond on more intimate levels than normal. Therein lies another key aspect of the ‘human condition’ – the desire to seek companionship effectively becomes a form of emotional starvation in times where common empathy is lacking. For Kaji specifically, it is his love of Mochiko which remains his core motivation when all his principles are stripped away, but even he feels the lure of extramarital attraction in her absence. A sweet but fleeting connection with a nurse in a military hospital almost develops into an affair, yet simply ends on friendly terms with him teasing the possibility that they might see each other again.

This is no romantic Jacques Demy musical though, bringing distant lovers together by whims of fate. Every scene of intimacy in The Human Condition hinges on the understanding that anyone could potentially die at any time, and that this moment of ecstasy may be all they have left. Hearing that prostitutes will be visiting the camp ignites joy in the Chinese prisoners of the first film, and the alliance built between those men and women fosters some of the strongest relationships of the entire series, with both working together on multiple escape attempts.

Later when Kaji abandons the army and finds himself leading Japanese refugees through dangerous forests and wastelands, Kobayashi orchestrates yet another profoundly affectionate scene between those whose lives have been destroyed. As most of the men and women make love in a farmhouse, Kaji sits by a campfire with another woman seeking warmth. Sensing his judgement of those inside who are married, she mounts a poignant defence of them, while Kobayashi sensitively dollies his camera slowly in on her face.

“Even if we get home alive, how many of us can return to our former lives? When women and soldiers spend fleeting nights together, they always talk about returning home together. When flesh meets flesh, it really seems possible. But at dawn the soldiers are strangers again. They get restless and anxious and grab their weapons and sneak off.”

At this point her monologue turns into voiceover, as Kobayashi detaches his camera from the conversation and starts moving it into the farmhouse. A single, parallel tracking shot glides across a row of beds, upon which bodies wrap around each other in sexual embrace, and yet whatever pleasure we expect to find is muted. As she mourns their collective futures, a faint sob can be heard in the background, and a montage unfolds of their distraught faces crying into each other’s arms.

“We’ll never get home. We’ll never see our loved ones again. We don’t even know how long we’ll live. We all share the same fate. We’re all ruined. We eat only to keep our strength from failing.”

For a director so dedicated to epic imagery, Kobayashi is notably skilled at depicting the psychology of his characters, entering the deepest recesses of their mind. Close-ups like those in the farmhouse offer a glimpse into emotions shared by entire communities, but within Kaji’s own story too we often get voiceovers of his immediate thoughts paired with Tatsuya Nakadai’s haunted, wide-eyed expressions. His performance is nothing less than breathtaking, especially when one considers where it starts and finishes, mapping out the erosion of every belief that defines Kaji as an individual until all he is left with is a single, primal desire to return home. Hatred gradually settles into his soul, and finally wins out in one of the trilogy’s greatest shots that smothers his face with darkness, leaving only a thin sliver of light to illuminate the bitter anger in his profile.

Once Kaji’s mind is infected with the madness of war, so too does Kobayashi’s cinematography throw its axis off in chaotic canted angles. After a devastating battle which unfolds like a horror film in Road to Eternity, Kaji ventures into the wilderness in A Soldier’s Prayer with a few troops by his side. For the first time he finds himself beyond the reach of any corrupt institutions, and instead bucks up against the devastating power of the natural world. Tilted tracking shots stumble with them in total exhaustion, bearing resemblance to similar visual devices innovated by Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov from around the same time, as delusional voiceovers echo through his mind.

It is an incredibly effective technique that Kobayashi touches several other times in this trilogy, most notably during the execution of Chinese prisoners-of-war after an attempted escape. Kaji’s world is totally tipped off-balance as he kneels beside them in agony and empathy, looking almost like he too is condemned to suffer his own parallel spiritual death. Kao is the only one among them to put up a fight in furious protest, and when he too eventually gives in, Kobayashi physically moves the camera to straighten out his final canted angle as if in quiet resignation. “This is your true form. The face of a man, the heart of a beast,” Kao spits at the hopeless Kaji before his demise. These words cut deep, ultimately spurring Kaji to take the moral high ground against his fellow Japanese – but for what? The purity of his own soul? His courage is admirable, but the actual change he can affect is minimal.

Then again, perhaps the inspiration expressed by a colleague upon his departure from the labour offers some justification. It is but a tiny spark of hope in a series that shows us time and time again the powerlessness of individual morality. Even as Kaji trudges through distant, snowy fields in his final days, utterly drained of those ambitions and convictions which defined him as an individual at the start of The Human Condition, he is fuelled solely by the last remaining shred of his humanity which could not be destroyed – his love for Michiko. It persists in hallucinations of her elated voice welcoming him home as Kobayashi frames his frozen, bearded face against dark, angry skies, and drives him right up to his final steps.

In the end, it is Kaji’s body which gives up before his spirit. Perhaps this is the core of the human condition, Kobayashi posits, finally distilled into its purest form – a desire for goodness persisting not for some moral high ground, or even in some false belief that it will reliably prevail over adversity, but simply because it is our most base, natural instinct. In this moment, every minute of Kobayashi’s epic, ten-hour trilogy can be viscerally felt, and we are left with nothing but the lifeless remains of humanity destroyed by the very same war it created.

The Human Condition trilogy is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Guru Dutt | 2hr 28min

Famous actors and directors may come and go, but the giant soundstage that Guru Dutt so frequently returns to throughout Kaagaz Ke Phool is seemingly immortal, becoming a glorious, unageing monument to India’s entertainment industry. It is the site that former director Suresh Sinha returns to as an elderly man at the end of his life, walking its rafters and lyrically lamenting those who have parted from his life. It is the studio where he once operated at the height of his powers, shooting an adaptation of the novel Devdas and cementing himself as one of India’s most acclaimed filmmakers. And in the film’s most inspired musical number ‘Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam’, it also hosts a blossoming romance between Suresh and his hand-picked rising star, Shanti.

The piercing beam of light which bursts through its open doors and dramatically cuts out silhouettes of its characters dims at the start of this sequence, and in its place Dutt shines a heavenly spotlight down from above. What unfolds is a beautifully understated sequence of affectionate longing so inexpressible that these two lovers cannot even verbalise their deep sentiment, leaving Geeta Dutt’s singing voiceover to express their most heartfelt desires. Guru Dutt meanwhile dollies in on the lovers’ yearning gazes and circles them with crane shots, imbuing the scene with a magical realist quality which sees their souls step out of their bodies and move into the spotlight. After this neat bit of film trickery, their physical selves are quick to follow. With his frame obstructions and depth of field, Dutt keeps on hitting one brilliant composition after another throughout this silent dance, before finally separating Suresh and Shanti on either side the studio, her in the light and him in darkness.

In essence, this is the story of their relationship compressed into a few minutes and rendered purely through Dutt’s majestic visual artistry. One successful star discovers a hidden talent in an unknown woman, brings her into the spotlight, and eventually fades from public view while she continues to flourish – it is a fable that Hollywood has told through the generations in remakes of A Star is Born, and which is recontextualised here in Kaagaz Ke Phool with the Hindi film industry. Given the actual circumstances that surrounded Dutt’s professional relationship with his co-star Waheeda Rehman, there is an added poignancy here. This sweeping musical epic was a box office failure at the time, ending Dutt’s remarkable run of films five years before his suicide in 1964, while Rehman would keep working for another sixty years, right into the present day.

There is brilliant circular form built into this narrative structure, and Dutt does well to emphasise it even further in Suresh and Shanti’s individual arcs, marking the heights of both their successes with masses of zealous fans. They invasively look down the lens through crowded point-of-view shots, feeding Suresh’s aloof ego the first time around, and later halting Shanti in her tracks as she chases down her now-obscure lover fleeing from this life. The music that plays out here is also where Kaagaz Ke Phool gets its title, as he sorrowfully sings of a thirsty bee searching for nectar yet finding only “paper flowers” – artificial imitations of true beauty.

Indeed, the false glamour of this industry takes its toll on Suresh and Shanti. Gossip columns linking them together while Suresh is in the process of separating from his wife make his daughter Pammi a target for bullies at school, and this subplot evolves into a melodrama which pushes Shanti away from the industry. With contracts locking her in place though, she cannot leave for good, and Suresh too grows depressed when he loses custody of Pammi in court and turns to alcohol. As magnificently sentimental as this romantic tragedy is, the comic relief that Johnny Walker offers in his role as Suresh’s brother-in-law does not land with the same impact as it did in Aar Paar or Pyaasa, and unfortunately marks a small flaw in an otherwise intoxicating film.

Beyond the performances and narrative, the key to the swelling emotions of Dutt’s characters lies in his imposing cinematic spectacle, connecting them to a dynamic style of rousing camera movements and striking visual frames. New to his repertoire as well are deep focus, low-angle shots which turn ceilings into exquisite backdrops much like Orson Welles before him.

There is no doubting his ability as a craftsman of grand aesthetics, but it is equally his ability to tie them so affectingly to his story which lands Kaagaz Ke Phool so smoothly in its final minutes, taking us back to the soundstage in the present day where the elderly Suresh has been nostalgically reminiscing his youth, success, and lost love. Descending from the rafters, he takes his place in the director chair among the scattered props, lights, and cameras. As he passes away and the giant doors rolls open to begin another day of work, the sun hits him one last time, drawing all eyes to his slouched figure. Almost like an ascension to an afterlife, the camera lifts into the rafters, punctuating the end of his life with the blinding white flash of the spotlight. There is certainly something poignantly poetic in the way Dutt’s premature passing mirrors the ending of his final film, and yet Kaagaz Ke Phool also captures the essence of an artistic imagination profuse with creative joy, reminiscing the love which inspired him to craft some of India’s finest cinema.

Kaagaz Ke Phool is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Alain Resnais | 1hr 32min

Three years on from his landmark Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, Alain Resnais was posed a new challenge – to recreate a similar historical depiction of Hiroshima’s bombing. His inspiration to turn it into the narrative film Hiroshima Mon Amour wasn’t just driven by his reluctance to tread familiar ground though. His recognition of the impossibility to accurately portray such profound human suffering would also drive this decision.

The opening fifteen minutes of contradictions is an absolute refute of those who would suggest otherwise. Close-ups of arms and bodies locked in a romantic embrace weave images of pleasure into the raw pain of newsreels, re-enactments, and surviving artefacts, as observed by Emmanuelle Riva’s unnamed ‘Elle’ (Her).

“I saw the people walking around. The people walk around, lost in thought, among the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, among the photographs, the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, the explanations, for want of something else. Four times at the museum of Hiroshima.”

For all of her observations though, Eiji Okada’s ‘Lui’ (Him) only ever provides the same variation on a single response.

“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”

Nuclear ash falls on their naked bodies, smothering their love with echoes of past traumas, and yet they remain inexplicably divided over the details of those memories. Elle believes she has seen Hiroshima’s suffering, in much the same way we might think we have grasped the Holocaust through Resnais’ documentary, but she has not seen it in the same way as Him who lost his family to the tragedy. The combination of dolly shots rolling down hospital hallways, museum exhibitions, and through historical sites with the repetitive voiceover calls to mind similar scenes in both Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad, summoning us into a dreamlike reverie where words matter less than the rhythms they inspire. Montages like these are where Resnais is most comfortable, prompting melancholy considerations of what it means to truly “see” Hiroshima rather than making any misguided attempt to understand its horror.

This is a film of intersections – past and present, France and Japan, man and woman, conflicting sides of one war. An early shot of two wristwatches laid over each other clues us into this meeting of timelines. Over a decade has passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, and now Elle has arrived in the city to act in an antiwar film being shot there. The city is still marked by tragedy, but its people recognise the need to keep moving on. Lui stands among them, as much a personification of Hiroshima as she is of her own small French village, Nevers. “Hiroshima. That’s your name,” she tells him. “And your name is Nevers. Nevers in France,” he responds.

It isn’t unusual for Resnais to infuse his wistful allegories with such elusive subtlety, though it is tough to imagine how this magnificently cryptic film would have looked without Marguerite Duras’ poetic screenplay. At this point in her career, she was primarily a novelist, making Hiroshima Mon Amour her foray into the world of cinema. Her dialogue flows lyrically in conversations and voiceovers, pondering the sensitive memories which have come to define both Elle and Lui, but there is also extraordinary formal ambition in her to-and-fro flashbacks.

Hiroshima as we know it in the film exists in the present, separate from history. By shooting on location, Resnais captures the spark of life which has returned to its restless urban landscapes, piercing the dark sky with flickering city lights and imposing magnificent pieces of architecture on our characters’ pensive wandering. There is an implicit aversion to the cold stillness of death in Elle’s love of this vitality, expressing her admiration for “Cities where there’s always someone awake, day or night.” In blinding contrast, Resnais’ representation of her home back in Nevers is tarnished with memories of torture and grief. Her hope for the future died along with the German soldier she fell in love with during Nazi occupation, and unlike Lui, she is still trapped in her past.

As such, a paradox forms in Hiroshima Mon Amour. With these separate historical periods occupying the same space, time ceases to exist. Long dissolves frequently erase the years that divide one scene from the next, and as Elle walks the streets in one scene with Resnais’ dollying camera angled up at the surrounding buildings, he alternates between images of Hiroshima at night and Nevers in the day. All through this film, he is formally dedicated to studying this surprising proximity between such distant settings. Even while both exist thousands of kilometres apart, each are scarred by war in their own unfortunate ways.

Perhaps this is why Elle believes she can comprehend Hiroshima’s tragedy on some level. Even after being told it is an impossible task for those who weren’t there, she nonetheless continues trying to draw a connection, using her brief affair with Lui to relive her past relationship with the German soldier. Simply the way he twitches his hand in his sleep becomes a catalyst for reminiscence, launching her into a nostalgic rumination over her dead lover’s final moments.

Although Okada brings a poignant warmth to his part as Lui, it is Riva who commands the screen with her expressive face, constantly reliving events that are invisible to everyone but her. All around her though, Japan continues to strive forward. Even the accommodation where she is staying, Hotel New Hiroshima, stands as a testament to those efforts, forming ravishing modern backdrops to Elle and Lui’s fleeting romance. Some experiences of history are simply irreconcilable, despite their similarities. For all the devastation that the bombing of Hiroshoma wreaked on its citizens, the fateful event meant something very different for all those living in France.

“The end of the war.”

The division between everything these two lovers represent is as simple as that. Just as these lives, cities, and eras have intersected at a specific point in time, they will also inevitably be ripped apart, set back on their own distinct paths. Resnais may spend time considering those tragedies which he never experienced firsthand in Hiroshima Mon Amour, but he realises that to try and evoke empathy through explicit artistic depiction would be futile. Cinema is a medium uniquely suited to the psychological study of time and subjectivity, and by narrowing such broad concepts down to a single catastrophe that echoed across nations and decades, he keeps digging deeper into the compounded layers of its mournful, enduring legacy.

Hiroshima Mon Amour is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Douglas Sirk | 2hr 5min

It is an unusual family portrait which Douglas Sirk paints in Imitation of Life, at least in the context of 1950s America. Half of its members are white, the other half Black, and there are no men to be found within it at all. Love interests skirt around the edges, but otherwise the film’s feminine sensitivities flourish across boundaries of age, class, and race, emerging in delicate cinematic paintings of privilege and social adversity.

On one side of the family we have Lora, an aspiring white actress and single mother, raising her daughter, Susie. A chance encounter at the beach one day leads to her meeting Annie, a Black single mother, and her fair-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, who Susie takes to right away. These four women become inseparable, and Lora soon offers Annie and Sarah Jane a place in their home while she gets her acting career off the ground.

Along Lora and Susie’s narrative thread, we find a mother growing more distant from her daughter due to her fame and demanding schedule. The cosy green drapes and patterned wallpaper of Susie’s childhood home wrap around the small family in a soothing embrace, its décor of ceiling fans and light fixtures hanging in the foreground of gorgeously composed frames. As Lora finds greater success though, Sirk’s production design takes a turn to opulence. The open spaces of the mansion they move into are adorned with bright flowers and candles rising up in the foreground, while decorative mirrors in backgrounds make rooms feel even larger than they physically are. Such exquisite furnishing allows for beautifully elegant imagery, though it is certainly at least colder than before, setting the scene for a burgeoning gap between Susie and Lora as both develop feelings for the same man.

It is by nature of their unequal social standings that Susie’s problems seem a little insignificant when played out next to Sarah Jane’s, who chooses to shun her Black heritage so that she may pass as white. She has seen the ugliness of America’s intolerance in its pre-civil rights era, and yet the bitterness that has been bred from that is not directed at its perpetrators, but rather her own mother. Annie, meanwhile, recognises that anguish in her young daughter, and can’t quite figure out how to reconcile her innocence with the future she faces.

“How do you explain to your child she was born to be hurt?”

Sarah Jane’s disdain for her mother is crushing, in one scene even driving her to go so far as to put on a mocking show of servitude to a guest, as if that were all there is to her ethnicity. Above all else she wants to be looked at with desire, so when she finally comes of age, she runs away to join a club where she can blend in with a troupe of white chorus girls. Though she claims she doesn’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with being Black, she clearly does not possess the empathy to see how similar her actions are to the strains of racism she is familiar with.

Perhaps we wouldn’t feel the same compassion for Sarah Jane if Sirk didn’t treat her suffering with such tenderness in his staging of this melodrama. When her white boyfriend confronts her about her true ethnicity, she is diminished off to the side of the frame as nothing but a reflection in a window, and the moment he grows incensed Sirk quickly pans his camera to the right to reveal him unnervingly towering over her. When she returns home after being beaten, he shoots all four women standing on separate levels of a staircase, their standing evident in where they are situated – Lora on top, Annie further down with her back to the camera, Susie concealed behind a plant, and Sarah Jane caught in the middle, all lines in the shot pointing to her. Even as characters deliberately pursue contemptuous lines of attack against each other, Sirk never loses sight of the raw pain which motivates them, all four women being destined to struggle in a patriarchal society to different degrees.

With such an interconnected relationship between Sirk’s vibrant mise-en-scène and his emotionally rich characters, it isn’t difficult to trace his influences back through the decades of cinematic expressionism. Stylish sentimentalism flows all through his dialogue and cinematography, outlining parallel paths of generational conflict as set out by two pairs of mothers and daughters. Unlike other Sirkian melodramas of this era though, there are few happy endings to be found in Imitation of Life. Instead, it is in the separation of children from their parents where we find hope that they might mature into adults, blooming like those floral icons of delicate growth scattered all through the film.

Imitation of Life is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Clyde Geronimi | 1hr 15min

There is a slightly larger suspension of disbelief that Disney’s traditional animations asks of its audiences compared to many other films, as they often make leaps of narrative logic to draw from familiar archetypes, but few have managed to do so with the grace of Sleeping Beauty. As Disney’s second animation to be shot in a widescreen format following Lady and the Tramp, there is something distinct about the way director Clyde Geronimi uses the full scope of his frame to draw out this rich world of forests and castles. In the layers of depth in these images, where foregrounded trees form gorgeous frames around our characters, he effectively creates the textured look of Renaissance tapestries drawn on canvas, like artistic tributes to the history of human storytelling.

As was the tradition of these early Disney fairy tales, we are led in with the opening of storybook and a chorus of heavenly voices, acting like a backup to our primary narrator. Orchestrations run through almost every second of Sleeping Beauty, like a suite of program music complete with leitmotifs, and rhythmically tying in with the animation in remarkable synchronicity. Musical accents land on lightning strikes, and as thorny trees magically sprout from the earth, cymbals accompany each once, these instruments telling their own story parallel to the visual one. All throughout, ‘Once Upon a Dream’ is the musical lynchpin upon which many of these melodies revolve around, becoming the basis of the love theme that binds Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip together in all sorts of variations.

The notion of sleeping goes far beyond the obvious plot point in this film. It is infused within these lyrics, underscoring such dreamy images of the two lovers dancing by a pond that mirrors their reflections directly beneath them. It is also within this whimsical context that we accept perhaps the most remarkable coincidence of the narrative, in which this betrothed couple meet by chance and fall in love. In true fairy tale fashion, there is no great tension in this love story, but we instead find the real threat lurking in darker places.

It is there that a black and purple robed figure marked by demonic horns enters – Maleficent, the evil fairy who directly antagonises the three good ones. There is a reason that she has taken on such significant stature among all Disney villains, and much of it is her daunting yet simple character design, with that pointed, pale face and a magical green aura that seems to infest the world like a sickness. As she rises in power and lures Aurora in a hypnotic trance towards her fate, it lights the masses of dark, negative space that surrounds her with a mystical faint glow.

As the good fairies begin putting the kingdom to sleep in response, the green light fades to a stunning blue day-for-night wash, overtaking the film like a cold, sleepy dream until both spells are lifted. Such striking displays of colours were not exactly anything new for Disney in 1959, and yet there is a level of attention to detail in Sleeping Beauty lets it stand out far above other animations of the era. That it took six years to make is impressive on its own, but the results of such intense artistic labour also speaks for itself in the film’s stirringly picturesque quality.

Sleeping Beauty is currently streaming on Disney Plus, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Video.