1965 – Scene by Green

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Sergio Leone | 2hr 12min

Few words are exchanged by rival bounty hunters Manco and Colonel Douglas Mortimer when they finally come face to face in the rural settlement of El Paso. For the first fifty minutes of For a Few Dollars More, Sergio Leone has been intertwining their paths in search of escaped bank robber El Indio, each scoping out their common target while remaining largely ignorant of each other’s presence. From their raised vantage points on either side of the main road, they spy on the outlaw’s gang gathering outside a bank, before incidentally turning their telescope and binoculars on each other. That evening, Manco sends the porter to packed Mortimer’s belongings and bring them outside where he is waiting, consequently leading to the pivotal confrontation that will ultimately decide the fate of both their quests.

Ennio Morricone’s score is sparse here, though the few notes he does play unite a pair of musical motifs. When we cut to Manco, a flute skims through a terse, cautionary phrase, while the Jew’s harp we have come to associate with Mortimer reverberates a piercing twang. The Colonel is framed in the classic Leone shot between Manco’s spread legs, before they take turns scuffing each other’s shoes. As much as this peacocking is an attempt to mark their territory, the prospect of either backing off seems increasingly unlikely, especially when they begin shooting at each other’s hats to prove who is the better gunslinger. The editing is taut, but with Morricone’s majestic score largely absent, we recognise that this sequence is not building to one of his deadly quick draws. From this rivalry, a begrudging respect is born between Manco and Mortimer, who soon begin negotiating the terms of their professional partnership over drinks.

*Rival bounty hunters spy each other, their paths colliding in this POV shot.*

*The classic Leone low angle, foregrounding the feet and framing the opposition.*

This willingness to cooperate may be the greatest virtue which our heroes possess in For a Few Dollars More, contrasting heavily against the villain’s treacherous manipulation of his own gang. El Indio acts purely on greed and self-preservation, stoking mistrust among his henchmen in the hopes that they all end up murdering each other. If he and his lieutenant’s plans work out, then he need only split the loot they have stolen from the bank two ways.

Unfortunately, El Indio’s shrewdness is not so forward-thinking. The fracturing of his gang drastically weakens his position against Manco and Mortimer, placing him in a precarious position by the time their final showdown arrives. In the Old West, this choice between unity and division is the only shot anyone has at finding order in anarchy, and may be all that stands in the way of life and death.

Treachery runs rampant within El Indio’s gang, stoking divisions and *distinctly* *setting them apart from our protagonists.*

After the extraordinary hit that was A Fistful of Dollars, it was only natural that Leone should continue probing these blurred binaries of Americana. With twice the budget, he is no longer restricted to a single location, but rather sprawls his narrative scope across multiple settings and expands his ensemble. The only point of continuity to carry over between films is Clint Eastwood as The Man With no Name, informally recognised here as Manco, and this time sharing the lead role with Lee van Cleef. Together, they form a stoic duo as they infiltrate, outsmart, and outshoot El Indio’s gang, seeking to claim the bounty that has been placed on the bandit’s head.

*Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cleef make for a compelling screen duo, reluctantly cooperating in their efforts to infiltrate, outsmart, and outshoot El Indio’s gang.*

Despite this narrow character link between A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, there is no doubt that both films inhabit the same dusty, lawless world of Leone’s American frontier. Far from the polished black-and-white cinematography or the blazing Technicolor beauty of classical Hollywood Westerns, this sequel maintains the faded colours and coarse textures of its precursor, using the natural rugged terrains of the Spanish desert to stand in for the harsh Texan wilderness. The only moisture to be found in this environment is that which drips down the faces of Leone’s actors, pressed up against the camera lens in deep focus close-ups that simultaneously track the action unfolding in the background.

*For a Few Dollars more has a larger scope than A Fistful of Dollars, giving Leone many opportunities to bask in these natural, rugged terrains.*

*Rural Spanish settlements stand in for the Old West, setting the stage for meetings and skirmishes.*

*A mastery of deep focus on display, pressing faces up against the lens while action unfolds in the background.*

There is much tension to be drawn from such lively staging, layering shots with dynamic motion and nervous stillness, though it is once again Leone’s editing which most crucially navigates each moving part of his staggering set pieces. Beyond even his John Ford or Akira Kurosawa influence, Leone’s montages call all the way back to Sergei Eisenstein, patiently cutting between twitching hands, holstered pistols, and apprehensive faces as they anticipate an outburst of action. Suspense is also rife in his constant cutaways to the safe that the gang is planning to steal from the bank, while the rapid cutting between Mortimer’s eyes and El Indio’s wanted poster when the bounty hunter first learns of his prison break lands like bullets, binding their destinies together in a cacophony of gunshots.

*Rapid-fire cutting volleys between these shots, viciously binding Mortimer and El Indio’s destinies.*

After all, the Colonel is not merely in this for the payout, as handsome as it is. His stakes are personal, and although we don’t learn the details until Leone’s climactic conclusion, the foundations of this grand reveal are woven throughout El Indio’s backstory. Most prominently, flashbacks to the time he raped a woman, murdered her family, and stole her musical pocket watch as a memento sit like a pit in his stomach, hinting at a shred of guilt. Whenever it is opened, memories of that tragedy return in its delicate, tinkling melody, effortlessly weaving a haunting sadness into Morricone’s otherwise majestic score of electric guitars, percussive chants, and piercing whistles. This is the melancholy which resides in all these characters, his motif reminds us, feeding the vengeful sorrow which has transformed the frontier into a battlefield of personal vendettas. On a more sadistic level, so too is it a cruel countdown that El Indio frequently uses in duels, challenging his opponents to only draw their pistols when its wind-up tune has run out.

*El Indio’s flashbacks arrive as dreamy, disconnected montages, giving ambiguous background to the pocket watch motif.*

This pocket watch thus makes for a fitting accompaniment to his and Mortimer’s eventual showdown, staged within the circular boundaries of a low stone wall. As its melody slows to a halt though, an identical tune suddenly starts up elsewhere, and Leone cuts to a magnificent wide shot of both men on either side of the frame with Manco’s hand in the centre. There, a second pocket watch he pilfered earlier from Mortimer is flipped open, and the historic connection between hero and villain comes to light. El Indio’s eyes move between the pocket watch’s photo of his victim and his adversary, and recognition of a family resemblance crosses his face – yet this is not his story to see through to its completion. For the first time in his life, he is the slowest to draw, and Mortimer chooses not to claim the monetary reward, but rather the inner peace he has long pursued.

*Flawless editing matched by meticulous framing during the final shootout, brought to a standstill by Manco’s reveal – a second, identical pocket watch raised in the foreground between both men.*

With set pieces as awe-inspiring as these, it is virtually impossible to separate Leone’s cinematic style and mythic storytelling. Character emerges from action, which is in turn born from a flawless synthesis of staging, music, and editing, revitalising the Western genre with the countercultural vigour of the 1960s. Manco is not a classical hero serving righteous ideals for the betterment of society, but a killer who sees death as little more than a commodity to be traded, though at the very least there is some grace to be found in Mortimer’s consideration of murder as an act of moral justice – however bloody it may be. In the absence of men living by virtuous principles, For a Few Dollars More gives us gunslingers choosing to wield their darkness as weapons, and strengthened by the coalition they form against greater, far more rotten evils.

For a Few Dollars More is currently streaming on SBS On Demand, and is available to rent or buy on YouTube and Amazon Video.

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

Federico Fellini | 2hr 17min

Coming off the heels of his widely acclaimed triumph 8 ½, it seemed that Federico Fellini was done with neorealism. By delving into the fantastical dreams of a surrogate character, he had constructed a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of immense depth and ambition, while shamefully exposing his own infidelity to the world. As such, his next project Juliet of the Spirits essentially held up a feminine mirror to 8 ½, contemplating the other side of his marriage to Giulietta Masina and filtering it through an equally surreal lens. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that he derived Juliet’s name from his wife’s, and additionally cast her as the spurned housewife whose entire identity has been defined by her relationship to men. In fact, it isn’t even until Juliet’s husband Giorgio arrives home in the first scene that her face even appears on camera, having up until then been concealed by camera movements, obstructions, and shadows conveniently rendering her non-existent in his absence.

By the time Juliet of the Spirits was released in 1965, it had been eight years since Masina’s previous collaboration with Fellini, having last starred as jaded prostitute Maria in Nights of Cabiria. Now with a few extra lines on her face, she carries a mellow wisdom in her round, dark eyes as Juliet, saddened but not embittered by her husband’s extramarital affairs. The whispered name “Gabriella” first piques her suspicion one night when he is sleep talking, and the multiple phone calls that come through with no one on the other end only feeds it, sending her to seek out the services of a private detective who might provide answers. None of this can take away from the fact that Giorgio has been her “Husband, lover, father, friend, my home,” but even now as she lists everything she is losing, she does so with a wistful smile.

*In the absence of her husband, Juliet’s face is concealed by camera movements, obstructions, and shadows, barely even present on her own terms.*

*Juliet’s house is dominated by clean white tones sharply punctured by the crimson hues of flowers, setting up a visual clash between virginal purity and sexual passion.*

Though Juliet tries to explore facets of her suppressed identity through an assortment of vibrant costumes, within her home she is most often garbed in chaste white tones, while guests light up the mise-en-scène with purples, greens, and pinks. Most of all though, it is Fellini’s radiant crimson hues which dominate his palette in Juliet of the Spirits, opposing our protagonist’s virginal neutrality with a sexual passion considered dangerously out-of-bounds. With so many clashing visual elements, his production design is deliriously chaotic, yet also flamboyantly united under an aesthetic that blends circus-like extravagance with regal Baroque architecture in varying proportions. While Juliet’s lavish, upper-class house is adorned with lighter tones, Sylva’s grand manor makes for a magnificent recurring set piece, each time hosting an orgiastic fever dream of wild hedonists revelling in rowdy opulence. Further bringing these extraordinary settings to life is the slow, dollying movement of Fellini’s camera too, peering through the multicoloured gauze curtains draped around Sylva’s bed as it slowly drifts past, and dollying in on actors with dramatic grandeur.

Few directors can capture chaos with the control and beauty that Fellini brings to his mise-en-scène here. Josef von Sternberg comes to mind as a fair comparison, but he largely shot his films in black-and-white – the patterns and colours of Fellini’s scenery are distinctive and gorgeous.

*This ornate wedding banquet that Juliet stumbles across sets a stark contrast against her lifeless marriage – the hopes and ideals that she once clung to in her youth are beautifully visualised.*

This bold venture into Technicolor filmmaking is no doubt a breathtaking visual achievement for cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, but even more crucially it commences Fellini’s trajectory into manic expressionism, evocatively painting out his characters’ reminiscences and hallucinations. For Juliet, these only really begin taking over her life following a séance on her fifteenth wedding anniversary, conducted by the gate-crashing friends of her husband who has entirely forgotten the occasion. From there, the spirits Iris and Olaf are summoned into her life as conflicting voices in her mind and surreal visions interrupt her reality with increasing ambiguity, beginning with a dead raft of horses and a sunken tank of studly weirdos dredged up from the ocean.

*The first of many explicitly surreal sequences, dredging up a tank of weirdos onto the shoreline.*

*Juliet of the Spirits is a largely maximalist in style, but Fellini’s shot compositions of these stripped back landscapes often astound as well.*

With Juliet’s stream-of-consciousness voiceover often running through her life and dreams though, fortunately not all these visions are so impenetrably abstract. Many of these fragments are rooted directly in childhood memories that have become foundational to her identity, unfolding like reveries distorted by decades of distance and Fellini’s purposefully disjointed editing. In particular, her recollections of a circus and a pageant play formally mirror each other as a pair of theatrical performances sitting on either side of a moral divide – one being a gaudy spectacle of feathers and sparkles that satiates the senses, and the other starring Juliet herself as a virgin martyr being executed for her faith.

*A pair of theatrical performances united in the red-and-white colour palette, but diametrically opposed in morality – a circus spectacle, and a religious pageant play.*

In the former, Fellini constructs a visual extravaganza that pays homage to Italy’s rich tradition of performing arts, and the seductiveness of this lifestyle that lured her grandfather into an affair with a beautiful dancer. The career he had built as a respected professor was thrown out with this decision, and by the decree of Juliet’s disapproving mother, so too was his relationship with his family. As he runs with his mistress towards a stunt plane, each of these figures chase him from behind, playfully staged in a long shot that evokes Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Dance of Death’ from The Seventh Seal. It is clear to see here how infidelity has impacted Juliet’s life once before, and yet quite curiously her feelings towards her philandering grandfather are far more positive than those towards her controlling mother, who in her mind represents an unattainable standard of self-righteous morality and untouchable beauty.

*Fellini irreverently calls back to the Dance of the Death from The Seventh Seal in this fine composition, as Juliet’s grandfather elopes with his mistress.*

In comparison, Juliet’s pageant play arrives as a far more modest affair, surrounding her with spectral nuns in purple hooded cloaks who planted the seed of Catholic guilt in her mind. As she watches her child self be sacrifice on a pyre of paper flames and lifted to the heavens, the adult Juliet similarly recites her lines, and perhaps even finds some inspiration in them – “I don’t care about the salvation you offer me, but about the salvation of my soul.” As it is though, both versions of Juliet have essentially been sacrificed to society’s gender expectations and forced to become a virginal Madonna, serving men as a sexless, maternal figure.

*Hooded nuns designed like ethereal spectres, haunting Juliet into her adulthood.*

*The adult Juliet takes her child self’s place on the burning grill, becoming a sacrificial martyr in both life and the play.*

While Juliet’s hallucinatory flashbacks begin as self-contained vignettes, each one introduces spirits that linger through her waking life, tormenting her with obscure reminders of her psychological self-doubt. Just as she is about to give up her marital vows and have sex with a guest in Sylva’s manor, the camera swings down from the reflection of their romantic liaison on the ceiling mirror to reveal the horrifying image of a demonic girl in white robes, roasting above a fire. Whenever Juliet feels she is straying too far from her morals, that demonic vision of her younger self from the play arouses a disturbing guilt, while nude women hiding around her bedroom conversely laugh and sneer at her insecurity.

*A truly shocking jump scare as the camera swings down from the ceiling mirror to a horrific rendering of her child self in the pageant play, burning on the grill like a virginal demon.*

*Spirits follow Juliet everywhere she goes, as Fellini goes all in with his outrageous character designs.*

To complicate the conflicting pressures further, Fellini challenges Juliet’s belief in Christian salvation with a mixture of pagan alternatives, including the aforementioned séance, an Egyptian rite of passage, and an oracle named Bishma who is said to enlighten those who are lost. Speaking in a raspy voice from behind transparent white drapes though, this raving clairvoyant offers nothing but shallow advice to submit to one’s husband, even at the expense of Juliet’s own welfare.

“Love is a religion, Juliet. Your husband is your god. You are the priestess of this cult. Your spirit must burn up like this incense, go up in smoke on the altar of your loving body.”

*Fellini injects religion and new age spirituality with camp ornamentations, underscoring the emptiness in their claims to great wisdom.*

As for the private detective who represents a more secular approach to seeking truth, there is no doubt that he offers far more practical answers, yet hard proof of Giorgio’s affair does not bring with it the spiritual guidance that Juliet craves. It seems as though every character she meets is following their own path to self-fulfilment, and while many are convinced of their own eminent wisdom, few are able to satisfy her longing to reconcile moral virtue, carnal desire, and holistic enlightenment. By giving tangible form to the intangible Christian God for instance, her sculptress friend Dolores seems close to comprehending the infinite bounds of His grace, and yet Juliet also realises that she has degraded a divine beauty into objects of lust.

“Let’s give back to God his physicality. I was afraid of God before. He crushed me, terrified me. And why? Because I imagined him theoretically, abstractly. But no. God has the most superb body ever. In my statues, that’s how I sculpt him. A physical, corporeal God, a perfectly shaped hero who I can desire and make my lover.”

*Confirmation of her husband’s affairs does not bring Juliet emotional resolution, but only sinks her deeper into despair in this bleak, monochrome room.*

*Juliet’s friend tries to grasp the divine concept of God by reducing him to physical form in her sculptures, yet there is still something intangible lost in the process.*

Even easier still is ignoring the existence of God altogether as Sylva and her hedonistic guests seem to do, encouraging a similar attitude in Juliet. “I fulfil my desires in life. I don’t deny myself a thing,” this glamourous starlet proclaims, and though she is clearly out-of-touch with any spirituality, Fellini does not paint her as a wholly negative influence. The confidence she instils in Juliet is absolutely crucial to her journey, driving her to pursue an independent life that sources happiness from within, rather than from her husband or any religious authorities. It is not that she is afraid of being alone, one American therapist who regularly attends Giorgio’s parties explains, but her only true fear is rather of the happiness she might find in independence that allows her “to breathe, to live, to become yourself.”

*Sylva is a compelling foil to Juliet – outwardly expressive and confident in her sexuality, sourcing happiness from within rather than from fulfilling the expectations of others.*

That Giorgio is the one to eventually pack up and leave at least eases the burden on Juliet to instigate the separation, though there are no tears to be shed on her part anyway. Left alone, she must venture into her soul one last time, but this time not to confront any new memories or insecurities. A small, previously unseen door in her bedroom wall opens up, and against her mother’s demands, she enters to find a long, narrow corridor. There, her inner child is strapped to that flaming grill, alone and scared. Finally untying the ropes that have kept her bound to society’s scalding judgement all these years, she lets her run free, right into the arms of the man her mother had kept her from all these years. “Farewell, Juliet,” her grandfather warmly imparts. “Don’t hold me back. You don’t need me anymore. I’m just another one of your inventions. But you are life itself.”

*A beautiful dream to formally resolve Juliet’s trauma, freeing her younger self from the fiery grill which society has tried to martyr her upon.*

As present-day Juliet walks outside the large white gates of her home, so too does she find liberation from its persistent spirits. Suddenly, new voices she had never heard before begin speaking to her, coming from a deep sense of self-acceptance rather than the nagging judgement of others. There is no aggressive expressionism or cluttered opulence to found in the green, natural expanse that she walks into, and much like the final seconds of Nights of Cabiria, Masina’s eyes once again drift towards the fourth wall in poignant recognition of our presence in her story. With a simple glance, Juliet takes control of her narrative, finally escaping into new beginnings away from the imposing gaze of society, religion, and Fellini’s own prying camera.

Much like the ending of Nights of Cabiria, Giulietta Masina looks right at the camera – freedom granted from the removal of the restrictive fourth wall, allowing her to become a full person outside cinematic and social convention.

Juliet of the Spirits is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to purchase on Amazon.

Repulsion (1965)

Roman Polanski | 1hr 45min

By the time Roman Polanski reached his second feature film Repulsion, he had already proved that shooting largely in a single location was no imposition on his creativity. In place of the sailing yacht where class tensions unravelled in Knife in the Water, here it is a London apartment which he distorts into disturbing hallucinations, revealing the chaotic psychological state of reclusive Belgian immigrant Carol Ledoux. The latter two instalments of his Apartment trilogy Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant would famously enter supernatural territory, but the deterioration of Carol’s mind in Repulsion needs no such influence from cults or demons. The visceral revulsion she feels towards even the vaguest notion of sex is instead enough to cripple her for days, confronting her with intimate violations of mind and body that seek to undermine her sense of personhood, and disintegrate her grip on reality.

Coming off her grand success leading Jacques Demy’s Technicolor musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Catherine Deneuve becomes the vessel through which Polanski examines an unstable, assaulted femininity in Repulsion, immediately proving her considerable range in the shocking contrast between both roles. Carol’s aloofness towards aspiring suitors in public hides the disgust that comes out more openly at home, specifically towards the boyfriend of her older sister, Helen. Even his habit of leaving his toothbrush in the same cup as hers invokes uneasy frustration, its placement taking on psychosexual significance as a figurative penetration, and the smell of his dirty clothes is enough to make her throw up. When she is left home alone for weeks without the company of another woman though, her obsessive paranoia expands uncontrollably in manic directions.

*The first in Polanski’s Apartment trilogy is towering achievement of claustrophobic mise-en-scène, isolating Carol within a space that progressively reflects the breakdown of her mind.*

*Expressionist light and shadows cast across the ceiling in a low angle, dividing the shot into segments.*

Deneuve’s performance is certainly helped as well by Polanski’s natural penchant for close-ups, isolating her disturbed reactions to the sound of Helen having sex in another room, and fragmenting her face with obstructions and shadows. This skilful framing of actors’ expressions is of course drawn directly from Ingmar Bergman’s playbook, though Polanski clearly favours it as a device to craft suspense and terror over subdued drama. Wide-angle lenses uncomfortably press us up against Deneuve’s face, invading her personal space within claustrophobic rooms, while the reflective surfaces of elevator mirrors and kettles create distorted, unsettling doubles in the mise-en-scene. Save for the epilogue which takes a step back into reality, Polanski hangs his subjective camera entirely on Deneuve and her erratic perspective, arousing an eerie discomfort from her vacant, wide-eyed gaze.

*Wide-angle lenses applied to close-ups intimately invade Carol’s personal space.*

*There is a hint of Ingmar Bergman to Polanski’s lighting and framing of faces, here casting a shadow across half of Deneuve’s wide-eyed expression to keep her at a distance.*

*Polanski never seems to run out of creative shot choices, eerily warping Deneuve’s face in reflections against household objects.*

Quite crucially, the array of symbolic motifs that Polanski formally organises around this tortured woman gives sinister shape to her breakdown, keeping Repulsion from falling into meaningless chaos. If Carol’s apartment is an embodiment of the afflicted mind she is trapped inside, growing more shambolic with overflowing bathwater and rotting carcasses, then the fracturing walls that she hallucinates suggest a similar splintering of her psyche’s very foundations. The cracked pavement that inexplicably captures her attention long before this is one of many seemingly insignificant visual cues here that plants a seed in her mind early on and later flourishes as a monstrous expression of primal horror, though the most horrific instance of this doesn’t arrive until the landlord’s fatal visit.

*Repulsion is relatively plotless, yet Polanski weaves through strong formal motifs, including these cracks which seem to follow Carol wherever she goes.*

Leading up to this point, Carol has been tormented by dreams of men breaking into her bedroom and viciously raping her, viscerally captured by Polanski’s handheld camera and set to nothing but the muted sound of a ticking clock. The first murder she commits out of extreme paranoia toward her unwanted suitor Colin seems to come as a direct result of those hallucinations, but when the landlord visits to collect rent money, attempts to take advantage of her, and brings her nightmare to life, we are given good reason to sympathise with her violent reaction. It is important to note that the razor she wields against him is in fact Michael’s, and thus she adopts its masculine power as she turns the tables on her attacker and slices him to death.

*Another motif comes in Carol’s nightmares of being raped, chaotically captured with a handheld camera wildly swinging through the scenes.*

*The peephole shot would become a trademark of Polanski’s, adopting Hitchcock’s brand of cinematic voyeurism as his own.*

Not that this surge of retributive justice brings Carol any relief, or even an end to her rape dreams. If anything, her descent into madness only escalates from here, as she delusionally irons her clothes without power and lets the apartment sink into filthy disrepair. Where Polanski initially composes his oppressive shots in Repulsion with an Antonioni-like framing of interior architecture, his visuals evolve here into a surreal bombardment of avant-garde stylings, leading Carol down a corridor of protruding hands that forcefully grope at her body.

*A touch of Antonioni in Polanski’s use of internal architecture, dividing his frame up through walls, corridors, and doorways to insulate his characters.*

*There is no holding back Polanski’s grotesque surrealism by the end, erupting in full force with hands protruding from walls and groping Carol as she walks past.*

If we are to single out a visual motif that unlocks the key to Carol’s deepest trauma though, then we must look to the very final shot of Repulsion once Helen and Michael have returned from vacation, discovered the gruesome remnants of Carol’s murderous breakdown, and found her in a catatonic state. While panicked family and neighbours scramble to help, Polanski’s camera tracks in on the family photograph that our gaze has been drawn to multiple times throughout the film, and yet which only now reveals an insidious secret. Partially obscured by the surrounding mess, only two faces are now visible – that of an older male family member with a wide grin, and of a young girl staring at him with profound loathing. At the core of Polanski’s surreal, psychological horror, there is simply a wounded woman forced into a depraved repression, miserably trying to contain its resulting damage to her mind, home, and whatever men dare to cross the threshold into either.

*Carol’s family photo is visited one last time in Repulsion’s final shot, this time in a new light – both literally and figuratively.*

Repulsion is available to purchase on Amazon.

Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Orson Welles | 1hr 59min

To faithfully adapt a Shakespeare play into a film as Orson Welles did several times throughout his career obviously entails a strong affinity with the Bard’s rhetorical devices and archetypes. To lift individual scenes from several plays and rearrange them into a compelling study of a relatively minor character requires something even greater though – a profound understanding of narrative structure as art, reinvented across centuries and media forms while retaining the same, core principles. As such, the once-clean divisions of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and history plays are melded together under Welles’ inspired reconstruction, Chimes at Midnight, offering a nuanced depth to Sir John Falstaff, the drunk, buffoonish knight who serves as comedic relief in Henry IV, Part I, Part II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Falstaff may not be the only side character that Shakespeare imbued with remarkable complexity, but he is clearly that one that Welles was most drawn towards, and it isn’t hard to see why. As a gluttonous, indulgent man who surrounded himself with powerful people and seemed to live in permanent debt, the parallels are clear, making the reason behind the casting doubly apparent. Although it is said that Welles went on a diet to slim down for the part, one wouldn’t guess it from the huge mass he carries around onscreen, only further emphasised by his trademark low angles that see him dominate most of the frame. From those low vantage points, Falstaff looks as if he is on top of the world, though such a steep incline only makes his descent in the final act land with greater force.

*Orson Welles is said to have slimmed down for this party, but he still carries an immense weight on screen, and his trademark low angles only emphasise that.*

The enormous depth of field that Welles innovated over twenty years earlier in Citizen Kane continues to emerge in his ravishing black-and-white cinematography here as well, bringing a razor-sharp focus to immaculately staged character interactions layered deep into the background. With the camera sitting so close to the ground in those abundant low angles as well, the overcast skies of England’s countryside and the vaulted ceilings of its cavernous castles become daunting backdrops to majestic scenes of royal power plays.

*Three levels of depth in this frame creating a quietly impressive composition of faces.*

*Always a precise framing of the horizon, here right at the bottom of the shot to emphasise the overcast skies hanging over these executioners.*

Centuries of tradition weigh heavy on the nobles who dominate these spaces, visually smothering them in doorways and corridors which open into vast, empty caverns. There, sunrays pour through the high windows cut into the roughhewn walls, throwing harsh shadows across faces and casting blocks of light on the stone floor. These castle interiors make for an especially daunting set piece when King Henry IV eventually passes away, as Welles sets his camera far back in a distant long shot from the throne where he slumps, before gradually trickling a mass of robed men into the room like dark spectres waiting to carry him away.

*Cavernous halls in King Henry’s castle illuminated by the natural light pouring through high windows – an absolute feat of black-and-white cinematography.*

This is not the environment where the King’s son, Prince Hal, is terribly comfortable though, and neither is Falstaff for that matter. The Boar’s Head tavern is where they would much rather spend their time, drinking, dancing, and poking fun at the King. Outside, the long, spindly trees of the forest that obstruct Welles’ compositions formally mirror the decorative arrangements of tall spears and flagpoles back at the castle, and in this double-sided visual motif of court and country, a formal divide is drawn between the two domains. If the castle is a building of mighty architecture and cavernous rooms, then this inn of drunkards and harlots is its opposite, as in place of high, arched ceilings Welles clutters his mise-en-scène with low rafters, rustic wooden beams, and bawdy crowds.

*The Boar’s Head Tavern stands in complete contrast to the castle in its clutter and low rafters.*

*Another formal contrast, though this time between the trees of the forest and the spears of soldiers, both obstructing frames.*

These are Falstaff’s people, and this is his kingdom, catering to his pleasures and humouring his boastful exaggerations that quickly turn two bandits he fended off on the road into eleven. His intimate close-ups may not hide his hefty weight, but there is a lightness to his spirit, often booming out across crowds through Welles’ loud, resonant voice. That his best friend, Hal, would ever turn his back on him is far out of the question, and yet the political machinations of the monarchy are not something he is bright enough to wrap his head around.

In case there was any doubt in our minds about Falstaff’s incapability among knights and nobles, the Battle of Shrewsbury arrives at the film’s midpoint to comically underscore his utter incompetence and cowardice. For Welles, it is a majestic triumph of action filmmaking, staging King Henry IV’s forces against the rebels with lines of horses stretching across fields, and blocking tight formations of soldiers in their military units. As they stand at attention, charge across an open field, and hack each other to pieces, one would almost believe they were watching thousands of men, though in truth Welles only had 180 extras to work with, and consequently had to be resourceful with his staging and editing. Even with an incredible depth of field, he still manages to obscure our vision with the fog blowing across the battle, while the fast-paced cutting strikes a fine balance of chaotic frenzy and clear coordination. As chests are pierced with arrows and horses fall to the ground, of course we can’t go without noticing that girthy lump of metal containing Falstaff bumbling through the middle of it all.

*Welles is incredibly resourceful with his backdrops, turning what would have been a plain, grey sky background into a fierce shot by lining it with with spears.*

*One of Welles’ finest moments as a director in his career, recreating the epic Battle of Shrewsbury with what was actually a limited number of extras.*

The cowardice of this drunken, foolish knight is rarely so evident as it is here. Not only does he feign death to avoid the fight, but he also stands on the sidelines from afar to watch Hal and the King’s enemy, Hotspur, battle it out, claiming the victory as his own when his friend comes out on top. Falstaff does not fit so simply into Shakespeare’s leading character archetypes of heroes and villains, nor is he even the sort of antihero who cunningly plots his ascent to power. He is totally driven by his own base, hedonistic desires, making his ultimate rejection at the hands of his own friend particularly difficult to grapple with.

As the man Hal once jokingly called a “villainous abominable misleader of youth” comes shambling into the new King’s coronation ceremony expecting a warm reception, it is hard not to feel a twinge of pity for him. For a second time he is branded a “misleader”, though there is no longer any humour in this indictment. All the time we have spent gazing up at Falstaff on his pedestal of privilege makes the high angle we now look down at him from land with even heavier weight, as Welles’ joviality and lust for life crumples into heartbreaking despair within seconds.

*A heartbreaking final scene between Hal and Falstaff, separating them by high and low angles that put a great distance between both.*

One the other side of this dialogue, King Hal looms over him, framed by the flags, spears, and vaulted ceilings that make up his new domain, far from the Boar’s Head Tavern. If one was to look hard enough, perhaps there might be a trace of regret in his expression, though his face otherwise now rests in an inhumanly cold stare, piercing Falstaff’s soul and exposing his greatest insecurity to the world – his total lack of substance or significance. As he is written in Shakespeare’s works, he is a mere side character, not destined for the spotlight he is given here in Chimes at Midnight, and yet by forcing him into it regardless, Welles peels back the compelling layers of his vapidity. To live as a fool in world of kings, nobles, and conspirators automatically puts one on the back foot, though in Falstaff’s carefree disengagement from their petty affairs altogether, perhaps we can find some unassuming wisdom to his short-lived yet jovial debauchery.

Chimes at Midnight is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Alphaville (1965)

Jean-Luc Godard | 1hr 40min

Highly stylised, futuristic visual designs do not always mesh so well with low-budget location shooting, but for a postmodern master of avant-garde cinematic form like Jean-Luc Godard, such delightful incongruity only strengthens his genre deconstructions. Alphaville is his take on film noir, but it is also a science-fiction set in a dystopian city, with hints of George Orwell and German expressionism, as well as the seeds of what would later become 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Why then has it fallen so far by the wayside when considering the widespread reverence held for those pieces of art that influenced it, and which it influenced in turn? Perhaps the answer can be found in Godard’s characteristic dissonance that rejects complete narrative immersion, striving to understand how authoritarianism is represented through the medium of film, rather than any traditional examination of the ideology itself. With that set as his thesis, Alphaville doesn’t just take a stand against artistic and emotional censorship, but rather becomes an act of creative rebellion in its very construction.

With the film’s exterior scenes being shot largely on the streets of Paris at night, it does not take a huge leap for Godard to reimagine its modernist buildings and streets as a futuristic society crawling with shadows and pierced by stark, white lights emanating from neon signs, cars, and streetlamps. This may be an economical choice, but it is also a purposefully stylistic one, turning away from artificial sets in favour of realistic environments that seem both familiar and slightly alien.

The streets of Paris at night become the science-fiction dystopia of Alphaville, with each light radiating an eerie aura and bouncing off the wet pavement. A unique blend of futuristic visual designs and location shooting.

*Modern architecture that belongs to both 1960s Paris and Godard’s bureaucratic technocracy – he is endlessly inventive with his location scouting and the way he frames his structures.*

Ruling this metropolis is Alpha 60, a Big Brother figure that manifests a menacing, croaky voice paired with a single, circular light, occasionally beaming out from behind whirring fan blades like some mechanical piece of artificial intelligence. Alpha 60 is not our protagonist, but it is essentially our narrator, with its ominous voiceover indoctrinating us into its cold rule of didactic reasoning. Its assertion that Alphaville’s technocracy is founded on logic is absurdly inconsistent with its resistance to questioning, though it is evident that the blind acceptance of rules it demands simply serves to suppress anything vaguely human.

“The acts of man through the centuries will gradually destroy them. I, Alpha 60, I am merely the logical means of this destruction.”

*Alpha 60’s design is a prototype for HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not a surprise given Stanley Kubrick’s praise for this film.*

*Expressionistic lighting doesn’t need to be complicated – a single, hanging light bulb does the trick here on this stairwell, swinging back and forth.*

Lemmy Caution is the craggy-faced secret agent from the ‘Outside Countries’ who comes into Alphaville with a mission to end Alpha 60’s reign of tyranny, but in his character design he bears far greater resemblance to a straight-talking, Philip Marlowe-type detective, ripped from the pages of a pulpy Raymond Chandler novel. Paired with this hard-boiled archetype is Anna Karina’s femme fatale, Natacha von Braun, who has lived her life by the rigid rules set by her father, who is also the city’s malevolent creator. To her, words like “love” and “conscience” are completely foreign, both being banned from Alphaville’s dialect that is specifically designed to limit freedom of thought. Upon meeting Lemmy, we can see pieces of his passion bleed into her, destabilising the brittle foundations of Alpha 60’s despotism.

*Anna Karina on her run of films with Godard is magnetic as a femme fatale, proving her own versatility through different archetypes and genres.*

*You have to admire Godard’s ability to pick out these locations as backdrops. A wild, delirious wallpaper pattern to match the narrative.*

Like The Big Sleep and so many other film noirs that came before, Alphaville possesses a dizzying plot that lands us at the mercy of a shady world which cannot be fully penetrated, constantly moving two paces ahead of any single character or viewer. Beyond the shadowy city streets, the bright interiors of buildings become havens from this darkness, lining ceilings with rows upon rows of lights caught from low angles that press down upon our characters. As Godard’s handheld camera passes through the modernist architecture in long takes, we acclimate to this fascinating environment of glass elevators and elaborate spiral staircases that simultaneously belong to 1960s Paris and reach into some progressive vision of its future.

Rows of light fixtures from low angles, spiral staircases, glass windows, long corridors, angular geometry – perhaps Godard’s greatest achievement in shooting architecture, crafting a world of harsh modernity.

It is not merely the immediate atmosphere that consumes us in Alphaville though, as Godard goes on to push his rejection of narrative transparency even further with formal cutaways to the Parisian neon street signs spelling out symbols and equations. These limited, inflexible forms of linguistic expression break up scenes like punctuation marks, reminding us of the world beyond Lemmy’s immediate experience, as well as Godard’s own presence in this story as a disturber of its continuity. Similarly, the suspenseful musical theme of accented horns and strings at first simply sits in the background, but each time it is repeated it announces itself just a little bit more, denying us the cadenced resolution we crave. With his trademark jump cuts and direct addresses to the camera topping off his self-aware style, he keeps us constantly living on a layer removed from the story, recognising the artifice of every technique, motif, and archetype that defines this film, and the science-fiction and noir genres at large.

*Godard’s cutaways to neon signs display symbols and equations, underlining the sinister system of logic governing this society.*

As Lemmy achieves his great victory over Alpha 60 towards the end, shots of unprocessed negative film invert shades of black and white while the city falls apart, its systematic oppression finally being reversed and Godard’s loud, audacious style proclaiming itself within the very fabric of the projected reel. Like his protagonist, he stages his own angry, one-man riot against the stifling limitations imposed upon artists within the old Alphaville, distinctly exerting his creative power as a director, not just a mere observer of events. The citizens’ conditioning to replace questions of “Why?” with firm statements of “Because” is the antithesis of everything he stands for, most of all regarding cinematic convention. It is not enough to simply continue film noir and science fiction traditions, but getting to their reasons for existence by bringing them to our attention and stretching them to their limits is the basis of his playfully wicked experimentations in Alphaville, confidently asserting the inalienable right to imagination and curiosity among all humans, whether they be real or fictional.

*Negative film as Alphaville is inverted on itself – a bold stylistic move from Godard.*

Alphaville is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965)

Sergei Parajanov | 1hr 50min

It takes a story as rooted in convention and archetypes as this ‘Romeo and Juliet’ inspired plot to imbue Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors with solid narrative form, as Sergei Parajanov certainly needs it to hold together his wildly avant-garde experiments in style. Comparisons may be drawn to Mikhail Kalatozov, his Soviet contemporary of similarly Georgian origin, especially in the untethered camerawork swinging through scenes with reckless abandon, and the low angles framing faces against monochromatic skies. But where Kalatozov was an actively propagandistic filmmaker working for the USSR government and gently pushing the boundaries of socialist realism, Parajanov broke all the rules in inventing his own unhinged, magical realist style that would only serve to inflame national authorities.

*Parajanov constructing crosses in his mise-en-scène as formal markers of tragedy.*

In a Hutsul village nestled in a Ukrainian mountain range, a young man, Ivan, falls in love with Marichka, a woman who lies on the other side of a feudal divide. When she passes away shortly after their marriage, he grows depressed, unable to shake her ghostly memory. Even when he finally remarries, her presence continues to be felt, and gradually erodes his relationship with his new wife.

Parajanov has no pretences about the simplicity of this narrative. It is a folk tale, first and foremost, powerfully rooted in Hutsul customs and Orthodox traditions which remain unifying forces through the clashes and tragedies of Ivan’s life. When misfortune strikes, Parajanov sets up crosses in his scenery, a constant reminder of how this community turns to spiritualism when confronted by life’s hardships, especially marking occasions of weddings and funerals with their own uniquely Hutsul rituals. Having been raised in this culture of pervasive religious dominance, Ivan comes to depend on his connection to the divine as a manner to transcend the material world and maintain contact with his lost love. As we witness in a colourful, hypnotic montage dissolving between Ivan’s thoughtful face in prayer and Orthodox iconography of Christ, this belief is his saving grace, injecting a peaceful radiance in the middle of an otherwise entirely black-and-white sequence of the film following Marichka’s death. Though the montage is short-lived, colour does eventually return to Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors with the arrival of Palahna, Ivan’s new love, this time becoming a more permanent fixture.

*A colour montage made up of long dissolves, firmly binding Ivan to his Orthodox beliefs.*

With the introduction of pagan phenomena in the film’s final act, the Christian bedrock of Ivan’s life starts to destabilise, as restless spirits and sorcerers disrupt the Hutsul traditions that Parajanov has so painstakingly detailed. Still, this shift in focus does not even slightly signify a shift in momentum, as his camera continues to spin, whip, twirl, tilt, pan, and track characters across the village’s rocky rivers, snowy forests, and rustic interiors, finding strikingly surreal compositions in each of these settings. Not everything he does falls in line with the rest of the film, as at times Parajanov seems more invested in his erratic whims of visual artistry than tying it all together, but there is still powerful form to this fable. In clashing directly with the religious and cultural customs it is depicting, the disorientating, energetic experiments of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors effectively shake off the stagnancy of this village’s repetitive lifestyle, instead settings its sights on the haunting mysticism which lies just beyond the boundaries of a narrow-minded society, and within the minds of its own characters.

*Too many painterly images to include on one page. Parajanov is a thoroughly experimental artist, always finding the most strikingly audacious angle or composition for any given scene.*

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is currently unavailable to watch in Australia.