Category: 1973

Luchino Visconti | 3hr 58min

The final piece of Luchino Visconti’s thematic ‘German Trilogy’ speaks more directly to the nation’s true history than its largely fictitious predecessors, and in striving to chronicle such dense passages of monarchical politics, he also ends up with his longest film yet. Ludwig stands at an imposing four hours long, though quite astoundingly, its pacing never drags. The odd exception here is in those uninspired, documentary-like monologues delivered to the camera by various supporting players in King Ludwig II’s life, offering criticisms of his rule that would never otherwise be expressed freely in his royal court. This is a far stronger film when it is interrogating such dissent as an extension of its rigorous character study, targeting the strange mix of sexual insecurities, mental illnesses, and artistic obsessions which roil around in the Mad King’s troubled mind. Within the opulent palaces of 19^th century Bavaria, he loses himself in the decadence of extreme wealth and fantastical dreams, and Visconti beautifully details it all in his exquisite, operatic staging.

With his angular eyebrows, sharp jawline, and bright blue eyes, Austrian actor Helmet Berger is a dashing fit for the role of the young King, who ascended to the throne at the age of 18. His sensitivity is revealed in his two great passions – the classical music of German composer Richard Wagner, who he seeks to relocate to Bavaria, and his charming cousin Empress Elisabeth of Austria, whose affection he pursues. The first half of Ludwig is dominated by these storylines, manifesting as a pair of romanticised ideals that can never quite compete with the realities and pressures of being King.

Inside the royal halls of his reign, Visconti surrounds him with the sort of elaborate period designs that carry centuries of historical weight, precisely carved to the traditions of an empire renowned for its ravishing architecture, textiles, and décor. Colourful walls and large frescos often form ornate backdrops to the historical drama, which is blocked through meticulous arrangements extending deep into his compositions. In his vibrant office of embroidered seating and scarlet wallpaper, oil paintings hang in golden frames above its royal occupants, while elsewhere giant candelabras reach all the way up to the ceiling in a cavernous corridor. Softening the intensity of these painstakingly curated interiors are large, leafy plants, infusing otherwise contrived designs with a lush greenery not unlike that which Visconti used to similar effect in Death in Venice. It also helps that he shot many scenes on location at many of Ludwig’s actual castles, making the most of their authentic halls and exteriors as the settings for his dramatised historical account.

Ludwig certainly relishes this extravagant living, and yet he possesses a dreamer’s mind that is detached from reality, preferring to shape his surroundings into wondrous fairy tale images. Upon the grounds of Linderhof Palace, he whisks himself away into a fantastical, artificial grotto that he built with the intent of staging operas, and in a wooden room that seems to be built around a tree, he hosts orgies with his servants. In his ideal world, Wagner would have unlimited funding to keep on composing music, though such lofty aspirations of enriching the minds of the people is not easily realised with the artist’s philandering and profiteering, eventually forcing Ludwig to send his friend home. Likewise, his love for Elisabeth is stifled by the expectations placed on him as a King to instead marry her sister, Sophie, which itself is further complicated by his repressed homosexual desires.

Unsurprisingly, many of Ludwig’s handpicked companions are men who, despite his Catholic guilt, arouse a romantic desire in him. Against a deep purple sunrise, Volk the waiter strips down and goes swimming in the lake, while Ludwig surreptitiously watches from behind reeds obstructing Visconti’s voyeuristic shots. When the servant is thrown out, presumably due to the King’s own inner torment, he is simply replaced with another who continues to inspire a guilty lust. Later in life, his hiring of actor Josef Kainz to follow him around and recite poetry to the point of exhaustion manifests this sensitive longing as an eccentric, poisonous obsession, which only worsens with his degrading mental state.

This deterioration is a physical one as well, and Visconti’s stylistic choice to roam his camera around scenes with zoom lenses pays off particularly well when we begin moving into close-ups of Berger’s now-grotesque face. With his black teeth, unruly hair, and red-rimmed eyes, it is clear that all self-care has disappeared from his routine, while his pale skin bears the mark of his reclusiveness from the outside world. Berger conducts himself with obstinate hostility in many of these later scenes, furiously ranting against the Bavarian government who dare to commit treason against their King, and simultaneously digging his own grave with his unhinged behaviour.

From The Leopard to The Damned, Visconti’s storytelling has consistently sought to understand historical empires through the larger-than-life characters defining them, and yet even after four hours of studying Ludwig’s erratic reign, there still remains something compellingly mysterious about his legacy. As he is arrested and confined to a manor where he receives psychological treatment, his surroundings finally reflect the pitifully tragic state of Bavaria’s own monarchy. Opulent decadence is replaced by monochrome, minimalist décor, with only a few simple paintings and a cross adorning the stark, white walls of his bedroom. This “tyrant who knows no limits in order to indulge his fantasies” is stripped of even those, and denied the liberty to imagine anything but an escape from his desolate prison.

The lingering uncertainty of the deposed King’s memory is best summed up in Ludwig’s final freeze frame, his wet, lifeless face withholding any answers as to how he died. “I am an enigma. I want to be an enigma forever, for those outside my world and myself,” he tells his psychiatrist not long before his death, and through Visconti’s tenderly drawn characterisation of this lonely, troubled figure, he is perhaps, at the very least, granted his last wish.

Ludwig is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Nicolas Roeg | 1hr 50min

To live through the tragic death of your own child is a horrifying enough prospect on its own, but in the convergence of past, present, and future that emerges in architect John Baxter’s unwieldy, indistinct hallucinations, that grief becomes a sea of despair, pulling him down into its cold, all-consuming depths. The layers of subtext and symbolism that flow through Don’t Look Now may take multiple viewings to fully appreciate, but in Nicolas Roeg’s fluid editing which swirls between cryptic images of blood, churches, water, and grotesque representations of death, its feverish atmosphere takes hold, haunting us with the ghosts of events that have already taken place, and some that are still yet to happen.

The supernatural clairvoyance that plagues John’s mind may be considered a curse in this way, but as we witness in Heather, a blind psychic he meets in Venice, such mysterious gifts need not be so detrimental. Though she cannot see, the special vision she possesses allows her more insight into the world than anyone else, and the abundance of mirrors and reflective surfaces surrounding her frame her as such, becoming distorted yet enlightening filters of reality.

Water consequently becomes an especially potent visual metaphor, particularly early on when an upside-down pond reflection of John and Laura’s young daughter, Christine, ominously portends her imminent drowning. She is not the last person in the film to die in such a gruesome manner either, as in a subplot concerning a loose serial killer in Venice we observe bodies being drawn up from the canals, rotted from the time spent submerged in their murky depths. If John’s own supernatural ability can be likened to these bodies of waters that contain splinters of answers, then it is important to recognise the necessity of coming at them from purely figurative angles, and avoid submerging oneself in the overwhelming, suffocating currents of literalism.

It is the latter course of action which tragically defines John’s own arc, as in the wake of Christine’s death he decides to accept a commission in Venice to restore an ancient church, and ironically dig deeper into his own scepticism. Unable to accept the possibility of the supernatural, he takes all his visions at face value, living them as if they were immediately present rather than considering their underlying significance. All around Venice he continues to chase a small figure dressed in a red coat, identical to that which his daughter wore when she died, and warnings of his own impending fate continue to emerge all around him. This city of deep canals, misty alleys, and ancient architecture becomes its own mysterious force in John’s journey, constructed just as much through Roeg’s masterfully inventive editing as it is through the location’s own unique layout of disconnected islands.

In those few moments where the gravity of the present outweighs all else, Roeg delivers weighty, slow-motion sequences, dramatically underscoring John’s discovery of Christine’s body as well as Laura’s fainting in the restaurant. Outside these scenes though, he delivers a masterclass in montage and parallel editing, intercutting the couple’s love-making with their morning routine the day after, and then in the very final of the sequence of the film smashing together the fragments of foreshadowing we have seen throughout the film to form a complete puzzle. Roeg’s magnificently frightening reveal flows in graphic match cuts between symbols, premonitions, and shots whirling across church interiors, all the while bells clang chaotically in the background.

From Heather’s clarified perspective, these enigmatic icons can be contemplated from a distance, allowing their underlying implications to arise organically. For a man like John though, so wrapped up in his own grief and scepticism, the reckless pursuit of logic only delivers answers after he has plunged right to the gloomy depths of his mysterious visions. And as Roeg’s persistent foreshadowing drives home over and over through Don’t Look Now, there is no hope of surfacing again this far down.

Don’t Look Now is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

William Friedkin | 2hr 12min

Though it is the scarred, pale face of a possessed Regan MacNeil which has culturally persisted as the image most closely associated with The Exorcist, the film reveals its most central concern right there in its title – this is about Father Karras, a priest tasked with saving the soul of a 12-year-old girl, and his disturbing confrontation with his own lack of faith. He is not alone in his efforts, as late in the film he is joined by Father Merrin, an older priest whose past with the demon Pazuzu offers a bolstering of spiritual conviction, and the full-frontal revulsion with which the fiend provokes them is similarly contained mostly within that final act. Up until this unleashing of supernatural horror, William Friedkin builds a creeping slow-burn of a narrative, quietly drawing together Karras’ spiritual crisis and its formal counterpoint in Regan’s gradual possession.

As Regan’s mother, Chris, walks through the suburban streets of Georgetown early on, The Exorcist’s famous tubular bells theme rings throughout, imbuing this seemingly benign location with a threatening eeriness. No longer do we have to venture into Gothic castles and creepy motels to find terrifying monsters, as the catalyst for Regan’s possession remains largely ambiguous. All we can gage is that this is an ancient spirit which humanity has wrestled with for millennia, as indicated by the opening scene set in an Iraqi archaeological dig site, and that it has invaded a corner of our modern society presumed to be a safe place for our children. The paranoia of 1970s America is well and truly alive in The Exorcist. 
  
As Regan’s mother, Chris, passes by the local church, we smoothly latch from her storyline onto the parallel plot thread of Father Karras, whose disconnection to his faith is mirrored in the physical distance between him and his elderly mother. As a devout Catholic woman, she is one of the few remaining links holding him to his religious belief, and the guilt he harbours over living too far to care for her properly is thereby associated closely with his own personal spiritual crisis. When she passes away, his shame and doubt only intensifies, further feeding his personal demons and thus putting him at an immediate disadvantage when he is enlisted to exorcise someone else’s.

When he finally arrives at the MacNeils’ house, these once-dainty, wallpapered bedrooms and corridors have been overtaken by the unholy force inhabiting Regan’s body. Rather than turning it into a red-hot, torturous hellscape, it instead manifests as an icy-cold wasteland, void of life or anything sacred. The demonic being which Karras is confronted with is intelligent and psychologically invasive, recognising and playing on his crisis of faith by deliberately failing his tests intended to determine whether Regan’s spiritual sickness is truly supernatural. Through vulgar acts of sex, violence, and blasphemy, it continues to force upon him questions of how this thing, whether it be paranormal or not, could exist in a world with a loving God.

As Karras’ strength dwindles, the arrival of Father Merrin heralds some little bit of hope. Silently anticipating the coming of its old foe, the demon’s eyes narrow, and we slowly dissolve from this extreme close-up to the street outside, where the elderly priest’s taxi pulls up. Chillingly silhouetted in the pale blue mist that has now spilled out from Regan’s bedroom and onto the footpath, Merrin finally enters this godless space.

It is an exhausting ten minutes that we spend watching the two face off – Pazuzu spewing green bile, cursing, levitating, flicking out its long, black tongue, all the while Merrin remains steadfast in his devotion, barely reacting to its provocations. No music is needed to emphasise this frightening battle of faith and corruption. Instead, it is simply underscored by Pazuzu’s rough, grating voice, Merrin’s prayers of conviction, and the violent rattling of furniture. Much of the repulsive imagery which The Exorcist is remembered for takes place here, but it is easy to forget how just about every other element of this scene, from its stark lighting to performances, is designed to wear its audience down into a state of hopelessness not unlike Karras’. 

The restoration of faith for this lost believer eventually comes not in his victory over fear, but in his literal absorption of another’s sins and subsequent sacrifice, thus destroying this evil once and for all. Friedkin paints the allusion to Christ’s redemptive death in broad strokes, but after the brutally unapologetic confrontation we have witnessed, an equally unapologetic metaphor of absolution serves to bring about a perfect balance. It is in the patient narrative progression towards this shocking test of faith that Friedkin accomplishes something remarkable, bit by bit letting his demented, expressionistic imagery seep into the quiet suburbs of America, and thereby crafting not just a controversial cultural touchstone, but a masterwork of cinematic horror.

The Exorcist as available to stream on Netflix Australia, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.