Category: 1980

David Lynch | 2hr 4min

At first glance, The Elephant Man does not hold to the definition of Lynchian which the surrealist director set for himself in his debut Eraserhead and would further refine in Blue Velvet. Its biographical narrative follows traditional Hollywood convention far more closely than those obscure, psychological dreams he is famous for, each of which strip back the illusions of modernism to expose uglier truths about humanity’s corruption. When interpreted through that sociological lens though, perhaps The Elephant Man doesn’t fall so far outside David Lynch’s realm of interest after all, as the severely deformed John Merrick simply becomes another device in his arsenal to expose the true essence of our moral being.

Tying this film even closer to his usual dreamlike style is the dark thread of surrealism emerging in a series of nightmarish interludes. Slow-motion close-ups of a rearing elephant and Merrick’s terrified mother are set against dark, smoky backdrops, playing out like a childhood memory distorted by years of shame and terror. John Morris’ tinkling circus score eventually gives way to the creature’s distressed trumpeting, though with the sound design’s constant clanging it could just as well be the whine of an old factory machine. Merrick is dehumanised by many people throughout The Elephant Man, and especially from those who liken him to that enormous, lumbering animal, but the harshest judgement of all comes from his own debased self-image.

Aside from its relatively conventional narrative, the other aspect of this biopic that differs from Lynch’s usual standard is the hope it pulls from such melancholic tragedy. This is not sentimental in the way a 1950s Hollywood treatise on human kindness might be, but it rather walks a finer tonal line through the stagnant gloom of 19^th century London, positioning John right at the bottom of a social ladder defined by the era’s dog-eat-dog industrialism. When surgeon Frederick Treves first meets him, Merrick’s only purpose is to serve the cruel ringmaster of a freak show, entertaining and horrifying audiences like the tortured somnambulist of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Lynch continues to evoke Robert Wiene’s expressionistic aesthetic in his design of the carnival as well, matching it to Morris’ deranged circus waltz and continuing to escalate his morbid aesthetic from there.

This is a prime visual achievement for both cinematographer Freddie Francis and production designer Stuart Craig, who under Lynch’s direction craft a monochrome Victorian dystopia with incredible period detail and a rich depth of field. The lighting especially casts its streets in a smothering, smoky haze, and conceals Merrick in shadows up until his uneasy reveal. Lynch’s camera traverses this urban Gothic scenery with an eerie elegance mirrored in Anne V. Coates’ fluid editing, as her dissolves, match cuts, and elliptical fades to black generate a dreaminess seeking to penetrate Merrick’s emotional defences.

This is no simple task either given how far he has withdrawn into his own mind when Treves rescues him, unable to communicate even the most basic ideas. The white hood he wears in public also makes it difficult to read his face, and only allows him the vaguest connection to the outside world through a single, rectangular eyehole. In one scene however it becomes a portal which Lynch’s camera travels through into one of Merrick’s dreams, paralleling the blue box of Mulholland Drive a couple of decades later, and formally running The Elephant Man’s idiosyncratic surrealism up against Victorian London’s rigid cultural structures.

When Merrick’s mask comes off, it can often be just as hard to read his emotions given the outgrowths that impede his expression, though even beneath these layers of prosthetics John Hurt pours a great deal of sensitivity into his stammering speech. The arc that sees him transform from a carnival attraction rendered mute by his deathly fear of the world into a man who can dress in final formalwear and sit among theatre audiences is marvellously executed, centring his own self-perception as the key factor. As heart-wrenching as it is to watch him cornered by a clamouring crowd in one scene, his ability to cut their cruel shouts short with a guttural proclamation of his humanity marks a milestone in his self-acceptance.

“I am not an animal! I am a human being! A man!”

Not only is he a man, but he is wholly Christlike within the symbolic framework of Lynch’s narrative, taking on a spiritual significance in this world of corruption and exploitation. Despite his suffering, the widespread kindness he inspires is profound, breaking through the cruel pragmatism of 19^th century London with a plea for compassion. There is a beautiful biblical bookend in his dialogue that reflects this too, with some of the first lines drawing from the Book of Psalms, and his last echoing Christ’s words as he hung on the cross, peacefully accepting death.

“It is finished.”

No longer is he haunted by nightmares of elephants. Now his mother speaks to him directly in his dreams, asserting that “nothing will die.” Horrifying surrealism has effectively transformed into magical whimsy, with even the play he is watching in a theatre mutates into a fantastical counterpoint, flying fairies across the stage in slow-motion and seeing his innocent imagination spring to life. Merrick’s physical limitations only hold him back so much in The Elephant Man. It is rather in the hypnotically idiosyncratic landscape of his own mind that Lynch locates the true key to an abiding, dignified happiness.

The Elephant Man is currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV.

Michael Cimino | 3hr 39min

The widespread adoration that Michael Cimino garnered from audiences and critics alike upon the release of The Deer Hunter in 1978 came about as suddenly as his fall from grace two years later. To this day, Heaven’s Gate stands for one of Hollywood’s most expensive financial failures, effectively sinking United Artists’ reputation as an independent studio and culturally bookmarking the end of the American New Wave. Mainstream cinema in the 1980s would soon look very different to the auteur-driven trends of the 1970s that Cimino rode a very brief high on, and which secured him the funding to direct such enormous epics in the first place.

Yet it is tough to pin these immense cultural shifts on a single film, and especially one that has been so under-appreciated. Cimino’s raw artistic ambition isn’t so different to that of more celebrated directors like Francis Ford Coppola, whose production on Apocalypse Now was plagued with similar issues of over-spending, schedule delays, and obsessive perfectionism. The evidence of that massive cinematic vision in Heaven’s Gate is right there on the screen, and should not be brushed off as merely a monument to one director’s ego. To go even further and claim that it is among the ugliest films in history as Roger Ebert did in his review cannot even be justified as mere hyperbole – this revisionist Western is quite frankly a work of immense visual beauty, possessing some of the finest camerawork and mise-en-scène of the 1980s.

None of this should be a surprise though given the credentials of Cimino’s cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who had previously collaborated with him on The Deer Hunter and achieved a similarly rustic aesthetic in Robert Altman’s Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Shane comes to mind as well in the use of Wyoming’s alpine mountains as daunting backdrops, towering over lush valleys and rural civilisations. So too are there traces of Sergio Leone in the majestic establishing shots of bustling industrial towns, the staging of massive ensembles across a widescreen canvas, and the grand movements of the camera atop cranes, and yet Cimino also instils this photographic marvel with his own gritty authenticity.

Most notably, natural light fills his scenery with warm, almost sepia tones, beaming in through windows and illuminating the atmosphere’s dusty haze. Especially as we move into the final act where wagons and horses kick clouds of dirt up into the air during large-scale battles, Cimino delivers some of the Western genre’s most astonishing landscapes, and then contrasts that grainy spectacle with the soft, purple skies of Wyoming’s sunrises.

This tension between gentle innocence and harsh conflict wholly transcends Cimino’s visual style and manifests as Heaven’s Gate’s central narrative concern, where a tenuous peace is slowly breaking down between the cattle barons of Johnson County and the European immigrants stealing their livestock. For those impoverished foreigners lying shoulder to shoulder in cramped bunkhouses, this is often the only way they can feed their families, though even those who work in rundown homesteads and brothels find themselves resorting to crime. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association reacts with disproportional violence against the theft of their property, sending mercenaries after the lawbreakers, and putting together a list of 125 settlers marked for death.

Christopher Walken’s menacing entry as vigilante gunslinger Champion is not unlike Henry Fonda’s own villainous arrival in Once Upon a Time in the West, slaughtering a family of offending immigrants with cold-blooded professionalism. The hole that his bullet leaves in the hanging laundry opens a frame which his moustachioed face peers through, before he strides off into the distance to serve whatever orders he is given next. Within the moral greyness of this social landscape though, pure villainy is not so easily defined. Champion has committed some truly wicked deeds, and yet when forced to confront the incongruence between his duty and his love for Isabelle Huppert’s French prostitute Ella, he is driven to perform acts of great heroism against the powerful landowners.

In compelling juxtaposition, John Hurt’s jovial cattle rancher Billy Irvine offers an inverse arc of cowardly passivity. The prologue set at Harvard College sees him give a rousing speech to a crowd of fellow graduates, and when we catch up with him twenty years later in Johnson County he is one of the few Association members to oppose the secretly planned massacre of immigrants. By every metric he appears to be a likeable, intellectual leader, and yet his actual impact is minimal. Billy is a man with little value beyond his charm, wearily resigning to sit among the landowners, quietly disapprove of their deeds, and drunkenly muse like a Shakespearean fool who observes but never acts.

“Armour made a man a knight, a crown a king. What are we?”

Instead, it is Billy’s college friend Jim Averill who takes the position of firm moral conviction in Heaven’s Gate, coming into Johnson County as its new marshal siding firmly with the immigrant settlers. In this role, Kris Kristofferson possesses the stoicism of a classical Western hero and the understated sensitivity of a modern man, reflecting a changing America that is reassessing its traditional values and diversifying its population.

Jim’s and Champion’s politics are as bitterly split as their mutual love for Ella is unifying, so it is through the latter that both men find personal stakes in the Association’s planned massacre. After all, she is one of the immigrants who has been trading sexual favours for stolen cattle, thus putting her name among the 124 others marked for murder. It is at the local skating rink where that list first goes public, as Jim stands in front of hundreds of settlers and reads it out with a tone of indignant shame at how low his nation has sunk. This is not the Old West which built its foundations on promises of the American Dream. It is a state-sanctioned Holocaust, enacted purely out of self-interest by authorities looking to preserve existing power structures.

The name of this rink where the foreign settlers gather is clearly important to Cimino, given that it is also the title given to his film. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ carries divine implications, suggesting a spiritual sanctuary for the meek who Christ assures will inherit the Earth. Just as it hosts their public meetings, so too does it offer them a space to drink, dance, and socialise, while Cimino’s dynamic camera twirls and waltzes with them across its wooden floors. With the frequent low angles catching the skeletal structure of the timber rafters and the sunlight’s warm tones filtering through the ceiling, this rugged set piece is both humble and magnificent in its visual impact. When it finally empties to leave Jim and Ella alone with the folk band, it is even easier to admire Cimino’s feat of production design, which covers walls with faded posters of a long-gone era. This is the last post of compassionate warmth in America, populated by those from Russian, French, German, and Slavic backgrounds finding uninhibited joy in a vibrant melting pot of cultures.

This camaraderie between immigrants is absolutely integral to the fortitude, resourcefulness, and resilience they show on the battlefield when they decide to take their fate into their own hands. Parallels are even drawn to the Romans as they cobble together makeshift weapons and execute ingenious strategies to surround, outnumber, and dominate their overconfident enemies.

These action sequences are skilfully edited, but even here Cimino never loses sight of his setting’s immense natural beauty, with his camera gazing in awe at the pine forests, peaceful lakes, and snowy mountains being obscured by white dust and smoke. Crane shots continue to shift our focus across the battlefields with thrilling invigoration, building this colossal epic to what looks like a grand victory for the immigrants – only for the US army to show up and arrest the mercenaries in the final minute, thus saving them from certain death. In effect, this is the wealthy landowners’ last-ditch effort to ensure that their defeat does not truly threaten their status in Johnson County’s existing hierarchy.

Even more crushing is the petty act of vengeance the leader of the Association enacts against Jim after the dust has settled. Resolving to leave town with Ella once and for all, he is ambushed by a small posse, who shoot one last bullet into his lover. The grief that forces him to his knees is one which continues to echo into the coda set ten years later, encasing him in a lonely recognition of everything that has been lost. Though he is clearly well-off as he relaxes aboard a private yacht with his college girlfriend, there is little warmth to be found.

This ending to Heaven’s Gate leaves more unresolved questions than it does fulfilling answers. If the America that Jim nostalgically swore to defend was already fading in the late nineteenth century, then it is completely gone by the time the twentieth century rolls around, with many of those lives which once shone so brightly now cut tragically short. In the end, this prosperous Western civilisation is defeated by its own shallow success, maintaining itself through corruption and implementing safeguards against those seeking to overturn its social order. It is only fitting that such a profound, melancholy lament of changing eras would similarly be reflected in a film so heavily associated with the end of the artistically fertile New Hollywood movement. Cimino’s ambitious creativity simply could not have flourished anywhere else.

Heaven’s Gate is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Alain Resnais | 2hr 5min

There is a single mosaic that appears at both the start and end of Mon Oncle d’Amerique, complex and bewildering in its composition, though not without precise intent. The first time we see it, a spotlight moves across the grid of still photos depicting people, rocks, bicycles, animals, art – a whole assortment of random pieces of humanity with no apparent common thread. Several voices are layered over the top from which we can only pick out isolated grabs, keeping us at a distance from any specific interpretation of Alain Resnais’ maximalist expression. The second time, we recognise these images as belonging to the film we just watched, taxonomically arranged and dissected into fragments. Wedged between these twin bookends is the rest of Resnais’ monumental anthropological study of human nature, taking the form of several narrative strands and motifs laced through the methodical musings of real-life neurobiologist and philosopher, Henri Laborit.

When measuring Mon Oncle d’Amerique up against so many other films of its calibre, it is apparent that there is not much in the way of visual style that might have offered it an extra edge of cerebral wit and playfulness. Equally clear though is just how ambitious it is in virtually every other aspect, not just in its broad themes, but quite essentially in its formal structure as well, far exceeding so many other masterpieces it sits alongside. There is no easy way to break it down into something comprehensible. Even within the context of the film, it takes its entire run time for it all to congeal into something artistically profound, with each disparate plotline and idea being weaved together like threads in Resnais’ magnificent tapestry.

Once the cacophony of voices starts to peel apart, it is a little easier to grasp the unravelling character introductions of Jean, Janine, and René. Each one is delivered like abridged biographies that not only cover their origins, but their entire stories as well, which will soon play out in greater detail. Resnais flicks through slides and footage covering their upbringings at a hasty pace, drawing parallels between each despite their strikingly different backgrounds. The births of Jean to a bourgeoisie family, Janine to politically active proletariats, and René to old-fashioned farmers are set behind oval frames of the characters themselves narrating their own lives, breaking the fourth wall like participants in Laborit’s sociological study.

Though we regularly return to the scientist himself presenting lectures to the camera that complement the behaviours of our three protagonists, he never refers to them directly. It is rather through Resnais’ editing that we begin to draw these connections. As we learn of their childhoods, so too do we learn about the triune brain theory, which argues that humans possess a unique set of neurological factors allowing us to create imaginative constructs from past experiences. “A living creature is a memory which acts,” he poetically reasons, right before we see Jean, Janine, and René each rebel from their respective families and decisively set themselves on their own independent paths.

Further binding them together is a common fascination and identification with three different classical French actors – Jean Gabin, Jean Marais, and Danielle Darrieux. The frequent cutaways to them in their black-and-white movies serve as punctuation marks on dramatic beats, like a comma in one scene that sees someone call out for René, followed by a shot of Gabin turning around, and then René performing the exact same motion. Elsewhere, Jean’s poignant departure from his wife and children is felt even more piercingly when the scene ends with his idol, Darrieux, embracing a loved one. Much like Laborit’s documentary-style presentations, these fleeting breaks from the narrative offer another angle through which we can understand Resnais’ characters as part of something larger than themselves, whether that be evolutionary science or French film history.

And then there is the subject of the film’s title, the mysterious American uncle who never makes an appearance. Jean, Janine, and René all speak of that familial figure as some legend who has left an imprint on their lives before disappearing, whether spiralling into homelessness or going off on an adventure to find treasure. For Janine, he is merely a hypothetical beacon of happiness that never existed, and yet which she believed she was entitled to from a young age. That these niche references sit alongside other broader cultural motifs might clue us into something about their significance as cultural tales, informing our values and beliefs which in turn shape the way we interpret the world.

Because when we are presented with something as complex as the human experience, represented by Resnais’ bookended mosaics, narrowed perspectives and ordered systems are essential in informing our ability to understand it. It is through those structures that we see how each piece of Mon Oncle d’Amerique comes together, most significantly in the affair between Jean and Janine, and the disastrous business meeting between Janine and René.

At this point, Laborit’s lessons take a fascinating, surreal turn, using lab rat experiments to describe these characters’ behaviours, predominantly through the procedure of classical conditioning in which creatures learn to pair warnings with pain. Still, even he often acknowledges the greater complexity of human psychology and sociology, and we are reminded of that in Resnais’ revisiting of previous scenes in cutaways that now comically substitute people for human-sized rats. Where an animal of lower intelligence might instinctively learn to avoid pain, we watch humans make the same mistakes by returning to ex-lovers, and conversely where we once watched two people hide their unhappiness, we now see two rats in business suits fight it out on top of an office desk.

Flashback montages such as these are cleverly inserted all through Mon Oncle d’Amerique, each one sketching out these characters’ common, predictable behaviours. When Laborit speaks of conformity as being a necessity to function in society, we flick through short scenes from their childhoods where they imitate adults as a means of learning. Similarly, when he expounds upon our primal desire for violence, we cut back to scenes we have already witnessed within the film where slaps, punches, and kicks have disrupted social civility.

By the time Mon Oncle d’Amerique approaches its end, we too might feel as trapped as those rats in their cage, or these people in civilisation. The advanced consciousness of humanity does not free his characters from instinct, but merely obscures and complicates its expression in the real world. Like rats trying to escape the electrified floor from one side of a cage to the other side, their attempts to break free of their families’ constraints simply sends them to another part of the same enclosure. Should any of these living creatures escape from their physical or sociological restraints, there is still an even greater, entirely inescapable force enslaving them – their own biology, quietly exerting control through their subconscious.

It is this painful truth which doesn’t simply underlie Resnais’ core thesis, but which makes up its very fabric, and that can only be exposed from as close an examination of the human mind and society as that which he applies here. The intricate tree mural painted on the side of a brick building in the final shot is the perfect conclusion to this, with each sequential jump cut bringing us closer to the painted bricks where its ugly details come into view. There is certainly some awe-inspiring beauty lost in a study of humanity as intensive as Mon Oncle d’Amerique, and yet in the formal cohesion of such unconventional motifs, collaged narrative threads, and punctuative editing, Resnais devises a truly compelling piece of dense, intellectual poetry, dedicated to our most unifying quirks and habits.

Mon Oncle d’Amerique is currently streaming on Mubi and The Criterion Channel.

Woody Allen | 1hr 29min

He was ten movies deep into his career built on neurotic comedy, riding a wave of popularity defined by his resounding successes Annie Hall and Manhattan, and then Woody Allen made this – a scathingly existential and autobiographical deconstruction of fame and artistic purpose, which came and went in the eyes of the public with little fanfare. Stardust Memories was not what people were expecting from him at the time, though years later he would claim it as his best work, and steadily its reputation has begun to approach its deserved status as one of his most accomplished films.

In its early scenes one might draw comparisons to Sullivan’s Travels in the framing of a comedic director looking to work on something a little more serious and sombre than his traditional fare, though Allen himself has noted he had not seen the Preston Sturges film at the time of making this. A far more apt parallel is Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, not just in its self-referential subject matter, but in its suffocatingly surreal string of images working to trap an overwhelmed director in a culture that has its own mind made up about his life’s trajectory.

And much like the traffic jam scene that opens 8 ½, the first scene of Stardust Memories sticks its own lonely director, Sandy Bates, in a crowded, inescapable vehicle, introducing the underlying metaphor that runs through the rest of the film. As he sits on a train waiting to depart the station, he catches the eye of a woman on a neighbouring carriage, who flirtatiously kisses the window in his direction. The passive, zombie-like stares of his fellow passengers burn into him as he hammers at the doors and windows, trying to reach that woman, all the while the train whisks him away from the target of his yearning desire.

It is clear who these nameless, expressionless men and women are meant to stand in for once we properly delve into the film’s narrative. All around Sandy, fans and journalists clamour over him with bizarre requests, questions, and statements, most of which are impossible to respond to. One man hands him a script his son wrote intended to be a “spoof on jockeys.” Another claims that he “can prove that if there’s life anywhere in the universe they will have a Marxist economy,” with remarkable confidence. “I was a Caesarian,” yet another states quite plainly. “That’s great,” replies Sandy. What else is there to say, really?

Allen continues to return to his first person POV shots all through these scenes, filling them with overzealous crowds peering enthusiastically right down the lens. Even beyond the masses of people, the overwhelming architecture of the Stardust Hotel continues to dominate compositions and obstruct characters, in one scene blocking Sandy out entirely as a man shakes hand protruding from behind a wall.

Allen’s collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis has always been an important one, but here in Stardust Memories it is absolutely key to the diminution of Sandy’s stature beneath this constant onslaught of chaos, as well as the slightly more expressionistic divorce from reality than his typical black-and-white film. The subtle darkness of the narrative manifests intermittently throughout the film in the empty silhouettes of its characters, as well as at one point in a montage of critics delivering scathing reviews set against pitch black backgrounds. Sadly, the answers that Sandy craves are not to be found here.

It is rather in the surreal blend of life and art, whereby one represents a larger, heightened version of the other, that he strives to find a common purpose in both. At least in the various women who come and go in Sandy’s life (perhaps mirroring the women of La Dolce Vita) he finds some companionship and understanding. In a flashback to his meeting of a previous lover, Dorrie, he spots her standing isolated beneath a large, overbearing mural, both overshadowed by and reflected in the art around her. Instantly, he recognises a shared pain between them.

In more comedic moments, formal boundaries of narrative logic are pushed to great effect, as in one scene that may or may not come from one of Sandy’s movies where he encounters a group of aliens, and poses them grand philosophical mysteries which they cannot answer. It is ultimately when he arrives at his most pressing question about himself that his own position in a meaningless universe begins to take form.

“If nothing lasts why am I bothering to make films or do anything, for that matter?”

“We enjoy your films, particularly the early, funny ones.”

Perhaps this is what provides the motivation for the final few minutes of the film then, in which personal and professional fulfilment meld together in a reflection of the opening scene, though this time with Sandy willingly riding the train in whatever direction it takes him. Suddenly we cut to a movie theatre audience applauding, having just watched everything we did, and in a starkly contrasted response to their earlier disparaging reactions there at least seems to be more thoughtful discussions.

There may be a slightly capitulation to populist sentiment in Sandy’s creation, though it is somewhat ironic that Stardust Memories is clearly not a film dedicated to audiences looking for easy entertainment. For those artists such as Sandy who place at least part of their self-worth in how much they are loved, the act of creation implies a question of who it is for – a question which Allen beautifully draws out with surreal, contemplative devotion to the act itself.

Stardust Memories is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes.