42: Alice in the Cities (1974, Wim Wenders)

Owned version: The Criterion Blu-ray released in 2016 as part of the Road Trilogy box set.

Acquired: Assumedly November or December of 2016, during one of Barnes & Noble's half-off sales.

Seen before?: No.

I feel like a lot of what Alice in the Cities is doing can be explained by the use of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln on a television in a motel in which disaffected journalist Philip (Rudiger Vogler) is staying. Philip is traveling across America taking Polaroids for an ill-defined writing assignment. Televisions figure prominently in Wim Wenders' empathetic portrait of dislocation and ennui - televised images blare in hotels and motels and airports, displaying silent images of film stars and cheerful men shilling albums of Italian music and "ads for the status quo," as Philip grumbles - but nowhere does the motif seem more instructive as to Philip's journey than a brief glimpse of Henry Fonda portraying that most noble and deified of Americans. Young Mr. Lincoln is an excellent, stirring work of art that wears well the trappings of a mythopoeic construction of America the Beautiful, home to great men and great ambitions. It can be slotted neatly, if one cared to, into a certain nationalistic vision, a burnished vision of historical greatness. The film, of course, is not as simple as all that - Geoffrey O'Brien sums it up with, "Ford accepts triumphalism as a necessary evil - accepts the need for a Great Man and a monument to affirm his greatness - but his movie is not quite that monument. It is more a lament for what the world might almost have been, if there had been no need for a Lincoln to save it" - which is of course also The Point. It knowingly offers up an America that was never there, that cannot be found because to do so is to constrict one's vision.

Similarly, Philip's article is failing because he cannot find the America's he's looking for, simply because this America also does not exist - the America he hopes to find has no bearing on the country itself but is instead an outcropping of his own mind. When he exclaims about his camera, "It just never shows what you saw!" what he's really decrying is his inability to extricate the reality of his surroundings from his own lived experience within those surroundings. He can't get outside himself and really see. In this manner, it matters not what country he finds himself in - his alienation stems from within, not without. What he's searching for is himself. What he finds is a little girl.

Alice, the little girl, has problems of her own. She's traveling with a mother, Lisa, who loves her but cannot prioritize the girl's needs over her own and is fraying to bits because of it. Philip runs into the two of them at LaGuardia Airport after a pilot's strike in Germany strands them in the US for a couple days longer. Whereas Philip's existential malaise manifests as sloth, Lisa's turns into a desire for escape, and soon Philip finds himself with a new travel companion. What could (and often does in other hands) devolve into a pathos-sodden tale about a lost man who finds himself when forced to be a father figure to an adorable moppet instead blooms into something more flinty and sharp-angled, where the emotion seeps naturally out of the characterizations. A good deal of that has to do with the fact that Alice is anything but an adorable moppet. Yella Rottlander takes this assignment and runs with it, pushing forth a impressively modulated, sullen and spiky turn that nonetheless allows space for the sorts of small joys you'd expect from a kid who is still, after all, a kid (e.g. the scene with the photo booth, which also serves as a handy encapsulation of the changing relationship dynamics between Philip and Alice). Alice is, in no small manner, one of the most realistic children I can recall seeing on film - Wenders threads the needle perfectly in exactly how obnoxious to make her without tilting into Dutch territory - and Rottlander strikes nary a false note. (Interesting to see this so soon after Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, another film that recognizes that kids can be irritating without being monsters.)

Alice is a kid in a tough situation who's just old enough to know how she's being screwed and practiced at finding ways to evince frustration at not being able to do anything about it, and Philip is man without purpose or direction. In the course of Alice in the Cities, they don't solve each other's problems or change each other's lives - they merely drift together for a while, both at different stations in life yet somehow sharing a common outlook. (There's a beautiful shot where Alice is reflected multiple times in a developing Polaroid of Philip - a metaphoric depiction of a number of paths ahead of her into the future, one of which leads to becoming Philip.) Wenders's philosophical stance here can be neatly summed up in the sequence where Philip and Alice comb the city of Wuppertal looking for the residence of Alice's grandmother - a man who grew up here but recognizes nothing, having not been home in over a decade ("These old buildings are all being torn down"), and a young girl looking for a house she can't remember in a place she doesn't know, their twin levels of alienation dovetailing in ways that make them ideal travel partners. And if the film were them and only them, that would be enough.

But what really makes Alice stick is the observational notes Wenders throws in regarding the world and people around them. The two of them may be shutting out the world, but the world is not alienated from them, and there are times when, say, Philip is telling Alice a story and a tram roars by in the background, or when Philip is trying to sleep in a hotel room and NYC street noise roars in from an open window, that remind us that the world does not begin and end with these two travelers. There is, instead, a whole bustling world, one of bus passengers and greasy-spoon waitresses, sympathetic policemen and flustered ticket-counter agents, ex-girlfriends and frustrated copy editors, and every one of these people, whether glimpsed in passing or given passages of dialogue and interaction with our leads, is given enough of a suggestion of a rich inner life by Wenders than any of them could spin off into their own film. Where Philip is closed off, Wenders is generous and curious, and he understands that life goes on around you no matter what you think of it. My favorite sequence in Alice is directly after Philip, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, spies Lisa leaving their hotel and realizes that she isn't coming back for Alice; as he trudges over to her, mulling how to break this news - or even whether he should do so - Alice is using the binocular scopes to follow a bird in flight. Unaware of the shift her life is about to take, lost in her joy, trailing a bird. Life goes on.

37: After the Rehersal (1984, Ingmar Bergman)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released by Criterion as part of the massive Ingmar Bergman's Cinema box set they released this past November.

Acquired: Christmas gift from my mother, though it didn't arrive until late January due to the overwhelming interest in the set.

Seen before?: No.

"Many directors' paths are lined with the corpses of actors. Have you ever tried to count your victims?"

Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehersal does not open with a title card. It instead opens with the above image, a shot that drifts over the length of a dressed stage to find its protagonist, director Henrik Vogler, with his head down on a desk. Is he dozing or just collecting his thoughts? No matter - at any rate, he slows stirs himself into upright, conscious life. Soon Anna, the lead actress in the production of Strindberg's A Dream Play Vogler is currently rehearsing, will arrive on set, claiming to be searching for a lost bracelet. Vogler assumes this to be an excuse, that's she's actually looking to talk to him - and he's proven right in quick order. Their two-handed verbal and emotional sparring, with a midfilm break for another back-and-forth between Vogler and older actress Rakel, comprise the body of After the Rehearsal. Just as Autumn Sonata was built out of the sparring between Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, and as Persona was built from the tension between Ullmann  and Bibi Andersson, and as Scenes from a Marriage was crafted from the arguments between Ullmann and Erland Josephson... who plays Vogler in After the Rehearsal.

So this is familiar ground for Bergman - indeed, why should we expect anything less from a late-career work from a master with such an identifiable stamp? The value here is in how Bergman embraces the familiar - indeed, weaves it into the fabric of the work. Anna, played with beautifully by Lena Olin, is the latest muse for Vogler, but her connections run deeper than a simple working relationship - one of Vogler's previous muses, Rakel, was in fact her mother, and the role she plays in A Dream Play was one that her mother had previously played for Vogler. This is, in fact, the fifth time Vogler has directed A Dream Play, and there is much discussion not only of Rakel but of another actress, Maria, who had also performed the role previously. Both these actresses, it's revealed, are deceased. Further, it's not just the material that has been reused - the set dressing is also a hand-me-down, with the centrally-placed couch in particular cited as being a holdover from a production of Hedda Gabler. Ghosts and echoes abound this production, and that's even before a literal ghost drifts in for a chat.

But there's something else, another angle that I think makes the idea of old, repetitive material into something productive. Early on, Vogler chastizes himself in voiceover for "...this parody of conviction that's gone sour and crumbled," speaking to a weariness with something well-trod; when he follows this up with, "Why justify myself to this young person who doesn't care what I say?" there's a sense that he's struggling to find his place in the modern way of things. Making Vogler a theater director invites a temptation to read this as autobiography of sorts for Bergman, a temptation the material certainly encourages when, say, Vogler tells Anna, "I make sure the audience loves you," and the film cuts to an over-shoulder shot from Anna's point of view, placing us in Anna's shoes as The Director Himself talks directly to us. But it's more than that - there's a feeling that this is all foregone, that these arguments are not new, that the carpet on the stage has a path worn into it that is currently being followed because that's the way Vogler (and by extension Bergman) wants it. Olin follows in the path of her mother because Vogler demands it; even when she protests about her ability to tackle this demanding role, he responds with, "You can only be that bad if you're talented." Rakel shows up because Vogler incarnates her as a way to expunge lingering issues regarding her and her daughter, and when he says, "Not a day goes by that I don't think of you," is he working out his guilt for having let the elder woman irreparably down or justifying why he's sucked himself into her daughter's orbit? When Anna throws a wrench into the narrative Vogler has dedicated himself to playing out, he responds by charging ahead anyway and narrates in full a fantastic love affair for the two, directing it down the cruelest possible path that results in maximum misery for both parties no matter how Anna tries to get ahead of or redirect this narrative. There's a telling moment during this long sequence where the two are strolling around the stage as Vogler spins his preferred future - at one point, Bergman lets them walk off frame and then zooms down to the stage floor, highlighting the swatches of gaffer's tape that serve as marks to be hit during the play. That's quite the hand-tip there.

If Vogler is then controlling the narrative, as a director is wont to do, sending it along a certain line that satisfies him, it's instructive that we come back to the first shot. Vogler is at his desk in repose. Maybe he's thinking, maybe he's slipped into a cat nap. The film that follows is inexorably tethered to his perspective - he's the only one who we hear on voiceover, he talks to Rakel even though she's dead (with Anna out of focus in the background), and when the story doesn't go to his liking he starts telling a different one. With all the back-and-forth about sadness and aging and death ("I breathe decay. You think I don't know that?"), combined with the pointedness of making the central production A Dream Play and the openly-fantastic interlude with Rakel, I suspect what we have here is not a case of a director breaking down the psyche of a young actress but a director breaking down the psyche of an old director. This is, on at least one level, a feature-length argument Bergman is having inside his own head, and if the chamber up there leaks out some echoes onto the stage where his characters are standing, so be it. Everything around him has gone silent save for the voices in his head yelling at one another; when Vogler muses right before the blackout, "What worried me most in that moment was that I couldn't hear the church bells," it suggests that even God has gone silent. Bergman might know something of that.

36: A.K. (1985, Chris Marker)

Owned version: This is included as an extra on the 2005 Criterion DVD of Ran, of which this is a chronicle of that film's making. Of sorts.

Acquired: Probably in April or May of 2009, shortly after Criterion announced that the disc was going out of print, from my then-local Borders.

Seen before?: No.

"We will try to show what we see the way we see it."

I really should have written about this back when I saw it at the end of January. But I waited too long, and now most of what I thought I could say is lost in the fog of my brain, much as the horses that fade into the fog in a striking shot captured by Marker in this, a stirring and unique portrait of one great artist observing another great artist and creating art from what he sees. All I have are my notes, which are as always a rough sketch of things that caught my interest, meant to provide a path forward for the piece I intend to write. Try as I might, I cannot grasp the shape of that piece as of now. So, I'll put in pin in this. I'll note that Marker's resolutely observational approach here, an inspired choice, reveals this sort of epic, expansive filmmaking to be as arduous as stop-motion animation and not too far removed besides - both involve laborious, time-consuming setups meant to capture mere minutes of footage at best. I will refer to a few images that caught my eye - a series of extras being made up and armored for a battle scene, with one man stretching his jaw in a way I found worth comment; the film's composer strolling through the mist like a purposeful phantom; a period-appropriate army marching past a small cadre of parked cars, two time periods smashing together at an odd angle; a man carrying a sheaf of grass painted an absurd and eye-catching shade of gold; lighting rigs framed and shot so that they appear to be closeups of suns hanging in a fading blue sky; Kurosawa himself in the midst of all this chaos, exuding an extraordinary calm.

If the typical making-of featurette is a demonstration of how something came to be, it stands to reason that they exist as testaments of activity - memory aids for things that happened, films made to help us remember. In that, Marker exploits this, draws it out, makes it text - tape recorders, VCRs, these "imperfect inventions" are devices of remembrance. And, as befits this project, they are then objects of creation. As Marker says at the outset, "Memory is what you create from." His creation stands interlinked with Kurosawa's creation. And my writing about his film about Kurosawa's film would then be a further responsive act of creation. Yet I fall down at this task. My memory, in this instance, fails me. But I must move forward or stagnate. I will come back to this another time. It deserves better.

34: Adventures on the New Frontier (1961, Richard Leacock & Albert Maysles & D.A. Pennebaker & Kenneth Stilson)

Owned version: The 2016 Blu-ray released by Criterion under the heading of The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates - a fascinating set of short films.

Acquired: This past July 4th at a Barnes & Noble as part of their semi-annual Criterion half-off sale. Seemed appropriate.

Seen before?: Once from this disc on the July 4th in question.

Part of me just wants to write just, like, "wow, so refreshing to watch a president being presidential!" and move on, but snark is only one tool in the box and overreliance on it can rot the soul. Besides, this film and its predecessor Primary make an impressive case study in how to critique a subject without overtly appearing to do so. While I plan (obviously, given the nature of what I'm doing here) to write at length about Primary down the road, I'll briefly note now that what struck me about it is how quietly but firmly the filmmakers aligned themselves with Humphrey over Kennedy without harming the project - indeed, the thrust of the film seems to demand Kennedy's triumph even as, during filming, it would have not been a foregone conclusion. It's a piece about the evolution of political campaigning in this country, and while Kennedy had issues and platforms he ran on and talked about at length, Drew and company hold that close until the final push towards primary day. They're more interested with his presence, his image and the near-messianic reaction he got from crowds, as opposed to poor Hubert Humphrey who's mostly seen doing old-school legwork for small groups in North Wisconsin farm country and greeting potential voters individually - the "man of the people" versus a man who seems to exist above the people, in a rarefied and inspiring space of his own. If we take that as the truth, Adventures on the New Frontier follows from there into the realities of JFK's ascent to governmental Godhood. It's easy to be inspiring; it's damned hard to be effective.

It's not just important, in the context of this project that you know about this difficulty. The filmmakers want you to feel it, to understand it in a bone-deep way. Adventures sets the stage for this in its opening minutes, with it first following JFK from behind, as though the camera were tethered to his neck - a newsman literally following the story before him as he walks down the halls of power. When the narrator says, "Now you will begin to move with the President," the double meaning of "move with" jumps out - that we are following the President as he goes about his day, and that we move as he moves, step as he steps, swing our limbs as he does... in essence, that we are forced into an identification with the President as he transitions from Great New Hope into, y'know, the actual fucking President. And, thanks to the miracle of then-modern access reporting, you will get to be in on that transition too! Given the thesis, it's then telling about the nature of the job and funny in a vacuum that we see much less of JFK than would be expected. While this is an act of media-blitz burnishment, made because JFK liked the work done on Primary, it prints the legend not by making its central figure seem godlike and perfect but by making him a regular dude with an irregular job, the white-collar boss of an office building full of diligent workers whose product is the fate of billions. He can sit in the Oval Office and smoke cigars and discuss, in calm and rational tones, a plan for nuclear disarmament as though there's nothing unusual about that, that he isn't discussing weapons that could vaporize entire populations in seconds, because that's the job. And because that's the job, it's not the sort of thing a man can do by himself.

So in addition to popping into the Oval Office to see JFK do things like create the Peace Corps, we follow Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg as he testifies to Congress about the weak economy and the plans to get things rolling, especially in grossly depressed places like the coal country of West Virginia, where unemployment is over twice the national average. (Coal country: dead now, dead then.) We jump to Puritan, a small coal-centric village in WV to see what damage this downturn hath wrought. And we follow Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs G. Mennen Williams as he prepares for, and ultimately attends a conference in Addis Ababa regarding the emergence of several newly independent states and a general push towards African self-governance. In following Goldberg and Williams, there emerges a clear interest in the space between stated policy and real-world application, between rhetoric and efficacy. I find the many ways in which the filmmakers pointedly use irony and contrast to drive home this idea that words and intentions are easy but action is much tougher. The most pointed example of this is likely a spirited bit of narration that concludes with, "The president is looking ahead," which had been preceded by an interlude in which a young Puritan boy hopes to get a shirt from a government-sponsored donation drive and is then followed by more testimony about the dire nature of the economy by Goldberg; meanwhile, Williams's preparation for his trip involves him discussing his diplomatic aims with Barrett O'Hara, the chairman of the subcommittee on Africa who boasts that he has been to the continent all of twice, and with Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender, who had been to 38 African countries that year alone and gets off the amazing line, "Anyone with common sense knows you can't raise chickens in a rain forest." This echoes further when a member of the African coalition at the conference states, "American opinion... was somewhat parochial before." Through it all remains a portrait of a flawed machine made up of men working towards something bigger than themselves, stumbling towards a sort of optimistic future and hoping the path they're on will get them there, working through disagreements of approach and policy via a shared understanding that this job is fucking impossible but equally fucking necessary. When the narrator speaks of JFK and "decisions he must make alone," well, that's another irony for you, since we see that no decision exists in a vacuum here. This is the kind of myth-making I can get behind.

(Retrospect also offers a look at a quieter form of myth-making that would have been unknown to all but the President's closest - check the stiff gait and tight-shouldered posture on JFK around the 18 or 19 minute mark and reflect that we know now about the panoply of ailments afflicting a man who was always sold as an acme of youthful vigor.)

25: Adventures of Zatoichi (1964, Kimiyoshi Yasuda)

Owned version: The box set of the complete Zatoichi series released by Criterion in 2013.

Acquired: July 19th, 2015 from a Barnes & Noble. (Criterion 50% off sale, baby!)

Seen before?: Once, from the old Home Vision Entertainment DVD (as received from Netflix) in 2004. Most likely early May. Never from the Criterion set. This is, in fact, the first time I've cracked the set. Which is exciting for me!

The joy of formula, pt. 3...

You make nine films about one character, you're bound to fall into some patterns. Especially when you're planning to make more. Adventures of Zatoichi, the ninth in what would eventually be a series of twenty-six about the wandering blind masseur/swordsman Zatoichi, slips comfortably into the dominant story beats that comprise most of the Ichi films - Ichi comes to a town under the thumb of oppression (a corrupt magistrate and a local crime boss in cahoots this time), befriends a couple locals including a young woman, outsmarts a rigged dice game in a gambling hall, drinks sake and fights anyone who attempts to make his life miserable. Then the climax has the swordsman cutting down a couple dozen anonymous foot soldiers before tackling a skilled warrior looking to prove his mettle. Every one of these films is telling the same basic story, and the series is far along enough at this point that this entry has a subtle bit of fun with that. The setting is a town that also serves as a mecca of sorts for those wishing, in the words of Ichi, "to worship the first light of the new year." Ichi remembers this place from his childhood and has returned to spend the last bits of the old year trying to find something - a brief sense of peace, maybe. Meanwhile, there's a man who has escaped from prison and returned to this town searching for his sister, and there's a cadre of vendors who have returned to this town as they do every year looking to capitalize on the celebratory occasion, knowing not that the magistrate has imposed stiff new taxes that will strip away their profits. In a series beholden to a cyclical repetition of expected formula, it's amusing to see the screenplay acknowledge that by putting most of the characters into cycles of repetition that don't go as expected.

So Ichi's trip doesn't go as he hopes. Instead of finding peace, he gets embroiled in events that reinforce his sense of isolation. Having gone through the series once before over a decade past, my memories of individual entries are not exactly crystal-clear. But as I found this worth comment back then, I feel it's safe to assume that Adventures of Zatoichi is at least unique to this point in the series in that it deals with Zatoichi's eternal isolation not as a tragedy but as a fact; indeed, part of Ichi's fury in the finale is fueled by his disappointment in coming to what he thought was a safe place and having to do the shit he always has to do. There's a thread where Ichi comes to think a local drunk might be his long-lost father, and when the drunk inevitably lets him down, the great Shintaro Katsu plays it with a rueful smile, as though he knew this moment of potential human connection was too good to be true ("For a moment, I thought I saw my father in you..."). Yasuda further accents Ichi's alienation by keeping him apart from others in group shots - if, say, the women with whom he's sharing a hotel room are in a shot with him, they'll be in the foreground while he'll be off in the background or vice versa. The effect is one of alienation - even as he walks among them, Ichi is marked as not belonging among the rest of the world.

Rather than bending to melancholy, though, Yasuda exploits this alienation in service of Ichi's ferocious fighting skills. We know his skills are superhuman - we've seen the previous films, assumedly - but Adventures of Zatoichi goes further and implies they might be literally inhuman. The great Matt Lynch criticizes this entry for making Ichi too saintly, but I think it's doing something different. The film leans into his apartness to paint him less as a skilled duelist and more as a force of nature whose whirling swordplay is an inevitable consequence of his existence. In other words, he cannot be one of us because he is not one of us. The opening scene has him chuckling in the midst of a fierce windstorm, musing on the dust blowing in his face and caught in a roil of red, oranges and browns (the cut from this bombast to kites in a placid blue sky is great). There are multiple fight sequences in which he erupts out of the pure blackness of shadows like an elemental phenomenon, an extension of the darkness sent to condemn his enemies to a different kind of darkness. And the final fight ends with him admonishing the dead, "You brought this on yourselves," then receding into the distance as snow begins to fall on the blood-soaked field of battle. He comes in with the wind and leaves with the snow, pausing for a moment only to get what he came for: the sun. One implacable fact of nature paying homage to another.

1: A propósito de Buñuel (2000, Jose Luis López-Linares & Javier Rioyo)

Owned release: The 2000 Criterion DVD release of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie includes this on a separate disc as an extra.

Acquired: June 14, 2010 - bought the disc from Criterion shortly after the announcement that it was going out of print.

Seen before?: No.

One of the things about this project that I'm looking forward to is re-watching a lot of Luis Buñuel. Buñuel was the first canon director I became obsessed with as a teenage cinephile. I spent a good portion of my teen years trying to watch all the major works of his and got to most of them (Viridiana eluded me until the Criterion release years later, and Los Olvidados came soon after when I realized that my library system at the time still offered VHS tapes - a luxury that, as I found recently, is no longer). I spent one summer reading My Last Sigh. I had a Belle de Jour poster tied to the Scorsese-sponsored Miramax re-release in my room in high school. I was the only one in my college Intro to Film course who had seen Un Chien Andalou prior to it screening in class. (To this day, one of the greatest in-unison reactions I've ever heard from an audience.) I spent years considering him my favorite filmmaker of all time, and if pressed I probably still would hold to that notion.

And the last time I saw a film of his was March of 2011, when my local arthouse theater showed Belle de Jour. That's no way to treat an old friend.

With all that as a foundation upon which I've set a good deal of my cinephilia, it then seems appropriate to start this off with a documentary about Buñuel. Buñuel, who has meant so much to me over the years, serving as a lamplight for this new thing of mine. It's like it was meant to be.

I wish I could say the documentary was deserving of the man, but it is ultimately the kind of basic talking-head documentary that seems all wrong for such a unique and unclassifiable figure. The film even admits this more or less immediately, when Jose Bello says, "With Buñuel, it's difficult to look for the explanation because most of the best things about him had no explanation." The project is undercut before it even begins, really, yet it doggedly goes on anyway. Because... well, what else would you do? What would a properly Buñuelian documentary about the man himself look like? A hall of mirrors, a pile of half-truths, a series of dreams, a disconnected parade of fetishes? Would it simply be an adaptation of My Last Sigh? And would there be cows?

The condition of the film's release, maybe, is telling. If A propósito is relegated to supplemental material status, unable to earn a release on its own, that seems strangely appropriate - consider it also a supplement to the man himself and his work, a conventional adjunct to the much richer and more fanciful Sigh (passages of which are read at various junctures during this film). There is the occasional interesting piece of information (the midfilm passage where several interviewees reflect on Buñuel's strangely conservative stance on sex and eroticism is engrossing - "Love is a secret ceremony to be performed underground"), and stories about the man never get old even as they've been told before. There's also a demonstration of Buñuel's signature cocktail, which as a booze nerd makes me indescribably happy and I can't wait to try it. (Three parts gin, two parts Carpano Antico, one part Cinzano sweet vermouth). Plus, it's made me want to dig up my old copy of Sigh and re-read it - it's been too long for that, too.