The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri) (1965)

The Battle of Algiers

”The Battle of Algiers” is an Italian/Algerian movie about the uprising that ultimately led to the independency of Algeria from France. It is a movie shot in a newsreel style attempting to be a documentary, to give the impression of reality although everything is staged years after events actually too place.

Let me say right from the start that I do have some problems with this movie.

While “The Battle of Algiers” pretends to be objective and depict reality it is after all an ordered job by the Algerians. According to comments the Italian contractors rejected the blatantly one-sided view the Algerians initially wanted and insisted on a more neutral point of view, but “more” is probably they right word. When you watch this movie there can be no doubt that the movie intends to favor the rebels although it avoids outright demonization of the French. So, we as viewers are supposed to take side with the Algerian rebels.

Well, that is a normal premise for propaganda movies, so I guess we have to live with that.

The real problem is that those heroic rebels are simple terrorists. Random murder, bombings, stabbing, ramming with cars, all those are acts we are terribly familiar with today and I think most will agree that such acts cannot be accepted no matter the cause. Maybe I am particularly sensitive to the subject by having been frequently to Israel over the past 18 years including during the second intifada. I know how it feels to be part of a public that can be subjected to random bombings and stabbings and the rage the French-minded public in Algiers feels is very much understandable to me. 

The motives of the Algerian FLN may be noble and they make some fine speeches, even if they do not altogether make sense, but through their choice of means they delegitimize themselves completely. Despicable though it was, the tactic was clever and ultimately successful. The terror attacks generated a huge amount of anger and outrage, which meant that the gloves came off. At the same time it very much created an “us and them” situation between “Europeans” and “Africans”, which threw the regular Algerians into the arms of the FLN, whether they were so inclined or not. Not dissimilar from the situation in Gaza. Because of that it actually did not matter if the FLN survived or not, they had already won the population and thus the war.

The French are through the movie criticized for being cruel and ham-fisted and it certainly does not look good what they are doing. In hindsight there was a lot they could and should have done differently, most of all in the battle of hearts and minds. The colonial disregard for native culture was definitely part and parcel to their ultimate failure. Still, in hindsight, did the Algerians actually win by kicking out the French or would they actually have been in a better place today had they found a peaceful accommodation? I think they would, but in the Middle East people tends to shoot themselves in the foot.

The interesting thing about the movie is that the Italian’s insistence on making it as real as possible inadvertently shows the Algerians in a less favorable light and makes us understand the French. Despite itself it actually undermines the very premise of the movie. One could argue that this is a redeeming feature of the movie, that it proves its neutrality, but I am not certain it is intentional. 

A good example is the portrait of Colonel Mathieu, a character who is not real, but a composite of a number of actual characters. He is a hard nail, a ruthless commander who wants to win at all costs, but then the movie also decides to present him in a far more favorable light, one that respects his enemy, command from the front rather than from behind and who asks very essential questions about the motivation for the fight. Hardly a one-dimensional villain. 

I cannot hide that I had a lot of sympathy for the French in this movie and very little for the FLN. It must have been very frustrating to live in Algiers at the time and hindsight did not help them much. There is a part of me who despise the movie for its sympathies, a part of me who want to kick the French administration for messing it up and a part of me who am impressed with how real this movie looks and therefore despite having to celebrate the FLN actually ends up condemning it. I think it is worth watching, but it is not a pleasant watch.  

The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na Korze) (1965)

 

Butikken på hovedgaden

It has been a long while since my last post. Over the past month I have been busy relocating back to Denmark after six years in Israel. My family and I have now moved into a not so big, but very nice apartment in Copenhagen and although it is largely empty, most of our possessions are taking a pleasant cruise on the Atlantic in a container, I am slowly starting to watch movies again.

The first movie in my new home is the Czechoslovakian movie “The Shop on Main Street” (Obchod na korze). A movie I knew absolutely nothing about, but which appears to be incredibly famous. It won “Best Foreign Language movie” in 1965 and is mentioned as being the most famous movie to come out of Czechoslovakia. Or certainly out of Slovakia.

It is a low-key movie about a humble carpenter, Tono (Jozef Kroner), in a small Slovakian town in 1942. Tono lives a quiet life, happy making furniture or going around with his dog. The main problem in his life is that he is being pestered by his wife Evelina (Hana Slivková), who wants more in life, particularly money, status and the lifestyle of her sister Ruzena (Elena Pappová-Zvaríková), the wife of the town commandant Markus (František Zvarík). Markus’ position in the SS equivalent Hlinka guard makes him a powerful and wealthy man and Tono hates him with a vengeance.

As part of the prosecution of the Jews in town, all their businesses are assigned an “Aryan controller” and Markus is assigning Tono as Aryan controller of a button shop belonging to the elderly Mrs. Lautman (Ida Kamińska). While Evelina considers this a gold mine, Tono is more reluctant and he soon finds that Mrs. Lautman is a sweet old lady, half deaf and somewhat senile, who has little idea about what is going on. The shop is a scam to keep her happy while in reality she is supported by the Jewish community. Tono finds that he likes her and his role of taking care of her so instead of plundering her shop he helps her and fixes her furniture.

All that comes to a sudden end when the Jews are rounded up and sent to the extermination camps and Tono finds himself in a pinch: Help the old lady and be hunted as a Jew-lover or send her to her death.

This is a holocaust movie, but a different kind than the usual ones. There are no big numbers here, instead we meet regular folks caught in the horrors of the genocide. Tono is an every-guy, who wants to stay out of politics, but are forced to take a stand. An impossible stand as it turns out. He can be an accomplice to the genocide or he can try to follow his conscience at the cost of his own life. For a hero this may sound like an easy choice, but for a regular dude this is not easy at all. He just wants to go away, be somewhere else, but he cannot. As such he represents the typical central European population during the war.

This personal touch also makes the movie more moving and heartbreaking than the typical holocaust movie. I understand the people, they are real people, even the bad ones, and the monumental disaster becomes personal. Mrs. Lautman does not deserve to die. The boy Danko does not deserve to die and as Mr. Katz, the barber, says, “When the authorities prosecute the innocent then it is the end of it”. The rounding up of the Jews is in very real terms the Armageddon, the collapse of the normal world.

It is this particular angle that makes “The Shop on Main Street” stand out. The normal, cozy world of real people that collides with the lowest of human evilness. Everything in the cinematography supports this: The town setting, the low-key home of Tono, the casual life they lead and the adorable Mrs. Lautman. The music has folk elements that are replaced by an alarming violin. The lighting changes from sun-bathed pleasantness to stark black and white desolation.

I was very pleased with this movie, it is a great and moving film to watch, but also heartbreaking as an effective Holocaust movie is supposed to be. This is not my favorite genre and less so as I get older, but this is definitely one to see and not just for its message. Highly recommended.

 

Vinyl (1965)

 

Vinyl

1964 is now officially over for me and my movie calendar says 1965. It is also about a week until I am moving back to Denmark with my family. Busy days!

First movie of 1965 is Andy Warhol’s “Vinyl”.

If you are into sadomasochistic gay sex this is likely something for you. Sadly, sadomasochistic gay sex is not my thing and that leaves… very little.

“Vinyl” is supposed to be a pre-Kubrick take on “A Clockwork Orange”, but you could have fooled me. I did not perceive any story at all. What we do get is a one-hour movie consisting of two camera positions. The first, lasting about 80% of the movie has a sadomasochistic séance in the background (not so much sex though, they a mostly just torturing the poor fellow) while in the foreground a dude called JD is first making an obscure speech, then is being the subject of another sadomasochistic séance led by a dude called The Doctor. Again not so much sex, mostly torture, humiliation and sexual undertones. All the while a girl is sitting on the right side of the picture doing… nothing. To call her an observer is too gracious. She is just there, looking as if she is wondering why she is there at all.

There is dialogue, but it is a declamatory dialogue that makes little sense and I tuned it out completely. I do not remember a single line.

At some point the camera zoom in on JD, but nothing else changes.

There is music and it is actually good music. The only redeeming feature of the movie, but exactly what the role of this music is I do not know. It is just there.

In art exhibitions Warhol is a big name and his paintings and installations are both interesting and influential, but if “Vinyl” is typical for his movie production then I would say that they miss the mark. I could do without.

Thankfully there are no free-flying dicks in “Vinyl”, but that seems merely a coincidence. Otherwise this movie follows pretty well the path setup by the List editors for underground gay movies. I get that there must be something for the LGBT community and that Warhol is a pretty big name, but for crying out loud, there must be something better than this.

 

The Demon (Onibaba) (1964)

Onibaba

The final movie of 1964 is the Japanese movie “Onibaba” and again Japanese cinema is bent on impressing me. “Onibaba” is one of the best movies in 1964.

I cannot say I entirely understand the movie, there are layers here that are inaccessible for me, but even at face value this movie is awesome.

In a distant Japanese past the country is engulfed in a lengthy civil war. That happened a few times in Japanese history, but the circumstances are not so important. In this war an older woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter in law, the younger woman (Jitsuko Yoshimura) are hiding out in a large field of tall and dense susuki grass. Their livelihood is to trap and kill soldiers who seek refuge or get lost in the field. They strip the dead soldiers of armor and weapons and sell then to a shady dealer for basic foodstuff. The two women are never named, but they are crafty women, bent on survival and doing a good job at that in a difficult time.

One day their neighbor Hachi (Kei Satō) returns. He left some time ago with the son and husband of the two women and were drafted into the war. Eventually they were assaulted by farmers who had the audacity to defend their possessions from plundering soldiers and the younger woman’s husband was killed. Hachi made it home alone.

Hachi is not a great guy. Not objectively. Pretty disgusting actually. The older woman hates his guts for coming home without her son, but the younger woman is attracted to him because he is… well… a man.  Soon they are forming a very sexual relationship behind the back of the fuming older woman.

One fateful night the older woman finds a way to scare her daughter in law into compliance when she finds a demonic mask. Only, this is not just a mask. It is a truly demonic mask…

There is a lot to love about this movie. Kaneto Shindo, the director, had his own production company, so he could ignore all the usual strictures on Japanese movies and film the story in a raw, brutal and direct style that gives the film an impact outside the usual scale for the period. The war is brutal, killing is easy and lives are cheap. The callousness with which human lives are dispensed with for simply livelihood is shocking, but also very convincing. In a very cold place we can understand the simple logic behind the actions of these two women.

This also goes for the raw sexuality between Hachi and the younger woman. There is not so much to explain: there is a woman and man, they have a sexual craving and they act on it. Is it good or bad? The older woman is against it, but not so much from a moral point of view, but because she hates his guts and wants to keep the girl for herself. To her, Hachi is a rival. We see everything, not because we are Peeping Toms, but because the style is raw and blunt.

Then there is the horror element. Life in the susuki grass field is pretty horrific, but the demonic mask adds another element. It gets stuck to face of the wearer and transforms the face to the horrific deformities suffered by nuclear attack victims. I am not entirely sure of the meaning of this. Could it be that the demonic mask unveils the monster beneath? Or that beneath demonic behavior and faces are vulnerable and scarred human beings? Not sure, but regardless the effect of the mask is terrifying.

Nobuko Otowa is awesome as the older woman and she would have been my suggestion for a Best Actress in 1964. If for no other reason, watch this movie for her.

Absolutely recommended, one of the best movies of 1964, and that concludes 1964 for me.

Mary Poppins (1964)

 

Mary Poppins

After a number of… difficult movies… it now time to get all the way back into comfort land. Mary Poppins is Disney with capital D and so we know that this will be as cushy and mushy as it is at all possible. This is certainly in stark contrast to the route the List has been leading me lately.

“Mary Poppins” is a fairy tale musical for the entire family, which translates to children with the adults sitting in on the view. It follows the Hollywood template formulae for musicals, meaning anything is possible, with songs and a loosely written story to take you from song to song. Because this is fairy tale on top of musical the logic and causality of things has also been dismissed and aiming it at children means that it all takes a silly slant. This could go horribly wrong, but it stops right at the edge and remains sweet rather than stupid and thank you for that.

In the Banks family the father, Mr. Banks (David Tomlinson) is a stiff upper lip British banker while his wife, Mrs. Banks (Glynis Johns) is busy campaigning for women’s right to vote. That leaves their two children, Jane and Michael (Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber) in the hands of a sting of nannies, whom they torment into quitting. Then the wonderful Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) arrives and takes charge of the children.

Mary Poppins is a magic nanny. She can fly and do all sort of magic things and around her everything is fun and nice. She takes the children on adventures, including a trip into a painting together with her friend Bert (Dick van Dyke), and soon the children are in love with her.

The point is of course to make their parents realize they have two lovely children whom they should take care of and spend time with themselves and in the usual convoluted way this is exactly what happens.

As I watched the movie I was thinking that “Mary Poppins” is adults idea of what children should watch rather than what children actually want to watch. That this would certainly be the case today, though maybe children were different in 1964. All that singing and dancing and stories of nannies, is this really what children want to see?

However, as I was watching the last half hour of the movie I was joined by my 8-year-old son, who was very interested in the movie (though it could be a trick to avoid going to bed) and today coming back from school he requested to watch the movie from beginning and he loved it. So, I was wrong, this actually does hit a note with children and the movie serves its purpose.

I think it is merely me who is too far outside the target group (musical AND children’s movie) to fully buy into the movie, but I must admit that it is charming and sweet and of good production value. Technology has made the merging of live action and animation trivial, but for 1964 it works remarkably well, so points for that.

There are a few interesting appearances in the movie: Elsa Lancaster, Bride of Frankenstein, as a nanny and Jane Darwell of Grapes of Wrath in her last role as the Bird Woman.

Normally I am not sure I would recommend this type of movie, but it felt like the right movie at the right time and it does the trick for children, so it ends up with a recommendation from me.

 

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo) (1964)

Matthæusevangeliet

When it comes to movie versions of religious texts a lot of the usual criteria for evaluating a movie become invalid. A religious topic, especially if it is THE religious texts that are being used cannot really be rated as a good or a bad story. If you are religious, you would rate it according to how well it matches your religious believes. If you are not religious such a story would be so far outside your version of reality that you are not in a position to rate it. 

This is how I feel about “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew” (“Il vangelo secondo Matteo”) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. I very much belong to the second group and whether this is a good rendition of the gospels I will leave to religious people. 

What I can say is that Pasolini here went, as far as I can see, for a very literal presentation of the life and death of Jesus. There are hardly any surprises, it is all taken from the text. Even the lines seem to be direct biblical quotes. Something that at times sounds very odd as those lines do not work particular well in a normal dialogue. Many scenes are set up particularly so specific lines can be spoken rather than to serve any progressive story. This means that the slavic adherence to the text makes the movie lumber along rather erratically. 

I have not watched many religious movies, but of the few I have seen those that work the best are usually those that take their own spin on the story, have a certain angle or dramatize events. Pasolini however seems content to just visualize the story and so there are absolutely no surprises or originality here.

Where this version is supposed to stand out is in Pasolini’s application of Italian neorealism to the telling of the story with his use amateur actors and natural locations. At least this is how Wikipedia describes it. I have a hard time seeing that. There is very little that seem natural here. Indeed there is a staged feel to the production that is anything but natural. Characters are not fleshed out and there is absolutely no spontaneity in the dialogue. If this is realism then something has happened since Rossellini.

Then again, if you are really into the religious text you would probably appreciate this strict adherence to the scriptures. It is a particular quality for this type of movie.

I doubt that I have to recount the story itself. It starts with the impregnation of the Virgin Maria and ends with the Resurrection of Christ. Everything in between is well known.

The film was filmed in Calabria in Italy and as I actually live in Israel right now I can see where these look like the real locations and where they decidedly do not. I suppose for the average viewer the match is good enough, but I find it a bit comical at times.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has a reputation of being an avantgarde director with many inaccessible or outright disgusting movies under his belt. My own experience with his movies is very limited, but I find odd that the director of “120 days of Sodom” should also have made this very conventional movie about the life of Jesus. I must say that I expected something else.

On an entirely different note, it is now official that my family and I are moving back to Denmark in July after six years in Israel. We are going to live in Copenhagen and the next month and a half is going to be pretty chaotic. My posting frequency will likely reach an all-time low in this period, but once established in our new apartment I hope to get back to normal speed.

   

Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diablo Na Terra del Sol) (1964)

 

Gud og djævelen i solens land

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Carl Th. Dreyer made a Western?

Well, “Black God, White Devil” (“Deus E O Diablo Na Terra Do Sol”) is what I imagine it would be like.

We got a very emotionally loaded movie that touches on a lot of big questions with characters that will stand still facing different directions and proclaim their existential pain with robot voices. Then they will shoot and kill a lot of people in a sun-dried land for no particular reason.

That does not sound very appetizing and it also reflects my general disappointment with the movie.

It starts out pretty good though. Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey) is a cattle herder (cowboy) in a very dry part of Northern Brazil. He is poor and lives in a shack with his wife Rosa (Yoná Magalhães) and their infant child. Things start going bad when Manuel gets screwed over by the owner of the cattle and Manuel kills him in return. This part is pretty good and very Western-like. Tough and gritty.

Rosa and Manuel escape and joins a religious group following a preacher called Sebastian (Lidio Silva). Sebastian is an asshole. He is filling his followers with lots of religious bullshit and is essentially creating a religious militant group whose only allegiance is to him. Manuel is eating it raw and becomes a faithful follower. This culminates when Sebastian commands him to kill his child as a sacrifice and that is pretty much when I mentally left the movie. The memory of that scene still makes me want to vomit.

Rosa kills Sebastian in return and immediately became my hero, for a while at least. A hitman, sent out by the church (Mauricio do Valle as Antonio das Mortes) kills the whole bunch except for Rosa, Manuel and a blind folk singer.

On the move again, Rosa and Manuel join a bandit who is killing every landowner he can get his hands on. At this point I was getting very confused. I have no idea what was really going on in these scenes, except for the massive amount of killing. It is a very surreal phase of the movie, maybe reflecting the bewilderment Manuel and Rosa are going through. Alas, Antonio das Mortes shows up again and do some more killing.

It is possible that I might have gotten more out of the movie had I not checked out after the baby killing scene. Then again, maybe not. It was getting very existential, very surreal and we are left with nobody to hang on to and a story that is not really going anywhere but towards death. We are very far from a Hollywood happy ending, but I could live with that if this did not feel more like a fizzle than a conclusion. In the end there is nothing but death. True, but also terribly depressing.

The production level is higher than the older Brazilian movies I have seen with the exception of “Black Orpheus”, but not anything approaching what Sergio Leone did in this period. We get the heat and the callousness from the cinematography, but beyond that there is a cheapness to the movie that speaks of a very limited budget.

Not a favorite of mine. How can any movie be that murders children in the name of religion?