I still can't for the life of me put my finger on why I like Linklater's School of Rock so much. Rosenbaum quipped on a radio program that "If Jean Renoir had decided to make a movie about rock and roll musicians in the 6th grade, it would have been something like this." I suppose there is a bit of anti-society to the prep school rock band, but it's no Rules of The Game. Renoir said, "A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again." This auteur sentiment certainly applies to Linklater, but Renoir also said that, "Everyone has his reasons," which may be more applicable to the guy who directed both Before Sunset and a remake of The Bad News Bears.


Renoir also penned the following introduction to his unnervingly charming La Chienne as a puppet show:


The first puppet says: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present a serious social drama proving that vice is always punished.”


The second puppet disagrees and says: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present a comedy of manners with a moral.”


The third puppet strenuously disagrees, pushing the first two puppets aside and exclaiming: “Ladies and gentlemen, pay no attention to them. The play that follows is neither comedy nor drama. It has no moral whatsoever… and proves nothing at all. The characters are neither heroes nor villains, but plain people like you and me. The three main characters are HE, SHE, and THE OTHER GUY, as usual.”


Jack Black's character may be this third puppet, elbowing his way to center stage and telling us that this film is about nothing other than how to rock. It could be a "comedy of manners with a moral" if we were to stretch the material to fit some sort of Dead Poet's Society "My Captain, my captain" framework, but the final scene of the film, playing over the credits, contradicts such a reading. In this last scene we just see Jack Black jamming with these kids who can actually play the instruments they have been playing throughout the film. There's no artifice to it, no clear intention, it is just awesome. This is Linklater's barbaric yawp, a sustained homage to an alternative way of being (Rock!) that "has no moral whatsoever." The School of Rock is ultimately a form of pedagogy jacked straight into the foot-tapping nerve, and as an obviously commercial feature seems to revel in its own mirth.


But of course this is still all still mere description, I can't quite put my finger on the pulse of the film. It certainly lacks a lot of the ambiguities and richly implicit moralisms of his other work. Perhaps this is from whence the pleasure of the film arises (even "pleasure" in the Roland Barthes sense, which is scarcely distinguishable in the French from eros). It directly juxtaposes fresh-faced youth with a far more ancient and inscrutable magic (Rock!). The entirety of the film is occupied with the creation of one giant riff with which the film finishes. Ultimately, the thematic pointlessness of the film, embodied by how much of a loser Jack Black's character really is, is reigned in and harnessed by Linklater's singular focus. There really is nothing more to it, and the pleasure of its experience lies in being able to comprehend it all in one glimpse. Like a catchy tune it just gets stuck in your head.

The first time I saw Tape I could hardly take it. It is relentless, the Come and See of thirtysomethings in the 90's. It is a film about regret and forgiveness, about getting something of your chest, the torment of raw guilt. And, as an adapted stage play, it takes place in a claustrophobic one-act script, a single hotel room out of which its three players never venture. While watching Tape I get overtaken by the relentless dialogue, this little room, and all the energy that is building inside of it. Linklater controls the material so well, choreographing his actors in this tiny space and ratcheting up the moral tension - I get anxious to get out of it, to take a break from all this talking. And ultimately that is the point, as this is an excellent metaphor for guilt and forgiveness, or at least for "getting something off your chest." The relief marked "conclusion" in our minds is the only way out.


I often wonder what it is in Linklater's past that makes him so keen on these themes, things like memory, forgiveness, and relationship. Most of his films (excluding than Bad News Bears, Dazed and Confused, and School of Rock which linger in a limbo of intentionality that make them hard to really categorize) that is not overtly concerned with these points of interest. As demonstrated in the Surise/Sunset films and Tape, Linklater has a knack for representing memory and regret along with how they relate to the objectiveness of morality. The conundrum most of his characters find themselves in is completely Pascalian: Why do I feel this way if there is no such thing as ethics? (A very Generation X version of the original Pascalian axiom: Why do I feel this way if there is no such thing as God/gods/G-D/what-have-you?) While such questions aren't foregrounded in Tape, they are an inescapable part of the viewing process.


And this is all somehow linked to his propensity for making films that take place over one day, or even in real time. He films events rather than stories, making an entire film out of what would be just one scene in most others. Any time I see a film that takes place in real-time I can't help but think of it as some sort of therapy, as a way of a director working something out for himself and for us by means of a detailed investigation of a moment, conversation, or argument. This psychological tack pops up thematically in both Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, which seem to me to enhance a transcendent quality in films like Tape, or even the Sunrise/Sunset films, which is not immediately apparent. In Before Sunset, for example, we don't just have two people walking the green streets of Paris in real time. We have two people, minute by minute, second by second, corresponding and relating to each other in gestures and responses unmediated by narrative time. In this almost Kafka-like insistence on detail, Linklater develops something greater than the sum of its parts. Likewise the relentless morality of Tape is linked to its resolute pace, it is an unflinching, unediting gaze.


Maybe the best comparison I can think of for this aspect of Tape would be that sequence in A Man Escaped in which Bresson almost painstakingly films Fontaine slowly prying that little piece off the door of his cell. Tape has this same element of almost absurd particularity, though applied to a conversation between these three people. There is a formal analogy that can be made between the act of removing that bit from the door and the act of conversing in Tape, and both succeed in become something much greater in scale then they are in fact.


It may be worth comparing Linklater's "moral" film-making and that of Rohmer. These are two very contrasting styles with effective results. What would a Linklater remake of Claire's Knee look like, for example?

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, is a transcendent and visually poetic ode to one of Eastern mysticism’s core doctrines. An old monk and a young boy live together in a one room temple that floats in the middle of a lake nestled picturesquely in a remote emerald valley. Quite ambitiously, the film chronicles the growth of this charming little boy to his wayward adulthood staged through the transition of the seasons over time from Spring all the way back to Spring. Through a narrative tension that stands in stark contrast to the minimalist environment of the temple’s mystical geography, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring moves us through volumes of spiritual dialogue without us really being aware of it.


One of the images that sums up this tone poem to the circularity of all things is the temple itself. This temple is one open room split into three spaces by two freestanding doors facing each other in the middle of the room. The space between these two doors is where the few that live or visit there kneel and pray to the emblems of divinity that inhabit the temple. Anyone in the temple simply pretends that these doors are the only way to enter the other “rooms” of the temple, by simply agreeing to visualize two walls. When this tacit rule is violated by the young monk’s desire for a young girl that is sleeping on "the other side," we begin to come into contact with the gravity of the temple's fragile architecture. His rejection of the patterns of behavior modeled by the elder monk lead to awful tragedy.


Kim seems to have a fascination with parabolic nature of film. Many of the scenes in his films are long, wordless sequences through which we actually experience the spiritual sensibilities he is representing. We follow the little boy as he ties rocks to a fish and a frog and learns why that is such a horrible thing to do. We watch him as a teenager discovering what love is, having seen a girl of his own age for the first time. Towards the end of the film, Kim decides to take a page from Herzog’s book and forces us to sit through a feat of incredible physical endurance. In this case though, Kim out-Herzogs Herzog (as if that were possible) and literally steps in to suffer for his art. I didn’t know that Kim was actually playing the part of the adult monk while I was watching it, but the suffering he endures in this scene would be oddly analogous to Gibson having played Caviezel’s role in The Passion of the Christ. There is something emblematic about Kim's presence as both director and directed.


Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall...and Spring is a great example of film as a spiritual exercise. It isn’t a Western spirituality, and Kim’s beautiful apology for the circularity of existence may strike one as lacking some key explanations when it comes full circle. But the film is rich with tones of transcendence. At the very least, it is good to see such great cinematography put to use as a language of mysticism. Like the door, the film becomes a space whose walls and distinctions are only apparent, though we are compelled to allow them to obtain in our senses.

"Exquisite Yearning!... Exotic Living! High in a hidden mountain village of a strange land and extravagant dreams and desires become exciting realities!"


The successes of Powell's Black Narcissus are well documented. Scorsese said it was being like "bathed in color," the over-realized storyboarding of films like Taxi Driver channeling this influence. It epitomizes Powell's almost Kandinskian passion for networking image and score, the climax played out as a wordless dance before the orchestra actually on set. It presages the eros literally foregrounded in his later, more pointedly (get it?) self aware Peeping Tom, which works in his filmography like a footnote referring to the aspects of Black Narcissus originally apparent only to the most Freudian of viewers. It out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock in its relentless pscho-what-have-you subtext as a story of unequipped English nuns in an ex-colony of the Empire. Here in this outpost of influence, the mere whiff of a handkerchief soaked in imported "Black Narcissus" perfume conjures up all the ironies inherent to the myth of colonialism. To the locals, it is a material vision of affluence. To the nuns, a cul-de-sac of spiritual ambivalence.


It is from this subtext that some of the best scenes of the film emerge. Of course the ending, eloquently choreographed and mathematically executed as if the performers are notes on a segment of sheet music, is a perfect microcosm for Powell's career in the same way that the end of Breathless is for Godard or the beginning of Andrei Rublev is for Tarkovsky. But sequences like the brief shots of Jean Simmons, playing the bejewelled local lolita, secretly sniffing fumes of Black Narcissus at the top of the screen as they pass over Sister Clodagh's head are even more successful in their phrasing of the film's context. In 1947, the year of this film's release, Indian gained independence from Britian, putting Powell's nuns in sharper relief from their missional subjects. Here Jean Simmon's seductive character looms over the receding Empire, already a present critiquing a past.


And continuing this direction, Powell sows the character arc of Sister Clodagh with several flashbacks to her past, in which she traded romance for the cloth. One of these flashbacks in particular is a montage sequence of a fox hunt in the Irish countryside. Horses thunder over hedges, barking dogs crash through the fields, flashes of plus-fours and knee-high boots, and an eventual long shot of the valley through which the party is rumbling. And then Powell jarringly edits back to the grey vista from the edge of the monastery, scattering acidic traces of the violence, passion, and vigor of the hunt. In this brief space between the montage and its context, this most British of pastimes reads well with the similarly erotic past of the monastery this nun is attempting to redeem (it used to be an apartment block for the emperor's concubines). This sort of scene is what post-colonialists live for, doing in the span of seconds what it takes Jane Campion quite a while to do in The Piano, albeit with zero explicit sexual imagery.


In Powell's hands these mere whisps of memory become charged with eroticisms and cultural critiques that post-war Western academia hadn't caught onto yet, his films becoming Duchamp installations without the naked ladies or Dali paintings without the juvenile Freudian digs. Or maybe Rorschach tests that really do look like naughty bits, two-dimensional masterpieces held before squinting philosophers and psychoanalysts just now coming to grips with the death of modernism. "Exquisite yearning" indeed.

“Big they fought! Big they loved! Big their story!”


(This is the actual publicity tagline for the film. How fantastic is that?)


The term “horizonless landscape” pops up often both in exhibition catalogs of contemporary photography and descriptions of post-modern culture. In its literal sense, it refers to a landscape image which is cropped in a way that eliminates the horizon as a point of reference. (Imagine, for example, how awful Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” would be without its horizon. Alternatively, among the most rewarding horizonless landscapes of our time would be Andreas Gursky’s giant high-resolution photographs of urban architecture.) In its metaphorical sense, it refers to what happens when we isolate a part from its whole context. Here in post-modernity, after the death of meta-narratives and all that, we live in such a landscape that lacks horizons and edges as points of ideological or spiritual reference.


I was stunned to encounter a perfect blend of this literal and metaphorical sense of the term in a place like a 1958 William Wyler western. By all accounts it is an excellent film, the cinematography making full use of the “big” country in which it was shot. It films its characters in deep focus from a distance, close-up as they look out at different vistas, and everything in between. But there a particular scene in which Gregory Peck (the good guy) dukes it out with Charlton Heston (the bad guy who eventually becomes a “good” guy) in the middle of the night. It starts off in a tight shot with Peck swinging away at Heston, but the camera soon pulls back to enough of a distance that these two brawlers become tiny features at the center of a bleak frame of windswept grass. The camera is placed in such a way that the horizon is deleted, and for several minutes Wyler cuts us off from everything but this monochrome patch of prairie. It is a stark contrast to the sumptuous landscape cinematography of the film at either side of this scene, and even at this distance one can hear the flat, meaty slap of fist on face as these two pummel each other into the ground.


This scene is a remarkable experience, a small moment in a giant film. It only comes to an end when both fighters agree that their ridiculous duel has been futile.

The Fountain has made me like Aronofsky’s previous film, Requiem for a Dream, even less. Many slate Requiem for a Dream as one of the best films ever made about addiction. Quite the contrary. Its visual self-obsession and over-reliance on technique tends to mimic the selfishness and duplicity that characterizes addictive behaviors. This is an admittedly harsh reading of the slick exterior of Requiem, and the burden of proof would lie on my shoulders to demonstrate such a criticism, but The Fountain confirmed my suspicion that Aronofsky has a hard time making films about actual people.


At the center of The Fountain is a sci-fi love story bulging with potential for some intriguingly humane filmmaking, but Aronofksy leaves this central story underdeveloped in such a way that in never actually balances out the lavish visual attention it receives. I kept waiting for The Fountain to turn towards its two main characters, but it constantly draws our attention towards the visual context of their time-bending narrative instead. For some reason, Aronofsky's directing can't seem to penetrate the wordless mystery of loving human relationships like Gondry, Jonze, or other very visually oriented directors. (I pick these two specifically because they have put together engrossing love stories with a concentration on technique equal to The Fountain.) The closest contrast I can get to Aronofsky's consistent failure in this respect is the extended scene in The Secret Life of Dentists when the whole family is ill. While watching that scene I remember being so struck with how Aronofsky-like it was in its execution, but completely unlike Aronofsky it managed to be tender, emotive, and intimately connected with the central character of the film. The Fountain is yet another evidence that he is a great stylist, but he hasn't really made a film about people yet. Oddly enough, his most abstract film, Pi, is probably his most personal film to date.


When thinking about The Fountain in terms of its closest neighbor, 2001, I become even more disenfranchised with the film. Whereas 2001 is a brilliant execution of myth, ultimately ecumenical and open-ended, Aronofsky's film is isolated, privatized, and internal. The film turns in on itself at the end, almost sunk under the weight of its central character's grief. Anything that could be said positively about The Fountain's use of imagination, abstraction, and mythmaking in the face of life and death is undercut by its central self-absorption, as its characters end up as isolated as Aronofsky’s technique. I recall coming across a word-picture in one of Jonathan Edward's books in which he describes sin (as with any good Reformed theologian read: the human condition) not as the heart ranging too far in the world, but as the heart closing in on itself and becoming inexpressibly tiny. I couldn't shake this analogy while watching The Fountain.

“Does a passive infrared scanner… see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”

These few paragraphs of review are bracketed by two quotes from Philip K. Dick’s book A Scanner Darkly, recently adapted by Linklater. It isn’t a rote adaptation, but he manages to get out of the book what is central to Dick’s intentions in the novel. On the basis of a number of odd personal coincidences, Dick’s novel has long been my go-to depiction of substance abuse and its psychoses in print, a sad and gentle giant of a novel that only unfolds its terror to the reader willing to stand on its shoulders for a while. The novel is a confession, and next to Dick’s two “mainstream” novels, a rare moment of unambiguous self-reflection. In terms of his biography, A Scanner Darkly is what they call “a moment of clarity.”


Linklater’s triumph in the film version of A Scanner Darkly is the transposition of these personal transactions that take place in one’s reading of the novel into images. The film makes use of the same animating/painting process he helped pioneer in Waking Life, which is arguably more effective and germane to the subject matter of A Scanner Darkly. Linklater’s frequent closely framed shots of Fred/Bob in personal dialogue, cloaked in the hallucinatory tones of the film’s unique format, are effective in turning the internal monologue of the novel into something other than simple voiceover narration. In these moments we are able to look the helplessness at the center of the novel straight in the eye. Meanwhile, the plot turns the empathy developed by these scenes into something far less conventional as the viewer becomes subject to Fred/Bob’s own confusion.


The impressionistic animation of the film enables Linklater to reconstruct the world of Substance D without the unnecessarily hysterical techniques of other addiction operas like Requiem for a Dream or Spun. In an ultimate irony, this world of Substance D (often just referred to as “death” or “slow death”) fabricated by Linklater’s painterly approach is in direct contradiction of André Bazin’s understanding of actual, physical celluloid passing through the camera as an extension of photography’s unique capability of recording and preserving life. From a purely formal standpoint, A Scanner Darkly isn’t a “film” at all. Linklater tipped his “holy moments” hand to Bazin in Waking Life, and I kept wondering throughout the film if he recognized how well his “film” matched Dick’s evocation of substance abuse, death, and the incapability of technology to penetrate either. Contra Bazin, A Scanner Darkly literally is a slow death, his painting the film frame by frame the foreground of a terminal, reality-altering illness.


Even if such an analogy is simply a by-product of Linklater’s production process that I just made up, it is brilliant. It embodies a profound criticism of films like Requiem for a Dream that have been heralded as effective depictions of addiction. What we really have in Requiem is the sort of short term, surface level escape from reality that drugs pretend to offer their users. All of Aranofsky’s tricks with steadi-cams, time-lapse cinematography, and split screen editing seem to be depicting the profound internal crises of his characters. But in reality, these techniques are fleeting, resting superficially on the surface of the film itself and failing to penetrate the psychosis of addiction. Their affect wears off soon after the film is over, the viewer quickly needing an equivalently MTV-like fix. In contrast, Linklater hasn’t made a film about addiction, but an entirely different world from reality itself which epitomizes the process and pitfalls of substance abuse. Somewhere there between Dick’s prose and Linklater’s formal mechanism of translation is an enduring performance of what they call “rock bottom.”

“‘Then shall it come to pass the saying that is written,’ a voice said. ‘Death is swallowed up. In victory.’ Perhaps only Fred heard it. ‘Because,’ the voice said, ‘as soon as the writing appears backward, then you know which is illusion and which is not. The confusion ends, and death, the last enemy, Substance Death, is swallowed not into the body but up - in victory. Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death.’”

I went off on Hess pretty hard in a piece published a while back by Metaphilm, reading it along the lines of the ignorant nihilism that informs Gummo (one of the worst things produced by America in the 90's). Despite the aimlessness of Napoleon Dynamite, which I argued appears at first to be quite harmless but in reality is as mercenary as anything Korine has done, there is something sharp about the camerawork in Napoleon Dynamite, a lazy sort of mise-en-scene effected by a relative lack of directorial vigor. It is possible that the crisp framing and simplified story-boarding of Hess' shots are simply an artless or thoughtless gesture, partner-in-crime to his equally thin approach to narrative transition and dialogue. But then again, maybe the guy has chops.


At least, the consistency he brings to Nacho Libre indicates that his clean and well-composed framing is completely intentional. And it fits his lo-fi comedy perfectly, sort of like how Leone's slow pans over empty landscapes dovetailed neatly with the wry irony of his storytelling. I suppose I understand Nacho Libre's less than glorious critical response, as I also still deplore the way Hess cuts his two-dimensional comedy from a Coen-ish (as in Joel and Ethan) set of racial profiles. But I will go ahead and say it: Nacho Libre is sublime.


There is a moment at the end of Nacho Libre that comes awfully close to the poetry of any of a number of Spike Lee dolly shots, the one where he puts someone on a dolly facing a camera and then pulls it down an alley or through a nightclub. (I am convinced that 25th Hour is actually just the one 30 second scene in which Anna Paquin floats through the nightclub. Anything before and after that shot is just a bookend, filler, an explanatory device, a progession towards and regression from that 30 second sequence that so hauntingly expresses the ambivalence of all New York bacchanalia post-9/11.) I am going to go ahead and spoil the complicated plot of Nacho Libre here, but at the end of the film Nacho, played by an ecstatically porcine Jack Black, climbs up on the ropes of the wrestling ring as his opponent attempts to flee from impending defeat. Nacho then dives from the ropes like Superman, soars about twenty feet through the air, and gracefully pins his opponent in a hold called "La Magistral Cradle." (It really is.)


This flight through the air, in which Nacho sails inhumanly over gaping bystanders, is a thing of beauty. It is a moment of incredible poise, artful virtuality, and unapologetic myth. I don't think it has any profound formal relationship to the film, as if Hess forges deep connections between this incognito half-Mexican charitable wrestling priest and some important point of film theory. It is simply a sublime moment: a memorable, perfectly composed flight over an impossible and unecessary distance. Jack Black is like a dancer, his sense of presence and Hess' completely arbitrary approach to scripting and imagery come together in this scene in such a way that they almost credit each other with dignity.


I could point to other scenes almost as sublime as this, such as the one in which Nacho climbs a cliff to eat the yolk of an eagle egg that will grant him strength and the "best moves." Nacho then turns and executes a graceful swan dive back into the ocean framed with unassuming precision from above. It may be no coincidence that Xavier Perez Grobier was brought on board as cinematographer for Nacho Libre. It is arguable that the best feature of The Woodsman, Monster House, Lucia, Lucia, and Before Night Falls are their refreshingly crisp camerawork, and Grobier was cinematographer on all of these films. It may not be the greatest "art film" of the year, but there is an artfulness to Nacho Libre that has gone woefully underappreciated.

(This is an extract from my paper "Jesus Beyond His Genre: The Non-Canonical Jesus Films" delivered to the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section at SBL 2006 in Washington, D.C. It is minus a boatload of footnotes.)

A loosely fictional account of the days leading up to the suicide of the lead singer of a famous grunge band, Last Days is an extended meditation on the death of a thinly veiled stand-in for Kurt Cobain. It is a passion play in the truest sense of the term, each scene the stop on a walk through the “stages of the cross” that traces the last days of this musician named Blake. Van Sant’s methodical pacing follows Blake in a series of dramatically lengthy tracking shots set in and around a ramshackle mansion owned by him and overrun by a group of hipster musician friends currently sponging off Blake’s celebrity. But sown throughout, there are hints of Veronica, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the paralyzing fear of the disciples after the death of Christ. At the end of the film, Blake commits suicide precisely like Kurt Cobain, and in the one non-realist image of the film, his wispy soul can be scene leaving his body and climbing a window frame into heaven.


In previous films, Van Sant has explored the narrative quality of prime-time media images and CCTV footage. The epilogue of Last Days, which grafts the famous MTV coverage of Cobain’s suicide over Blake’s death, links this theoretical tendency in Van Sant to the references to Jesus’ life made throughout the film. The point of comparison between Blake and Jesus is the hagiography that has developed for both in the wake of their death. Van Sant films Blake within the narrative framework of Jesus passion and resurrection not because he wants to impose a redemptive significance on Kurt Cobain’s life, but because just as our readings of Jesus as a man get lost in the shuffle of the Christology inherent to the resurrection, so has did the media fail to see Cobain as a suffering person. This image of ascension signifies Blake’s worth as a person over and against his worth as a cultural icon. It is not a theological image as is its passion narrative parallel, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. It is an utterly human image, an iconography of pathos that robs Cobain’s death of its purely cultural overtones and recasts it in the dignity of anonymous suffering. And of course, this is all very early Albert Schweitzer. And here we see a different iconography of Jesus developed, in which he is co-opted as a first century media figure that presages fallen media figures of our age. Thus it is only Van Sant’s oblique reliance on the canonical tradition that lifts his film out of the potential absurdity of its details and conclusions.

(This is an extract from my paper "Jesus Beyond His Genre: The Non-Canonical Jesus Films" delivered to the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section at SBL 2006 in Washington, D.C. It is minus a boatload of footnotes.)


Despite the directness of its title, Bruno Dumont’s La Vie de Jesus is not a Jesus film. And if it weren’t for the title, there is not any way that even an informed viewer would connect this to the life of Christ in any fashion. Over the last decade, Bruno Dumont has produced several of the most controversial films to hit the international scene due to his facile, even arbitrary, penchant for confrontational imagery. Critics have rightly interpreted such imagery in the context of Dumont’s humanistic concern with intimacy, loneliness, and the raw poetry of human relationship. And La vie de Jesus falls neatly within such a reading.


Dumont revealed that he took the title from Ernest Rénan’s famous 1865 book of the same name. He said: “I had the desire to tell the life of Jesus. Not to repeat what everybody knows. It is the significance of that life that interests me. I invented a story to regenerate the meaning, to show that there is a humanism in Christianity that they don't teach in the Church, in the schools.” As Renan, for Dumont, Christ is a “poetic expression of the human tragedy.” And his vaguely rewritten “Life of Jesus,” attempts to retread Jesus’ expression of humanity in the life of Freddy, an unemployed French teenager who divides his time between caring for his pet finch, playing in a local marching band, and hanging out with a girl that lives in this same lower class provincial French neighborhood. In the beginning of the film, while visiting a friend in the hospital, someone points out a faded medieval print of Jesus raising Lazarus on the hospital wall. This brief flicker of divinity soon peters out beneath the slow pace of Dumont’s gravely meditative filmmaking.


Freddy eventually kills a boy who has been flirting with his girlfriend, and the film ends as quietly as it began, leaving one to wonder where Jesus was other than in the flat image medieval image in the hospital. Yet Dumont claims: “Without the title, the film loses something. It is a very mystical film. Film has the power to touch something mysterious in the body, its secrets.” Beyond the issues posed by Renan’s reading of Jesus’ life and ministry, there is a vast theoretical background to Dumont’s statement. Dumont sees film as a way of regaining contact with the body, with the physical, in such a way that contradicts the disembodiment inherent to culture in the information age and the hyper-sexuality of advertising. There is a sense in which the film disembodies Christ by bracketing it with the unfulfilled expectation of a Christ-figure. This ironically accords with Dumont’s concern to re-embody Christ, who according to Dumont has been over-theologized by traditional Christianity, barring him from actual life, the day to day sociology of ordinary people. This can also be seen in the interplay between secrecy and revelation put into play by the title that calls to mind the work of Kelber and Kermode on the Gospel of Mark. On Mark, Kelber says, “From my perspective, the gospel encourages experimentation with a new logic in defiance of received opinion. Secrecy, or as I prefer to call it, mystery results from a disorienting-reorienting narrative which forestalls closure. Meaning is thereby not allowed to attach itself exclusively to the one, the literal sense.” Likewise, Dumont’s film ends darkly, in a shadow, disconnected from the expectation of its title. It is only the brackets created by the title that suggest the presence of Jesus in the film, the viewer invited to respond to Jesus’ subsequent absence. Dumont’s Christ-figure is only a fleeting phenomenon of the film itself, a shadowy humanist abstraction of Renan’s version of Jesus revealed to the viewer by means of a conflicting reader-response to Dumont’s imagery.

(This is an extract from my paper "Jesus Beyond His Genre: The Non-Canonical Jesus Films" delivered to the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section at SBL 2006 in Washington, D.C. It is minus a boatload of footnotes in which I express my consternation with Quandt, and interact with Baugh.)


Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, is arguably the most successful rehearsal of his preoccupation with diegetic sound, deep focus cinematography, editing and the duration of time, and film as a medium of presence, a means of spirituality. Bresson’s previous films begged for transcendental readings, as they are saturated with quiet images of his peculiar sense of grace, and his pioneering triangulation of film opposite from the spiritual and real evoked a realism that informed the auteurs of the next generation which we now know as the French New Wave.


It is this realism, motivated by the formal properties of film against the written word and painted or photographed image, that lends such a gravity to what may be the most unexpected Christ figure in film history. The film follows the stages of life of a donkey and the vicissitudes of its owners in a French village, the often abstract storyline cycling through the life of Marie, a young woman wavering between the love of a good man and the local bad boy. Against this simply polarized narrative backdrop Balthazar stands mute, often in the frame only as a flicking ear or tail, both a witness to and participant in the sufferings of those men and beast he comes into contact with throughout his life. Though Bresson has resisted the reduction of this film to a Christian allegory, there is a constellation of features that point to Balthazar as a sort of Christ-figure. Bresson took the name Balthazar from the traditional name of one of the three wisemen, saying that the film “is about our anxieties and desires when faced with a living creature who's completely humble, completely holy.” He draws on biblical imagery of the donkey, lacing its story arc with images of the virgin birth, gift of the magi, a baptism, stations of the cross, crown of thorns, a stigmatic wound, and a strikingly emblematic death. The film ends with Balthazar laying down in a field among braying sheep, having been shot in a botched smuggling attempt the night before and finally succumbing to this mortal wound.


It is in this final scene, in which Balthazar consummates his role as witness of the suffering of those around him by falling quietly, laden with the ill-gotten gain of his last masters, that the obtuse spiritual imagery of the films comes into focus. Bresson lets the camera linger on this startling image of mortality until the frame fades finally to black. Balthazar has passed silently through the film as a reference to something deeper than the materiality of its characters, and even its naturalist imagery. Critic James Quandt sees his death simply as the “prolonged expiry of an old, abused animal.” But this misses the accumulation of Bresson’s referential links to Christ by means of Balthazar as a wordless image. It is not a representation of Jesus’ narrative at play here in the subtext, but simply the enormity of his divine presence. This is not a “Christic subtext” in Kozlovic’s sense, but an opaque image in a profoundly Bressonian sense. In Balthazar, he evokes the prologue of John: “We beheld his glory…and his own did not receive him.” Similarly, Balthazar’s image has difficulty fitting into the film, moving quietly through it until he exhausts its narrative potential, paradoxically being broken by the dramatic mechanisms of the film that he has given shape and purpose.

Documentarian Michael Apted filmed a bunch of kids when they were seven years old for a British TV “programme” named 7 Up. He has returned to talk to these kids every seven years since, this year being their 49th. In past installments, Apted and his participants haven’t fared so well, and at a low ebb in 42 Up only featured 11 of the original 14 participants. This time 12 are back, but 49 Up takes a further critical turn as some of the participants implore us to rethink the entire series itself. Surprisingly, it ends on a very quiet note, just a sober splicing of images from then and now with nothing other than our memory of each as a commentary. I have seen most of the rest, and this is the most memorable installment to date. If the series ends here, it will go out with a reflective whimper. Apted’s series will be remembered culling universal truths from this range of largely everyday biographies.

I first encountered the story of Timothy Treadwell (amateur bear researcher killed by hungry grizzlies in the wilderness) in Reader’s Digest and even then wondered why it had not been made into a documentary. Treadwell’s odd story is perfectly suited to Werner Herzog’s favorite themes: the raw power of nature, the awful determination of man, and the wisdom often obscured by both. Treadwell is yet another in a litany of characters determined to push the limits of unmovable forces that thankfully inspire Herzog to keep picking up the camera. There is extant audio footage of the attack that brutally claimed both Treadwell’s life and that of his girlfriend. Fortunately, Herzog chose not to let us hear it, his mere recounting of its content is pointed enough and evidence that he doesn’t need to rely on shock value to get his films seen. Historically, Herzog has been quite fond of speaking, but one of his finer moments happens towards the end of Grizzly Man when he claims: “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder.” Herein may lay a significant key to the rest of his work.

“The eyes are flaring with little stories…”

We tend to associate myths with words, with repeatable narratives that can be written or spoken. In Eye Myth, Stan Brakhage was intent on producing a myth that could be purely mediated by the eye. In commentary on the film he says that “the eyes are flaring with little stories,” and this short seems to catch the eye in action. The eye here is constructive, aware, perceptive enough that it almost begins to re-educate itself. Eye Myth is about a sense of myth-making that side steps the literary processes we usually associate it with.


His shortest piece, at nine seconds, Eye Myth took Brakhage a year to make. It is also one of his most gratifying hand-painted films, in which he would actually paint every frame (that’s 24 per second) and then roll that strip of film through a projector. Part of what makes it so satisfying is that as it plays so quickly, it can be immediately digested. Many of his longer hand-painted works have languorous gestation periods. But its potency also derives from the haunting composition Brakhage stumbles upon towards the end of the piece. A confluence of paint flickers by until the image of a seated man facing right emerges. He flashes through a number of abstract permutations until the frame unexpectedly flips to the left, and for a brief moment becomes relatively defined amidst the clouds of color. He could be thought of as trapped in the paint, perhaps momentarily freed. But that may oversimplify Brakhage’s intention. It would be better to think of the man in those final frames as the final flourish of an Eye Myth, the grounding thought or image that relates the myth to the this-world state of affairs it is attempting to make sense of. (Because this is what myths do.)


In the same commentary though, Brakhage makes a very subtle mistake. He points out that part of the “oxymoron” implicit to the short is that the word “myth” actually comes from a word meaning “mouth.” Technically, this isn’t true. The Greek word mythos from which we have the literary term “myth” corresponds more to the act of speaking than the means by which one speaks. And even more than that, in Homer it typically refers to lengthy speeches or explanations of events that eventually became a genre in themselves. While this lexical correction undercuts the sense of the film as a physical oxymoron between the things eyes are supposed to do and the things mouths are supposed to do, it ends up highlighting what Brakhage is getting at anyway. Eye Myth really is about discourse, but it is more specifically about ways in which the eye constructs stories in ways that are typically associated with the mouth. For Brakhage, discourse can’t just be limited to speech activities and this is at base is the ontology of film.


And I have actually been to a little town called Eyemouth, so I know what I am talking about.

I stumbled across Jim Jarmusch late one night during one of those helpful IFC retrospectives. Little did I know that I had already been primed for films like Stranger Than Paradise or Mystery Train. Well-steeped in the ad hoc personalizations of the Band of Outsiders era Godard, I caught on to Jarmusch’s game with minimal effort. In his earlier films one has the sense that Jarmusch had more of a knack for aiming his camera at the right spot in a somewhat unscripted scene than he did for the tight, controlled sort of directing that characterized American independent filmmaking of his predecessors. This is excepting Cassevetes of course, from whom Jarmusch learned how to be such an actor driven director. And here also is where Jarmusch and Godard part ways. Godard’s films develop around ideas, but Jarmusch’s films develop more around people who occasionally have ideas.


Jarmusch once said in an interview that he starts the filmmaking process simply by sketching the contours of a character (even with a specific actor in mind) and then “the plot kind of suggests itself around the character.” And sure enough, one can still see this principle at work in his later films. Dead Man emerges around a series of well-rounded characters penciled into the frame by a black and white Blakian naturalism. Ghost Dog follows an unexpectedly sensitive figure through what could be a script as referentially vapid as Pulp Fiction. (Coffee and Cigarettes just does its own thing.) And now Broken Flowers adds to this catalogue of character studies masquerading as thoughtful fictions.


Jarmusch had to have Bill Murray in mind as he developed this character. Not only is he the logical end of the last few characters played by Murray (the aging absent dad of Lost in Translation or the same, though funnier, in The Life Aquatic), but things he does are the sorts of things I have always imagined Bill Murray doing on his days off. He sits around in snazzy tracksuits listening to Marvin Gaye and ruminating about days gone by, saying something dryly ironic every now and then to the waitress at the diner he frequents. In Broken Flowers he plays Don Johnston, retired computer entrepreneur and inveterate womanizer. After his latest girlfriend leaves him, Don gets a distinctly pink letter in the mail informing him that a son he fathered twenty years ago is now out trying to track down his birth father.


Other reviews cover the plot line well enough. Aided by his interestingly Ethiopian neighbor, Winston, Don tracks down the five possible mothers of such a child and visits them in turn. The last, having died years before, provides a surprisingly mortal moment in a rain swept cemetery. Along the way there are plenty of the Jarmusch brand of giggles, so much so that after a while the comedy begins to become pat, a little overbearing. But I think Jarmusch does this on purpose. There is a scene in which one ex talks about her dog named "Winston." Don winces a bit, as if this has all gotten too hokey for him. Up until that point the film had been a bit blase, predictable, and uncreative in its dialogue. In this scene though it all starts to pivot as both Don and the audience realize at the same time: Yeah...this is a bit corny. A bit too corny. But the paternity crisis he is in isn't corny at all. Don has just been treating it at a charming and comedic distance, which is what has gotten him into all this emotional trouble in the first place.


This comedy is also moderated by frequent stretches of silence, Don pilots his rental car down the highway to the jazzy hum of Winston’s specially crafted soundtrack. Directors like Tarkovsky or Bresson used the same sort of blocks of space and sound to create a sense of pacing and transcendence, but Jarmusch just creates vacancies. The hotel room at the end of Stranger than Paradise is as stifling as it is bare and vacuous, one actually gets anxious while trying to endure the minimalism of that scene. The end of Broken Flowers is the same species of startling vacancy. Don stands in the middle of the street not having found any of the answers he went looking for, and realizing in the process just how important the question was to begin with. He finds he wants a son, he does want something grounding like that in his life. But he stands in the middle of the street without one, every passing twenty-year-old male a vision of what could have been.


Further notes on humor and irony in the film:


Much of the scripted comedy strikes some viewers as a bit trite and shallow, certainly beneath the subtlety of Jarmusch's other work. Which is true. We get tired of Johnston's shtick after a while, but so does he, right in the scene before the cemetary. When he finds out that his ex's dog is also named Winston (like his friendly neighbor), he grimaces as if it is all too much for him. It has gotten too cute, too sophmoric, which is a complete offense to the situation he has created for himself. Thus Johnston's character arc is from self-indulgent under-realization to a discovery that this dull comic monotone is actually the way he has chosen to deal with the emotional fallout of being a gigolo. That is why the end is so vacuous, he simply has no response because he never made the effort to learn one. All he can feel is some sort of frantic fear that he missed out on life and now can't really do anything about it.


The cemetary scene in most other contexts would be so cheesy, so pat. But here it effectively signals Johnston's breaking point. And what makes this ironic is that he is broken in the context a scene as conventional (in a cemetary, it is even raining, yada yada yada) as the preceding film; it has taken a lot of very subtle footwork for Jarmusch to make this actually work. Johnston isn't "above all this" as if his posing provides enough of a buffer from reality, he has just been pretending that it does. And the shallowness of the film's comedy serves to expose the Johnston's viral superficiality. The film really is about Johnston's "coming of age" in this respect.


The Marvin Gaye scene is a great example of this. Flat-out cheesy, but so broadly overdrawn that it sets the tone for how we are to perceive Johnston within the film. Think of that scene as a bit of foreshadowing.


Furthermore, it isn't Johnston in the film it who is deadpan, it is actually Jarmusch. Murray is fantastic at "under-realization" in the film, but Jarmusch is a master at providing space for actors to respond to his scripts this way. I hate to pull out the word, but as an auteur, I think Jarmusch needs to be read in light of his entire body of work. In that context Broken Flowers is an unassuming masterpiece by anyone's standards.

Depending on who you ask Les amants du Pont Neuf was either Leos Carax’s high-water mark, or the frantic efforts of a man drowning in his own ideas. Coasting on the reputation of his past two achievements, Carax was surprisingly granted access to the Pont Neuf for the making of the film. On such a set, with no less than Juliette Binoche and Dennis Lavant in tow, even I could probably make a decent film. But infamously over budget and way off schedule, Carax eventually had to build a replica of the site, complete with a custom façade of La Samaritaine in the background, in a town south of Paris to complete the film. Packed with some of the most lavish set pieces to ever hit French cinema, the film bore with it a level of expectation few films could hope to match.


Binoche and Lavant play two homeless castaways that bump into each other while squatting on the Pont Neuf during its complete restoration. Virtually stranded from society in this limbo between the banks of the Seine, they fall into a precarious version of love before embarking on a ludicrous crime spree to support their meager needs. When Alex finds out that Michele is desperately in need of a surgery that will recover her permanently failing sight, the film takes a turn for the worst. His desperation to keep her despite her need for radical and immediate eye surgery begins to erode the foundation of the haphazard Eden they have cobbled together on the bridge.


Les amants is often marked by Carax’s typical flourish. For a few minutes we watch Alex at work blowing fire for tourists, dancing with and beneath the flame in a way that only Carax could stage. At one point, the elder bum in their squat learns of Michele's growing blindness and sneaks her into a nearby museum after hours to view a painting by candlelight. And I have seen few things as spectacular as the drunken joy ride down the Seine during the city-wide Bicenntenial party in Michele skis behind Alex in a stolen police boat as an apocalyptic display of fireworks erupt from the walls for several minutes down either side of the rivers. I haven’t the slightest idea how this scene was filmed; it is an incomparable expression of emotional excess.


Les amants du Pont Neuf is about a wild and exuberant love that grows in the rubble of an unsanitary homelessness. Those who don’t like the film point to some of the more unbelievable scenes towards the end of the film as evidence of a general thoughtlessness on Carax’s part. For example, when Alex discovers that Michele's family has hired people to plaster posters all over Paris asking for information concerning her return, he sets fire to dozens of them that line the underground hallway of a Metro station at once. The sheer impossibility of Alex actually being able to do that (much less being able to find a vacant Metro station within the city limits) makes the scene cloying and absurd. But I am fine with that, as the same could be said of the entire film. At least Carax is being consistent.


And my perception of the film as a grand success may be biased. I once spent the last few hours of a summer night before daybreak on the Pont Neuf, and I can attest to the slightly less than realistic aura granted to Paris from down there between the banks.