Early in Anthony Mann’s seriously neurotic and starkly severe Reign of Terror, a sinister hand excretes from the border of the frame and reaches up to choke the man we have thus far assumed to be our protagonist. The camera suggestively observes who we take to be our hero in a mirror’s gaze while an unknown assailant stabs the man in the back. Within a minute, this film not only reintroduces the man wielding this phantasmic appendage as our real hero but shatters the accepted vision of historical cinema that would believe in clear gazes and untroubled viewpoints to begin with. Both Orwellian and Wellesian, this is a historical anti-epic that entirely disfigures historical cinema’s own panoptic “epic-ness.”  It erects an edifice of cramped people who can barely see where they’re going down the cloistered, blinkered hallway of history. If cinema often promise to reflect the past to us, Reign of Terror offers an ever-cracking mirror.

Poetically, this marks Reign of Terror as a hell of a text, not a milquetoast, straight-laced historical suit-and-tie but a full-on expressionist straight-jacket.  Politically, it means that the film has little use for historical grandstanding, and that its politics can verge on drowning revolutionary potential – the hope of a genuinely better world – in a swamp of what passes for “complexity” but may simply be confusion. Released in 1949, Reign of Terror is a transparently fearful text. It is a Cold War casualty fully in line with the politics of the time. Its opinion is that revolution is often more foolhardy than not. It resonates with what Lionel Trilling would call the liberal imagination’s fear of dogma and its metaphysics of calibrated uncertainty, Isaiah Berlin’s appreciation of “negative liberty” as a bulwark against what he perceived to be the excesses of totalitarian solidity, and Hannah Arendt’s belief that the Soviet revolution was merely an extension of the French Revolution’s inevitable slide into dictatorial control. The film’s portrait of Maximilien Robespierre is as a self-important monomaniac exercising autocratic dominion, a God-like puppet-mater who calmly intones things like “I made the mob. They are my children, they won’t kill their own father.”

Yet Reign of Terror evidences a deliriously morbid, at-times nearly erotic fascination with death regardless. It is conservative, in the small-c sense, but Reign of Terror is also troubled and tormented in a way that is never less than fully fascinating. While the “history film,” in 1949 as it does now, promises an unceasing access, a panoptic gaze, Reign of Terror turns the limits of its micro-budget production into a boon to its imagination, warping conspiratorial gloom into noirish modernism. This is a history with precious little stable ground, and whatever it lacks in moral clarity, it recovers in aestheticizing the experience of having your sense of historical meaning – of history as a divine arc – swept out from under you. Heroes who seem like dark angels partitioning the frame later feel like shadowy wraiths ready to do away with us.

Continue reading →

A special holiday addition of midnight screenings, for mother.

In one of cinema’s more fortuitous twists of fate, Psycho II is essentially a re-adaptation of 1964’s Straight-Jacket, William Castle’s Psycho rip-off that, itself, only relied on the concept of Psycho to drastically reconfigure its thematic texture and imaginative logic. Like that film, Psycho II ruminates on the tortured pull of past, on whether cycles of violence inextricably perpetuate themselves or whether they diffuse and eventually decay, whether they emanate from individual souls or via cycles of society, as the unfortunate tragedy of vicious circumstances, or as the unknown endpoint of some sort of cosmic gravitational pull. Like Castle’s film, Psycho II can only play silly for long before revealing its secret: it genuinely cares about the soul of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the troubled man who, twenty-five years before, murdered a few trespassers and cleaved linear cinematic storytelling in half along with them. Under the sway of Norman’s own psychological self-splitting, Hitchcock proposed that the medium itself could not stand stable anymore.

Psycho II bristles with the consequences of that history. It trembles with disquiet not at the murderous power of a seemingly self-composed man but at what it would mean to put himself back together again, to recompose the soul of a broken man. In the original film, Bates was essentially a cipher for a fragmented world. This film posits that the society unleashed by that world does not want him to find a home in it, that it would rather ossify its instabilities in him than acknowledge them as distinctly social distortions. This film’s portrait of Norman is not a malevolent individual force. He is a lost soul tormented by unseen energies he cannot name in a film trapped by a history it does not want to claim.

Continue reading →

When they created Hangover Square, star Laird Creiger and director John Brahm had already collaborated on an American remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent classic The Lodger. That foggy cobblestone of a picture was as close as English language silent cinema ever got to the shadowy sublimity of German Expressionism, and the remake was a malevolent Hollywood horror-noir about European violence for a nation currently embroiled in the international contradictions of Western democracy. This follow-up, however, is even more capable of limning the thin line between the heavenly and the demonic, between modernity’s potential and its conundrums.

Adapted by Barré Lyndon from Patrick Hamilton’s popular 1941 novel of the same name, Hangover Square depicts progress’s gloomy underbelly in the story of a creator harboring a dark secret he isn’t even aware of, an inner shadow he cannot stabilize. For Laird Creiger, the man playing the tortured creative entity, it no doubt resonated with his desire for social acceptance, to be a hero in a world that had typecast him as a villain. By the time the film saw its release into the world, Creiger would be gone from it, dead from a self-imposed crash diet, including amphetamine use, the result of a rampant desire to be a leading man. By the end of this film, his character George Harvey Bone will likewise immolate himself in the poetry he pursued, releasing himself into a tragic uncertainty that he could not resolve in his life and which finds luminous resonance in his art.

Creiger’s sudden demise, and the shatteringly nervous performance he delivers in a character that clearly channels his inner ocean of frustration, is probably the reason why Hangover Square lingers in the shadowy recesses of the public memory. But this magnificent phantom of a film is an unquiet mind in which George’s artistic confusion doubles for Creiger’s own appetite and his socially unallowable sexuality (rumors abounded, and constructed relationships were displayed in public to present him as a heterosexual face for a movie poster). His portrayal of Bone is deeply moving and frightening, a vicious caricature of a society that produces compromised selves and displays its violence onto the souls of the unwanted and the otherized. One of his lovers warns him not to be “so far away.” Elsewhere, she asks him if he is “with me or with somebody else?” But Creiger seems to not be with himself, to be at odds with his own body, deranged by a world that quickly moved him from the fringes to the center but which didn’t, finally, have a place for him.

His Bone is an aspiring, brilliant composer in Victorian London who suffers from sudden eruptions of confusion and piercing episodes of uncertainty. When one of them leads to fugue state on the same night as a murder occurs near his flat he and his fiancé Barbara Chapmen (Faye Marlowe) confront Dr. Allan Middleton (George Sanders), who assuages him but quietly harbors suspicion. We need no suspicion because we’ve seen him commit the act in the film’s misty opening which, via the lighting of a streetlamp and a track inward from the streets to a private domicile, announces its illumination of the hidden reservoirs of brutality beneath the modern world. But he genuinely cannot remember the act, and he had no intention of doing it. This inverse Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who is not trying to unleash his inner primordial id but who is trying very desperately to keep it at bay because he seems unable to, presents a decidedly sympathetic mirror of the early 20^th century’s vision of itself. Within this violence, Bone finds a kind of dark power that is also a lapse into nothingness, a trancelike agency that is also an unmaking of self.

This is a fractured man, a huge behemoth who was also a shivering mouse. His character is a deeply ambivalent protagonist, almost frighteningly undecidable. At one point, when this towering beast of a man walks toward the screen, the camera seems to cower in fear, as though he is pushing the screen toward him and it is running away at once. A later image suggests the subtlest outline of his coat and hat in the background with his umbrella handle looking like a knife stuck through the coat’s chest, a symbol for the death of self creeping around the background of his life that he is unable to directly acknowledge and confront. When he opens a pocket-knife in front of his face, he wields a weapon of selfhood that is also figured as a schism of the soul. 

On-screen, Creiger finds an odd sort of power in harnessing his unacknowledged impulses, in unleashing his otherness onto the camera. When his other lover, singer and burlesque dancer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), who is transparently using him to advance her career, envelops him, the camera pulls in to the two of them, suffusing the material background in a black void. Absent the exterior world, the darkness consumes them in an absolute emptiness in the vehicle, a passage to a desire he cannot admit but which encloses him in a narcotic nonetheless. In the back-half of the film, he begins to accept himself as the beast that society made Creiger himself to be.

If this positions Creiger only as a doomed other who falls prey to his own monstrousness, Hangover Square also presents Bone’s tormented “black little moods” as cracks that open the world around him, that gouge out a vision of the social abyss pressing itself upon him. The city streets are pock-marked with ditches one might fall into, indicators of a modern London violently etching its way into the world, forcibly being made and unmade repeatedly. Fire torches, through graphic matches, become gas lamp lights, implying a modernity that is only ever a tightrope between a cavern of unmaking and a void of violent possibility. When George kills a victim off-screen, a bicyclist tragically runs over his cat, a kind of psychic tremor transported by his sensitive soul through the caverns beneath the city being dug for the subway system, as though London and everyone in it is tied together with a garrote of their own nerve endings.

This tension, not unlike the cord George wields like he’s tying his necktie, becomes truly vertiginous in the film’s harried, apocalyptic depiction of a Guy Fawkes Night party. Brahm and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle figure a celebration of national unity as a deranged homogeneity, a mountain of fake bodies all-too-easily crowned by a hidden real corpse all too easily masked as another effigy. Nationalism’s hidden brutality, here, is publicly acceptable, and yet still finally masked. Bone easily anoints himself the apex of a bonfire of collective chaos, not as its shunned outside but its repressed inner instability.

Of course, that’s being too cohesive for the film’s sensibility, and perhaps too radical. To read a film as restless and feverish as this one may be a fool’s errand, or it may suggest a text that was simply confused about what it was trying to say, or it may suggest that good art is, like Bone, tortured by its irresolution, by a drive for composure and Apollonian form entangled with an unraveling impulse to engage Dionysian force. The film is neurotic, and so were the people who made it. Creiger, of course, no doubt wouldn’t connect his own internal frustrations with this man’s murderous energy in any one-to-one way, but the point is society might have, an uncomfortable fit that allows the film to work multiple angles of social discord. Indeed, his two supposed lovers – although both relationships are notably, suggestively chaste – are clearly marked and opposed as arbiters of light and darkness, classical virtue and modernist force, yet they are often paired and echoed in various shots. This all may indicate that the film doesn’t hold up to a sophisticated and choker-tight reading, but that it prefers to run rampant, even to corrupt its own self-interpretation, and that the text is, like Bone, too uncanny and too bruised to do much other than unleash itself upon a world that has confused it.

Indeed, the film self-consciously rejects any stable reading of its drama. In one moment, we see Bone from behind, his face visible in a tiny mirror, and we sense that Bone can only see a miniaturized yet aggrandized version of himself, both smaller and bigger than he really is. The film won’t finally settle on the right way to view him, so instead it discharges him upon the world in a conflagration of a final performance in which the maddened Bone combines pieces written for both women into a swirling vortex of ravishing light and swooning darkness. His hands play fiercely and restlessly, not quite the unthinkingly violent automatons from the 1920s WWI, where the pianist’s hands were often figured in German horror as uncontrollable, runaway machines at odds with the reasonable, thinking mind. There, we get the sense that the misbehaving parts could be extracted, that inner cohesion and its capacity to produce and temper creative form could find he right balance between mechanization and human soul. Here, instead, the hands mark the artist as a savage, sublimated portal finally unloosed in an ecstatic blossoming of personal serenity and self-destructive turmoil, a man entirely in control of his own dialectical and dialogic exasperation and conjuring it in a tempestuous release of sheer energy. In this view, the artist harnesses the world’s buzzing natural chaos and complexity, scouring the shadows for signs of a dark and nebulous otherworld and hoping to stay in the penumbra, somewhere in between announcing social unrest and succumbing to complete malevolence, hovering between dark and light.

Bone, in this sense, is the tortured chronicler of a nation unsure of what composure means in the ascendant 20^th century. His fits of rage are set off by loud, discordant noises, by the shocks of city life that interrupt the surface-level harmonies of the mind and of reality itself. At one point, he is disturbed by metal tubes falling of a transportation cart, by the scaffolding of technological modernity itself. They look uncannily like Luigi Russolo’s famous tube-like instruments invented to capture and channel the democratic polyphony of a frayed modern urban landscape, what at least one scholar has called the “emancipation of dissonance.” Russolo promised a new sound, a conduit for the discordant polyphony of a modern landscape, and his effervescent, corruptible vision of the 20^th century would both climax in revolutionary and radical movements like the Situationists and curdle into the oppressive, reactionary currents of Italian fascism, each with their own visions of how to reconceive harmony for European cities in the 20^th century.

These dueling and overlapping tendencies are uncannily embodied in Hangover Square, in its sense of a quiet instability moving equally and simultaneously toward potentially liberating disruption and that liberation’s imminent capacity to be rerouted into sheer brutality and hateful violence. This energy can only find refuge in a final symphony that, in combining different modalities of music, both traditional and modernist, cannot remain a guardian of classical composure and virtue without acknowledging the murmurs of uncertainty and otherness that already haunt it. The camera ultimately pans out and swirls around the artistic maelstrom Bone conjures and channels into blasphemous rage, taking ownership over the violence that haunts him, uniting his agony and ecstasy in a poesis consummated in a fire that portends the coming tremble of the 20^th century. It dooms him as both a casualty of modernity and its purest form.

Score: 9/10

Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide feels like a strange dispatch from a cinematic mist that was and a gathering darkness that would be. It emerges out of that odd schism called the early ‘60s cinematic landscape, at once an ephemeral phantom of noir and an early tremor of the new uncertainty called the New Hollywood. It has a loose, oneiric, wandering sensibility that was a distant descendant of French poetic realism and its American poverty-row counterpart, the cinema of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. At one point, the camera tracks through a forsaken coastal town bar and exposes a Night Hawks for the post-Old Hollywood generation, a community of aimless men and women in perpetual passage from one place they’ve been and another they’re going, adrift between a cinema of the past and a cinema not yet. When Dennis Hopper’s Johnny Drake walks down a flight of stairs, his journey is elongated by the camera into a passage into a new realm. He is in flight to a desire that he cannot contemplate, and a love he is both waiting for and not ready to contemplate, much as Hopper himself would become a poster child for the untold inner chaos of a psychedelic cinema that American cinema couldn’t yet formally imagine, as of this film’s release year of 1961, but which seem to haunt this text like a ghost from the future, a fate Night Tide is inevitably building toward. Like its protagonist Drake, like the doomed woman Mora (Linda Lawson) he falls for, Night Tide seems trapped between other things. It is liminal cinema par excellence.

Continue reading →

A man lurches into frame from the side, and a declamatory text card threatens us with both the immanence of a thoroughly violent stranger and the danger of a thoroughly didactic film. But while the 1953 crime drama The Hitch-Hiker loudly proclaims its message in the first minute, the film as quickly abstracts itself into a slurry of chaotic uncertainty. As if recognizing its own apparent obviousness, The Hitch-Hiker soon descends into a fog of poetic gestalts. Ambling feet wandering down the road. A scream. A flashlight on a car. Two dead bodies, their faces invisible, in a postmortem tableau. Lights like strange forces in the desert, and then a car. We’re told what and how to think and who to watch out for, but director Ida Lupino still finds ways to project the disorientation of the world on the disquiet of the screen. The title freezes over an image of a gun, with the words “the filmmakers present” over it. This is a pistol whip of a film, a raw, steel shot that festers like tetanus.

The Southwestern desert, as many scholars have claimed, lingers in the cultural imaginary as an otherworldly region of the mind, a relatively unclaimed invitation to possibility as well as a brutal crucible where the supposed iron-clad reality of the rule of law is tested and contested, exposed as a harsh, shifting ground beneath presumptuous displays of harmony. The Hitch-Hiker, fully aware of this ambiguity, is a rural noir that doesn’t submerge us in the cloistered chaos of a city but into a netherworld that once feigned as America’s frontier heaven on earth. Beware of wanderers, the film suggests, but the highway road seems to imply that we’re all wanderers in this nebulous world.

Continue reading →

Watching the cinematic adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, it’s hard not to feel the ripple of James Baldwin’s and Ralph Ellison’s critiques of the celebrated author. For Baldwin and Ellison, although they never fully shunned their forebear, they claimed that Wright was a merely “sociological author,” one who was too invested in a mechanical image of African Americans as an environmental distillate, or those of subsequent critics who emphasize the way he can only imagine unmodulated oppositions between protagonist and environment.

But Wright’s was a moral materialism, a tragicomic vision of the heroic quest to survive in a brutal and unforgiving world that weaponizes us against ourselves and metastasizes even those avenues we prepare for our liberation as new modes of oppression. Wright’s friend and fellow author and expatriate Chester Himes ambiguously and unresolvedly labelled this “the notion”: that trick which mutates the impulse toward freedom into a mechanism of control, that turns desires for agency into easily manageable fantasies of command and dominance that are alternatives to real power.

Native Son cannot escape the notion. It doesn’t offer much, really, and it is more of a curio than a fully fleshed out feature film. As a protest against society, its modes of vocalization are somewhat superficial. As an artistic statement, it is wan and limited. Its failures, however, are not those of a mute cog in a machine or a prophet of resignation, but of a film, perhaps unaware of itself, producing itself as an avatar of its own limits. Native Son cannot escape the world around it. What it can do is visualize its own entrapment.

Continue reading →

With The Wizard of Gore, cinematic raconteur Herschell Gordon Lewis created both his ideal interpreter and his own undertaker. The titular Wizard, Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager), is both a carnival barker of cinematic proportions, a canvas for Lewis to voice his own frustrations, and a self-destructive, film-killing force. He embodies cinema’s life-force – the illusion of reality presented for us – and its death-drive – its interest in peering back beyond the illusion, exposing itself before us.

Early on, when Montag cuts a woman’s head off in what is apparently an illusion, her head falls off, and in a dissolve, we see the bloody stump, before the camera starts spinning around like a washing machine, which becomes Montag himself, joining with and celebrating his whirlwind of spectatorial dismemberment. He then conjures a flower that kind of looks like the bloody stump, just for kicks. Cinema, scholars have long noted, is a magic trick, an art form that works to convince us of its own holism and to hide the seams that render it a singular, internally-bonded object rather than a collection of disparate footage. The problem of a filmed magic trick, of course, is that the filmmaker can edit the trick together, making it all too easy to convince the audience and, thus, all the more difficult.

And yet! Lewis still cannot get the job done. When Montag performs the trick, the film’s editing is simply not up to the task of “convincing us” that what we’re seeing is anything like real magic. At every stage, the film’s cut from prop to person, object to another object, is so glaringly obvious that the film’s credibility crumbles before us. Lewis’s film is awful, essentially incompetent anti-cinema, a true travesty of the contract that cinema makes with its audience, its promise of an authentic, self-same, cohesive entity presented before us as an unquestioned reality. The Wizard of Gore completely fails itself within the first scene.  

But what if it also transcends itself? The Wizard of Gore musters the absolute bare minimum of effort – making the film “about” magic basically makes it obvious for the audience – that it seems to ask us whether the legitimacy of the magic-film comparison can survive on sheer charisma. This film has absolutely no game. It is an entirely guileless object, a work that presents its ideas with the cunning of a five-year-old. But what, the film wonders, are other movies really doing that this one isn’t?

Continue reading →

Despite its sterling pedigree, Intruder is an unjustly forgotten late ‘80s slasher, the unfortunate victim of a genre in the process of cannibalizing itself to death, even if the entrails produced something as deliciously necrotic as this. A kill crazy picture that is both too straightforward to qualify as experimental and too grimy, strange, and exploratory to qualify as pure trash, it’s the Skid Row of slashers, a terrific product that is mostly content to color within the lines but does so with too much elan and energy to write off easily. Despite the slippery, nervy direction and sinister, potent script by Scott Spiegel, who co-wrote Evil Dead II and clearly learned a thing from Sam Raimi (who appears here in a small role), and the co-production by Spiegel and Laurence Bender, who would soon translate this film’s playfully macabre spirit into producing Reservoir Dogs and then several later Tarantino films, Intruder has not lingered in society’s imaginary at all.

That’s the world’s loss, but it also makes the film all the more conniving and conspiratorial, a cinematic wolf in sheep’s clothing. Despite lacking the obviously labored-over dialogue and post-modern narrative chicanery of Bender’s future productions, Intruder nails the nervous exhilaration of Tarantino’s first film. While it lacks anything like a gimmick or a concept worth a damn, indeed while it may seem to lack even a film on paper, Intruder radiates euphorically disreputable, gloriously low-concept energy. It’s sloppy and basically empty on the surface, and while that diagnosis is technically correct, the film knows how to sneak up on you while you’re overlooking it. It’s a shiv of a movie pretending to be a meat cleaver.

And shiv it does, even before the cleaving starts. Even before the nominal killer enters the late-night supermarket that serves as the film’s combination morgue and display case, this is phenomenal stuff. Spiegel introduces us to the supermarket on a trolley of the damned, the camera being carted beyond its control into an open-air consumerist prison. The camera then cuts to the outside world, presented as a void that sequesters the supermarket off as a penitentiary that these workers must also make into a home. Or, at least, into a refuge that becomes a family, one presented with a surprisingly humanistic and empathetic eye by a script whose early scenes ease into an unexpectedly naturalistic mode. This is a script that exhibits real compassion for this impromptu community, and a camera that displays real compassion for the lonely surrealism of the night shift as it splits the difference between a groggy dream and a wayward, late-capitalist nightmare.

Continue reading →

Strange Days opens with a remarkable moment of cinematic voyeurism, a morbid act of willful complicity disguised as sheer kinetic pleasure. In first person, we watch as a would-be robber is frantically chased out by the police, ultimately falling to his death. Soon enough, we’ll learn that we’ve been watching a virtual memory, one that can be felt and experienced through a proto-VR headset, and one that is sold by nebulous street urchin and creature of the night Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes). We will also learn that Nero is tormented by his own memories of ex-flame Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), who now runs with bigger fish crime lord Philo Gant (Michael Wincott, so you know it’s a mid-‘90s film). He, like the film’s opening, is willing to run head-first into a violent world, and he is only held back from his darker impulses by a platonic but ambiguous relationship with extraordinarily competent bodyguard and driver Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett). These relationships will expand and knot and inflame and fold in on themselves over almost 150 minutes of screen-time, but, for the first few minutes, we are in a blissfully neurotic and disturbingly ecstatic cinematic present-tense, a scene which impels us to look and to look away in equal measure, and during which we can think of nothing else.

Here, in the first minute, director Kathryn Bigelow updates her breathtakingly fluid-frenetic chase sequences from her prior apex Point Break, itself a story about how an audience-surrogate is tempted by the anti-social thrills the promise of escape offers, into a deliciously disturbing treatise on the uncanny thrill of cinema itself. Demanding that we participate in the act only to have the violence turned on us as we fall to our doom, the film opens with a self-implicating gesture that serves as Bigelow’s fullest statement of art not as a beautiful getaway but an elegant trap that invites and disfigures us in all its grueling and emotionally invigorating but disturbing and self-assaulting complications.

While this isn’t without its tensions and difficulties, even what we might call failures, and arguably the film’s overall interest in technological voyeurism is more notable for its vigorousness than its originality (given that the theme received such a consistent showcase in Hitchcock’s films, among many others), Strange Days is a pretty nervous, pulsing stylistic and conceptual workout that remains far more legitimately troubled about more serious topics than most films of its budget would even know what to do with. A pungent fulfillment of what her ex-husband James Cameron more than a decade before called “Tech Noir,” Strange Days explores themes of voyeuristic addiction and self-flagellation by playing around the boundary between filmmaking, fetishism, and observation in a way that borders on cinematic autoerotic asphyxia. It feels like the film is trying to destroy itself, dazzlingly so at times, but never loosely nor arbitrarily. This is throat-knot political popular cinema of the finest variety.

Continue reading →

With the release of Robert Eggers’ apparently very good remake of the most seminal of horror films, let’s look at the last time they also, somehow, managed to do it right.

Remaking one of the seminal films of the 20^th century isn’t likely to win you any critical favors. However, for Werner Herzog, a filmmaker of unnatural receptivity to the world and general skepticism to the people who inhabit it, the film seems to have called to him nonetheless. Faced with the unenviable task of divining the original Nosferatu’s spirit rather than merely upholstering it for a new era, of being a necromancer rather than a cryptkeeper, Herzog seems to have done neither. Beckoned not by the surface or the soul of the original film itself but an unclarified possibility latent within it, his film is neither a remake nor even really a re-envisioning but, rather, a malevolent force that vibrates to an entirely different frequency, a tone poem that stalks the corridors of the unknown only to finally implore us to recognize our very selves.

Herzog is no stranger to films about men on strange journeys, impelled by the delusional hopes of a soul haunted by the belief that they can test the mettle of the cosmos and emerge unscathed. In his most famous, and best, film, Aguirre the Wrath of God,Klaus Kinski’s impenetrable and monomaniacal explorer believed he heard the siren song of a divine, heavenly order that was, finally, merely his own desire for control. Here, this film’s version of Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is not an impossible id but a bourgeois bastion of modernity attempting to colonize the world, to partition it into parcels of private property that attempt to compartmentalize the cosmos. In doing so, Herzog fears, the world invites its own destruction in the process.

Yet it is not the bland Harker, finally, who captures the film’s soul, but, rather, its melancholy, banal Dracula. If Herzog worried, with Melville-esque apprehension about the fate of modernity, Klaus Kinski was, of course, his Ahab, a once-in-a-lifetime conduit for Herzog’s divine and demonic sorcery, his own doomed attempts to channel and best the world with monomaniacal monstrousness. Casting Kinski, an actor who seemed to barely be able to bear the weight of the cosmic flux around him, as the creature would seem to finally set him up as the very force of nature he so desperately wanted to be, to become a literal embodiment of the quest for containing the universe that tortured him. When he sets off for the East to sell a home to Dracula, we are immediately cast into the realm of Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” a portal of exquisite otherness that the man-creature is, nominally, the corporealization of. It’d be as though he had finally broken open his mortal shell and achieved an ecstatic sublimity of sheer resonance. The physical instability of the world, the very thing that had exposed Kinski’s cavernous ego in the stiflingly humid air of his own excessively imperialistic self-importance in Aguirre, now seems to warp around him as he wields the darkness of a world where reason long ago failed to extend to the depths and explore the breadth it promised to.

Continue reading →