Crying foul on director Mikhail Kalatozov’s deliriously unhinged, masterful slice of post-Bay of Pigs agitprop for its unapologetic commitment to ideology would be tantamount to artistic heresy and limpid emphasis on the political over the artistic if the film weren’t such a bold and brazen reclamation of that age-old fact that art is innately political no matter what. Plunging into the revelry of fantastical space as obviously euphoric as Lang’s Metropolis city was demonic, and as bodaciously animated as Lang’s vision to boot, Yo Soy Cuba is an aesthetic vision primarily. But with these aesthetics, the proof is in the proverbial politics to begin with. Separating this far-out vision of a largely fictive representation of Cuban life from its animated muse – its Soviet morality – is at some level impossible: like Eisenstein’s utilization of montage to stage ideas of collective conflict, cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky’s aesthetic revolutions aren’t apolitical. Yo Soy Cuba is a vivacious workout, a Communist high palpably star-struck by the wave of political revolution it presumed (or hoped) was on the horizon, a film bathed in all the passions genuine belief can muster, and a work that marshals an unmediated, even crazed support for Cuban life into a catalyst for unbridled cinematic experimentation positively running wild with screw-loose charisma. Continue reading
Films for Class: Yo Soy Cuba
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Simultaneously reaching a near artistic zenith and floundering in middling commercial anonymity with the giddy, off its rocker, positively deranged Bringing Up Baby in 1938, director Howard Hawks had obviously caught an itch that could not be quelled by merely retreating to a new genre (although Hawks was one of the foremost masters of genre-agnosticism in film history). Conscripting the dastardly trio of Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht, and Charles MacArthur to whip up a whirlygust of a screenplay conjured from the bones of the stageplay The Front Page (by the latter two of the trio), Hawks required another at bat for the genre. The progeny of this attempt, His Girl Friday, isn’t inherently the best Hawks film (it isn’t even the best Hawks screwball in my estimation). But as his second-chance screwball, it is the summit of his decade-long experimentation with the disconcerting, rebellious limits and possibilities of film sound. 
An aberration of the soon-to-be-implemented, puritanical Hays Code, Howard Hawks’ twitchy, rough-housed Scarface is a coarse rampage of firebrand cinematic verve, a sojourn into the underworld and death that paradoxically and perversely reflects cinema at its liveliest. Early sound cinema is often (falsely) denied vitality and dismissed as stodgy, but Scarface has a bullet or two to quell those who would deny it. Independently financed by Howard Hughes, Scarface trumpets its independent spirit as an ambivalently trashy social expose that wears its heart and its brain on its pistol. Cinema in the raw, it displays casual mastery of technique but invokes the shambolic one-take sloppiness of a killer Neil Young album. 
In the early golden years of classical Hollywood, Universal Studios somehow always tempted, and summarily avoided, being left hanging in the lurch. Unlike the five major studios, all of which owned their own theaters and thus guaranteed distribution of their films, Universal wasn’t born with a silver spoon in its mouth. The spendthrift glamour of the MGM musical machine was but a cloudy daydream for a studio that, while hardly poverty row, needed to carve out its own niche to go toe to toe with the big boys. Rather than trying to assimilate to the studio heavies with facsimiles of their Dream Factory productions, Universal ensconced itself in the out-of-the-way places, the boondocks of cinema, testing out more unsavory realms befitting their more hardscrabble existence. Unwilling, or unable, to lull the masses with luxuriant A-picture opulence, the company decided not to soothe America to bed but to lower itself into the murk of mutated German Expressionism and raise a shrieking countermelody, the kind of rattling cadence that could wake the dead.
Possibly the most explicitly thematic among the famously un-explicit Terrence Malick oeuvre, The New World’s de facto state of mind is the untamable wonder and bedeviling awe of the unexplored tracts of physical land and the unexplored mental topography of human longing and desire. Beginning with a human marooned in a strange world, the man’s only outlet to reformulate their essence is to couple the corporeal material of the physical world with his spiritual or extra-real essence of self-awareness within nature for the first time. This rigid “physical” and “mental/emotional/spiritual” dichotomy has historically been if not eroded then at least imperiled by non-Western cultures who have often adopted more fluxional conceptions of how physical, mental, and spiritual Western categorizations are instead more dialectical and interweaving, even possibly the same thing (materials are given use value beyond their capitalist physical money value). Malick’s own temperament has for decades obviously occupied a realm at least parallel to this distinctly non-capitalist mental wavelength. His films unstitch the iron-clad demarcations of the physical and the spiritual by basking in the ability of the human, untethered from their normative mental shackles, to approach new mental resplendence, new mental exultancy, by opening up to the capacious confines of the natural world. 
The mental cracks of an unstable mind loom large over Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film. But although main character Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is parallel to the film, it isn’t her student. Red Desert is too unresolved, too contingent, too woolly to reduce to a purely psychological reading rooted in Western cinematic bylaws where expression is distinctly and unambiguously a refraction of the protagonist’s mental geometry. The common reading that Giuliana is “mentally ill” mistakenly clarifies and pacifies an instability that the film intentionally, beautifully, cannot quantify. The mistaken assumption unduly emphasizes the individual, the protagonist, as a “special” or “unique” case-study that is different from, or tangent to, the world around her. 
Four-for-four and every-mutable, Laika will never master the box office (good thing they have a trust fund kid at their helm), but they’re the first serious challenge to Pixar’s recently abandoned throne in the Western animation market. Having wrung their kiddie-Halloween aesthetic dry over three films varying from exceptional (Coraline) to inspired but simplistic (The Boxtrolls, prompting claims that they were running out of steam), Kubo and the Two Strings is the offspring of a seemingly dramatic sea change in the company. At some level the most self-consciously mature of their offerings thus far, Kubo is also undoubtedly the company’s most luminescent at the formal level. There are strains; the tepid narrative literalism of most animated features is present and, if anything, only exacerbated by the fidelity evident in the rest of the film. But even if Kubo was merely ancillary to the realization that Laika still has gas left in them, the flaws would be forgivable at worst and downright invisible at best. Oh yeah, and the film is also frequently stupendous, so there’s that box to tick too. 
In the annals of screwball comedy, no film more baldly trumpets its sense of collective character perplexity as much as Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, a screw-loose comedy of emasculation, inebriation, and performative recalibration that upends the collective narcosis of the everyday world. As with many screwballs, the eyes of the world within the film unmistakably do not understand the two main characters, much as audiences at the time didn’t quite understand the film. The inescapable mania of the picture can cause even the peppiest viewer to catalyze an embolism. Or run away in fear. Whichever comes first.
Largely, the story of The Circus is, much like the circus itself, the tale of performative wonder forever mired by dogged claims of benighted emptiness. Much like a circus, The Circus is whispered about with the hushed tones of an empty-calorie exercise in endlessly travelling around, living a harried, itinerant life as a collection of sketches rather than the presumably more “developed” and forward-thinking narratives of Chaplin’s silent films on either side of this feature (the monumental The Gold Rush and City Lights). You could call it a trivializing escapade into fluff rather than an expedition into psychology or social realism, but you’d be denying the film, and yourself, in doing so. Singularly among Chaplin’s feature-length films, The Circus is a regression to his earlier days alighting one and two-reeler pantomimes, and it is not in spite of this fact but because of it that the film flies as highly as it does. 
It is ever easy to infringe on Michelangelo Antonioni’s reputation with the benighted “pretentious” signifier, avoiding and flattening the mysteries of his oeuvre in the process. The real work, and the effort Antonioni deserves, arrives when one actually looks into the film, engages with the materiality of its existence, and discovers that the act of watching this unquantifiable, unstable film is itself a reflection of the film’s gaze onto the tentative spaces of the world. Antonioni’s cinema isn’t a fixed state, but a thought-process, or a process of gazing and puzzling out a world that is not prefigured or assumed but a project ever in a state of transition. The concept of “the gaze” was waiting in the wings, soon to be all the rage, at around the time of L’Eclisse’s release, but few films transcend the subjective gaze of the character to a higher state of awareness of the subjective gaze of the film quite like Antonioni’s. L’Eclisse doesn’t confound expectation to trick us with a twist but to trap us in a state of affairs where the world must be interrogated. And in trapping us within the world and not allowing us to gallantly stride across it (as most movie characters do), Antonioni’s films are, paradoxically, primarily liberating experiences, works that unshackle us from narrative as well as easy expectations of what the world ought to be. 
The Long Take 