We begin in motion, a man in a self-consciously unconscious suit running into a subway station, as though late for work. He is late for work. He’s about to hold a subway car hostage, but he walks like a recently divorced dentist. He seems less like a man worried he will get caught for robbing several million than a guy concerned about whether his coworker will waste fifteen minutes of his time at the watercooler. The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remarkably workaday vision of New York City, a schlub’s paradise. It feels trapped in a post-‘60s hangover, but what it sees isn’t a nihilistic failure but a run-of-the-mill existence. New York City, here, is a machine that hasn’t defaulted on a foregone promise but that was too busy to even recognize it when it was there. When the conductor first recognizes that his train is being stolen, he can only respond “you’re taking my train?,” and it’s more like he’s confused why anyone would want to bother with such a thing, or how it could be an interesting plot for a movie. When the police get involved, you half expect the hostage takers to respond “hey, I’m stealing here!”
Yet this is a hell of a movie, mostly because it doesn’t really treat any of this as a hell of thing. Nothing in Taking of Pelham 123 insists on its self-importance. It treats commandeering a subway train as another feature of the day, an incident roughly as interesting or as improbable as the nonchalant tour that Walter Mattheau’s Lt. Zachary Garber gives for Japanese businessmen at the beginning of the film. Everyone is a worker, and the film poeticizes what it means to be workmanlike. Director Joseph Sargent was avowedly not a great director, but his journeyman sensibility is amazingly appropriate in this context, a banal, quotidian vision for a monotonous world.
Sargent’s somewhat flat style thoroughly, elegantly deflates the entire film. He brings the kind of vulgar poetry that Don Siegel or Robert Aldrich would have brought to the proceedings, etching a semi-naturalist vision of crude, ragged world but distinctly not an expressionistic one. This is the city not as a crestfallen hellscape or a byzantine labyrinth of bureaucratic overreach or a carnivalesque playhouse but a simple fact, one that keeps you moving through it so expediently that you don’t bother to notice how it is limiting your consciousness. This is not a camera that accesses an inner life beneath the surface but one that observes how depleted inner life has become. When the pivotal moment comes and the strains of the story come together, Sargent frames the crisis not as an interruption but a continuum. In an exquisite panorama of a weathered transit station, Mattheau is giving his tour, mockingly bullshitting his temporary hostage audience, before he learns about the other, more severe hostage crisis perpetrated by the other, equally disgruntled, disaffected men. What, the film quietly posits, does it mean that these two things are less different than we want them to be, or that we no longer want them to be that different in the first place?
Arthur Penn’s name doesn’t linger in the cinematic imaginary like many of his New Hollywood co-conspirators. Like Robert Altman, he was an older man when the movement kicked into high-gear, which meant that he was not a product of the film school generation. Unlike Altman, however, he did have a background in commercial cinema and television. In other words, he didn’t cut his analytic teeth examining every nook and cranny of the ‘60s European interpretations of the American cinematic mavericks of the ‘40s and ‘50s. He developed his eye and hand by making those sturdy, silently subversive, culturally neurotic mid-century American films in the first place, which places him on a continuum with, say, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel, and Robert Aldrich rather than Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. He was less a student of the cinema of American waywardness than a traveler of American waywardness himself.
Befitting his journeyman sensibility, Penn’s films offered a more subliminal, less self-consciously auteurist perspective of what directing might mean. His sensibility was rooted in looking at reality through an odd angle in a mirror rather than, as his younger New Hollywood contemporaries would, shattering the mirror and holding up a serrated shard to reality’s throat. This scrappy, less avowedly personal stamp wasn’t necessarily a moral vision per-se, but the quiet compassion with which Penn contoured the emotional universes of his down-on-their-luck renegades reflected a serious empathy with the mundane nonetheless. One can think of him more as an extractor perceiving momentary realities than an artificer wholesale reconstructing that reality and conjuring meaning out of cinema’s defamiliarizing smoke and mirror show. His was a cinema of the silent tremor, not the sudden eruption.
Early in Winter Light, Max von Sydow’s Jonas Persoon gives voices to one of the major throughlines of director Ingmar Bergman’s career, a subcutaneous current that unites many otherwise ostensibly disparate films. When Jonas’s wife Karin (Gunnel Lindblom)asks to meet with pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Bjornstrand) to discuss her husband’s crippling depression, a neurotic aftershock of the nuclear armaments he is obsessed with, the couple – her ability to voice to terror and his ability to bespeak it through his reticence to speak – bring to life many of the abiding conundrums of Bergman’s cinema. What does it mean to speak for another person, and how are our capacities to find life emboldened and sabotaged by our entanglement with others and with the world? And what does this mean when we as a species have decided that the capacity to wipe ourselves out with nuclear weapons is the only way to pacify our existential uncertainty at having created them? How can we, knowing this, go on speaking in the first place?
The Persoons are only the most manifest evocation of Winter Light’s vision of the mid-century as an ambivalent netherworld salvaged from its slow, inexorable decline into the abyss only by those moments of human connection that ultimately come back to mock the idea that we believed they could save us. The largely disinterested way Tomas moves through his daily rituals suggests a weary soul who has become a wayward traveler of life. Real fatigue seeps through every inch of Bergman’s frame, and in his unshakable dread, Persoon only makes Bergman’s lingering spiritual disquiet manifest. His was a trepidatious cinema, one that, as Susan Sontag famously claimed, may be genuinely uninterpretable. That’s perhaps more poetic than, well, interpretive, but the man definitely made movies that beg the question of whether interpretation can do anything in the modern world, and why it would be worthwhile to even bother interpreting in the first place. Bergman’s anxiety about the certainty of meaning in a world where mutually assured destruction dwarfs any other kind of certainty suggests that terror has become its own sublime, seemingly worshipful God (as scholars of nuclear destruction have long argued), something that frightens and disturbs the search for truth, that induces an apprehension beyond the capacity to intellectualize. The austere severity of Bergman’s film seems to state its case so bluntly only because it is trembling with disquiet, with an unease that shudders so much, at such a low frequency, that it actually stills the film, and grants it a capacity to rend the soul.
Few faces linger in cinema history like Giulietta Masina’s. As Gelsomina, a woman sold to brutal, confused strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) to serve more as his assistant than his companion, Masina is an open void, a vision of sheer openness to the cosmos as vibrant, animated, complicated, and embattled as Renée Falconetti’s in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Gelsomina is unimaginably receptive to the world. She achieves a kind of pre-cognitive grace, the self as a pure canvas on which the world is written, and which, in her planetary vibrancy, rewrites the world. While she echoes Charlie Chaplin’s worldly attentiveness to flux, his need to follow the often confusing motions of an ungovernable world, as many have pointed out, her carnivalesque sensitivity to the mutable rhythms of the earth, the sheer multiplicity of life, is uniquely guileless. Chaplin seems to wrestle with the world. Gelsomina becomes it, existing as a microcosm of its flows. She has no ulterior motive, not even a need to survive. She simply experiences. While she never quite finds a home in the world, it is only because she seems singularly able to find momentary homes in passing notes, in itinerant images, in local joys, and in temporary sadnesses. She is a performer of everyday life, capable of potentializing any moment, a completely versional person who becomes whatever she needs to be. Each moment she encounters is entirely itself, a murmur of radical otherness she finds, and accepts as part of her, as she vibrates to the lyrical indeterminacy of the world itself.
It is simply unimaginable how much trust Giuliata and her husband, director Federico Fellini, must have put in one another to approach this character, to conjure a being who exists in such a primordially open, childlike state. For him to invest so much, or to allow her to return so much to him, both resonates with and embodies the film’s sense of celestial synchrony, its appreciation of a world where the wondrous and the awful are warp and weave of one another. Within the contours of this film, this also marks Gelsomina as irremediably ajar, prey to a world which she has no faculties to respond to, which she does not erect psychological boundaries to avoid. Compared to nearly every other film protagonist, she reads as inextricably passive and essentially pre-liberal in her identity, not a self-contained and self-authorizing individual but an animate point in the world, a ward of the universe.
La Strada asks us to appreciate this openness with an attitude of diffuse directionlessness and supersensory epicureanism. The world is brutal and unforgiving, it says, and any honest reckoning with it requires a sense of beauty that is contingent and localized, that finds joy in the everyday, not in a final eternity or an ultimate meaning. While Gelsomina echoes Falconetti’s Joan in a shared attempt to breach the limits of our everyday modes of viewing and perceiving, her version of transcendence does not look beyond the world into a transcendental ether called God, as Falconetti did. Gelsomina discovers grace in the world, marking her as a pure immanence that is spiritually inflected and yet entirely un-transcendent. She seems essentially untouched by the accumulated cultural signifiers on the world around other, but she also does not turn the world into a mere surface hiding a deeper, truer, essential divinity. Rather, she accepts the world’s all-ness in its manifold multiplicity and ravenous uncertainty.
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.
Anthony Mann was one of the great chroniclers of American violence. His classic Winchester ’73 expresses that violence in an unholy object: a doomed gun that sidewinds through the hands of weary travelers of American life as it indexes a brutal cycle none of the men trapped in it could break from. Three years later, in The Naked Spur, he shifts from an object to a place, a cragged expanse that is a space of ostensible but illusory freedom that becomes an unexpected forum for the affectations of rugged masculine types and the afflictions of American society. The very raggedness that made the frontier a living thing was also a product of genocide and mass death and often spelled existential demise. The West in The Naked Spur is a fully three-dimensional hellscape, a place whose forbiddingly omnipresent physical nooks and crannies mirror the impossible ethical convolutions characters make within it. William C. Mellor’s cinematography is vivid but oddly neutered, intimating a vibrant geography concealing a festering moral sickness. It’s as though the spirit of the West no longer needs a corporeal object to attach to in order to unleash itself upon the world. When one character remarks that “it’s getting so I don’t know which way to point this thing anymore,” he’s talking about his gun, obviously, but he might as well be talking about the shared worldview its characters inhabit, one which invites them to join guns for a common cause just as easily as it coaxes them into turning their guns on one another.
In its cavalier, casual brutality, The Naked Spur feels like a definitive statement on the Wild West, but only because Mann’s film is so self-consciously un-definitive. That’s because everything is so double-sided. Take lead man Jimmy Stewart, the consummate Janus-faced Old Hollywood protagonist. There’s a reason Hitchcock famously quipped that he cast Stewart when he made movies about who he (Hitchcock) really was, a fundamentally ambivalent man capable of extreme nastiness when he summoned his darkest reserves of psychological frustration. In Stewart, Mann found a would-be scion of a moral American universe who was actually a cruelly domineering figure harboring unexpectedly violent urges. His character Howard Kemp begins the film an apparently noble man, but it isn’t long before we see how capable of using others he is, abusing their potential desires for his own momentary needs in a way that stops short of overt malevolence but certainly constitutes a kind of cruelty.
Robert Greene’s Bisbee ‘17 is obviously indebted, at least in part, to Joshua Oppenheimer’s generation-defining The Act of Killing. Yet it is far from a delayed echo of a masterpiece. In The Act of Killing, artistic generation signals a deeply ambivalent, forever-incomplete form of moral reckoning, one that offers no reprieve from past wrongdoings and only tenuously implies anything like real acknowledgement of complicity. But the film is absolutely about the desire to atone, or at least one’s desire to believe one has a desire to atone. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, artistic self-fashioning – one’s capacity to relive one’s most horrible acts – becomes a grotesque purgation of one’s past. The evacuation of self, the spilling of the soul, suggests a need to believe in indemnity if not a genuine willingness to engage with and confront the consequences of one’s actions. The characters at the center of The Act of Killing want to believe they can escape their past, even as they seek it, and celebrate themselves through a past they vaguely seem to despise themselves for.
Bisbee’ 17’s literal and figurative fault-lines are much more diffuse and, in some ways, more complex. The effects of a reprehensible incident and a moral failure seep through the cracks of a town over a full century, and they trickle into every crevice of its being, but it is much harder to get a bead on what any one in the film wants to think about it, let alone whether they should be affected by it at all. This is not an account of individuals believing they are coming to terms with something who are, in turn, coming to terms with the dubiousness of their coming to terms. Bisbee asks us a perhaps harder question: are these people responsible for anything at all? With the sense of blame unmoored from typical Enlightenment-derived notions of individual culpability, we are forced to question how we are supposed to feel toward any of these people, and, indeed, whether we even want to care about a form of reckoning that, the film suggests, may merely just be cashing-in on a legend.
Still, while culpability is displaced through the generations in Bisbee ’17, both films ask similarly prickly questions about the value of historical confrontation and the limits of artistic witness. Each film examines the ghostly after-image of a horrific incident as it metastasizes in the mind of its perpetrators, or their lineage, and as it evaporates into the sheer raggedness of history. In both cases, cinema is tasked with saving the present from its unacknowledged past and recovering the past from the present’s refusal to acknowledge it.
Most of all, though, both films task cinema with meditating on its own capabilities. When we leave either film, we are hardly sure that anything has been achieved, or that any past has truly been acknowledged. What film itself can do, in the face of abject horror, is a serious question mark in both texts, one that each film recognizes will gnaw down those who ask too hard. For The Act of Killing, the question was national, genocidal, and deeply historical, an awful grandness that warps an entire country’s history – the entire world’s history – by insisting on humanity’s capacity for brutality, and humanity’s ability to seek forgiveness for that brutality in the eyes of others without actually wanting to fully wrestle with it. For Bisbee ’17, the question seems much smaller. The event in question was more localized, and there’s little sense that anyone outside its direct descendants ever heard of it. But for the people who come and go in this film, it has the capacity to become everything. Like an underwater whirlpool, it’s both invisible and gravitational, a century-old violence that is both a chthonic tragedy to confront and a taxidermied memory to curate and ornament. The people of Bisbee seem all too willing, in a manner less overtly reprehensible but no less troubling than the mass murderers of The Act of Killing, to remember the violence only insofar as it suits them.
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.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue opens with a hilariously deflationary inversion of the famous opening to director Sam Peckinpah’s previous film, The Wild Bunch. While that scabrous cosmic moan of a film famously begins with children maliciously treating nature’s brutality as entertainment, Cable Hogue saunters into a gentle, quiet conversation between a man and a lizard, coaxing it into a humane death that affirms their mutual value on this earth. The animal is to be food, certainly, and this is a no less brutal version of survival, but Peckinpah plays it not as a wicked triumph of nihilistic glee but an unfortunate reality of interspecies relations. The man is Cable Hogue (Jason Robards), and this is his compassionate desert pragmatism. Just as he is about to quietly kill the animal in an act of poetic, tragic necessity, a gunshot blows the lizard into pieces as bloodied as they are useless. When Hogue ponders the value of such an action, he seems to be proposing a counter-narrative to Sam Peckinpah’s whole oeuvre. This sort of murderous brutality is, the film suggests, just a tad bit gauche when all is said and done.
Hogue himself is a mystifying creature. His lizard conversation is a kind of cosmic communion, a natural respect for the sacrifice the lizard is making for his survival, and he continues the film with a similarly good-natured penitence to nature’s cosmic continuity. Talking to God, Hogue self-amusedly but very seriously notes “ain’t had any water since yesterday Lord, getting a little thirsty, just thought I’d mention it, amen,” not solemnly offering a prayer but suggesting a casual reminder to an old friend. He speaks in a spirit of warm-hearted minimalism, a kind of spartan humanism embodied in every moment of Peckinpah’s tough-minded but unexpectedly generous film. Hogue even gets his own credits sequence, a ballad-backed constellation of moving and stilled images that uses the similarly stop-start rhythms of TheWild Bunch to an antithetical purpose. While The Wild Bunch viciously metallizes and bleaches-out its Western archetypes, cutting into their motion, deconstructing it, and revealing the acid emptiness beneath, Cable Hogue playfully ricochets many simultaneous images of Hogue around the screen, serio-comically elevating his everyday trials and tribulations. The former is an image of heroes exposed as fraudulent brutes. The latter is an everyday man uplifted as an accidental poet of humanity. He has no pretensions to greatness, but the film treats his mundane ethos of workaday survival and epicurean pleasure as an undyingly human spirit of ramshackle beauty.
In its surprising, almost disarming generosity, The Ballad of Cable Hogue proposes a quiet rebuke to both the classical Western’s ethos of moral certainty and mythological majesty and the revisionist Western’s spirit of recalcitrant brutality and skeptical deconstruction. Both Hogue, unusually for Peckinpah, both are merely two sides of the same coin, seeking refuge in revelation of essential truths and the promise of moral certainty. Hogue neither celebrates nor excoriates but takes the arguably more difficult, less self-congratulatory perspective that the West cannot be summed up as any one thing. The film is an act of divine perplexity, a film that treats curiosity itself as a worthwhile mode of being. Much like Hogue himself, his titular film doesn’t seem to know where it’s going, and it finds pleasure it whatever comes its way.
It is the very fogginess of this vision that paradoxicallycasts such an unusually clear eye on the shadow of the West in the American imagination. The Ballad of Cable Hogue is set in 1905, twelve years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner lamented the demise of the American frontier. In his view, the land was a natural deposit at once energized and empty, pregnant with great potential and yet essentially available for human manipulation. This paradoxical vision of a landscape that was complex and value-laden yet essentially docile projected a canvas teeming with human futures, raw matter for fashioning new selves.
By Hogue’s release year of 1970, the ambivalence Turner felt was largely seen as passé. American media had mostly come to accept writer D. H. Lawrence’s view that “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” If men and women of the 19th century “lit out” for the territories, the revisionist Western line has typically been to expose the violence of this vision, to look to the shadows cast by America’s divine pretensions of Manifest Destiny. Responding to view of the West as a sublime potential of inert matter awaiting human mastery that not only invited but demanded “strenuous” activity, to use Theodore Roosevelt’s term, the newer, tougher breed of American cinema revealed the cruelty masking as energy and exposed the mental enervation dressed up as physical vigor.
Peckinpah’s films certainly participated. They cut down Western mythologies by the dozens, sparing no one in the process. But Hogue suggests that this tactic may risk reiterating the very “hard, isolate, stoic” soul it strives to unmask. After all, if Americans were supposed to be paradigmatically touch, taciturn, and realistic, what could embody that ethos more than revealing the grubby underbelly of the nation’s fantasies of idealism and grace?
It is thus ironic how un-ironic Hogue is. The plot, such as it is one, begins when Hogue finds water underground and sets up a desert spring. On the verge of dying, he digs in the dirt for water that is, essentially, mud. In any other Peckinpah film, this would be a self-consciously grotesque gesture, a cold-blooded reminder of the fundamental depravity of the human will. Here it’s a conversational engagement, a friendly opening-up to uncertainty and circumstance that is not quite a determined plea for survival. Asking “Lord … you call it” as he smiles, he receives the muddy water as both manna from Heaven and, simply, the vagaries of chance. His face drenched in muddy water in the ground, he coarsely laughs with a quietly boastful “Told You I was Gonna Live.” But his self-aggrandizement is humanistic, rooted in shared equality rather than hierarchized distinction. He is not an apex of humanity but a singularity of it, a fabled hero who embodies its foibles and frustrations and a stubborn determination that borders on grace. When he tries to get a deed to build a spring out of the water for parched passers-by, he can only gather a measly two and a half dollars. When asked if he has anything else to add to the value, he marshals, in a line tossed-off like an on-the-spot improvisation and a channeling of almost celestial wisdom, “Well, I’m worth something, ain’t I?”
Uncharacteristically, Peckinpah’s film believes he genuinely is. Or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that the film is interested in the proposition that he might be. This is an unusually generous portrait of human existence for Peckinpah, one in which a series of mostly well-meaning characters struggle to etch out their lives. It is also, atypically, not really asking much of these characters, other than that they exist, and keep going. What emerges is a kind of bildungsroman of an already formed man, a wanderer who never exactly learns anything, but always seems to be paying attention to new truths that might arise if he looks hard enough. Robards is wonderful, a prickly, protective man who confronts the world as an earthen poem. Speaking in simple, taciturn sentences – “I got to mark my boundaries, build me a claim monument.” – he nonetheless radiates humane warmth, celebrating, and embodying, a poesis of raw dirt.
And, indeed, a man willing to get his hands dirty, even though he is unusually hesitant to do so compared to the men he is confronted with. Throughout the film, he has been involved in a many-years-long engagement with two men who he, theoretically, seeks revenge on, not that he is trying especially hard. Near the end of the film, they inconvenience him again by putting him in a situation where he finds his gun uncomfortably necessary. The color of his soul, and the caliber of the Old West, seems to be on trial here. Just as he is about to shoot the man, however, a “horseless carriage” – car – arrives. The man on the bad end of the gun treats this beacon of modernity as his manna from heaven, but while the car momentarily stops the film’s climax, it just keeps on going. Laughing at the two men and their simultaneously monumental and pyrrhic conflict, this modernity treats the Old West and its elemental drama as a roadside attraction to mock rather than an enigma to wrestle with. In his cunning, curt demeanor, Hogue looks on just as bemusedly, remarking “that’ll be for the next guy to deal with” as he makes sure to set up his would-be victim with a fate worse than death: taking over his spring, sitting in wait for modernity to come to him while Cable can go live a new life as a perennial traveler on the road. The car, a dark emblem of an uncaring modernity, catalyzes a kind of epiphany for him, suggesting the pettiness of their grievances, even as it implies the littleness of the life of those moderns in the car, and the beauty and terror of Hogue’s.
Of course, Peckinpah’s point is that Hogue was probably always going to save the man on the other end of his gun, working to end a years-long retribution arc on the path to a more wholesome and full-hearted existence. The film, in the very nature of its ambulatory and discursive narrative structure, acknowledges this revenge is much less important than the characters make it out to be, more a pest than a pestilence. What really matters is the fact of the spring, the feel of the water, the sense of the space, and the time shared with local prostitute Hildy (Stella Stevens), who becomes a kind of displaced love interest who comes and goes, and itinerant preacher Joshua (David Warner), who has more interest in women than anything else but does not seem to oppose this to a genuine faith in the lord.
It is this spirit, Hogue’s welcoming ethos of taking life as it comes, not getting too wrapped up in pretensions of divinity or significance, that matters to a film that encroaches on a sense of grace that feels truly Thoreauvian in its willingness to appreciate the renewed physical and mental sensation of engaged receptivity with the earth around you. Of course, Peckinpah also mocks this deflationary ethos as itself a kind of American fetish for rugged, simple living. At one point, a preacher laments “The Devil seeks to destroy you, with machines,” for “inventions are the work of Satan,” and the film doesn’t exactly treat this rhetoric as a generous sensibility. The film doesn’t really agree with the man, but it understands Hogue’s adjacent version of it as a kind of everyday pragmatism that is also, essentially, mythical. That’s pretty American, admittedly, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue mostly appreciates the peculiar mixture of circumstance and effort that defines the belief in Western possibility that Peckinpah’s earlier The Wild Bunch so brutally excoriates and sets ablaze. It’s an aspirational ethos, but Hogue is not a celebratory or worshipful film so much as an intrigued one, a film that looks for beauty in unsuspecting places, even those that we have grown to dismiss. The film taps the Western landscape in the same exploratory spirit Hogue does when he sums up how he discovered and cultivated his water supply: “I found it where it wasn’t.”
When he chooses to leave his water supply at the end of the film, to become someone else rather than be wedded to his personal property, Hogue recalls naturalist and everyday experimenter Henry David Thoreau’s own eulogy for his time living off the land: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” In a genuinely moving conclusion, Hildy returns, and just as she and Hogue are about to venture into another film, the car she rode in on runs him over. He lays out in bed, to die where he lived, in the desert. The preacher Joshua returns on his own gas-powered vehicle, and, at Hogue’s request to witness his own funeral, he delivers a meditation on the passing of the West played not as riposte or a lament or a eulogy but as a serio-comic inquiry. In its final moments, the film reflects on itself, on its own acts of self-mythologization. Hogue “came stumbling out of the wilderness like the prophets of old,” a figure who was God’s “dim reflection,” a man who might transfigure a spark of divinity but who himself wanders between Heaven and Hell.He might not be a hero, the film supposes, but he “lived and died here in the desert, and I’m sure hell will never be too hot for him.” He was, in the parlance of the Wild West, himself.
But also not himself. He only exists, the film suggests, in America’s bedtime stories about its own past, as a congealed archetype of a nation’s historical inheritance. The spring at the center of the film is an almost comically literal embodiment of the West’s promise of rejuvenation and Biblical redemption, its mantra of personal grit and hardship as the wellspring of a civic religion of self-creating, self-surpassing individualism of the type Hogue himself embodies to an extent that is both self-parodic and entirely sober.
Naturalist John Muir wrote four years prior to this film’s setting of the “Thousands of nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” who were “beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity,” bespeaking a desire to conserve not only the land but the spirit that he and Turner both felt was rapidly petering out. In asking men and women to dive back into the water of natural replenishment, they implied not only a physical necessity but a moral imperative, an injunction that was, of course, paradoxical. The West celebrated escaping from civilization and it necessitated “civilizing” the region one escaped to. It worshipped natural primitivism and justified the very technological triumphalism that made the former impossible.
This is to say that “the West,” as an idea, roped together so many horses riding in so many directions and attempted to obfuscate the tensions in these paths through sheer force of will. The relatively easy thing for a film to do would be to dismiss these paradoxes. Hogue tries to inhabit them. Rather than mock or dynamite its genre’s central confusions, Ballad is usually immanent in its critique. Its hero is as pure an archetype of the Western hero as you could imagine, and the film’s most deconstructive maneuver is to expose how contingent and unclarifiable his core really was, how the archetype tenuously congealed around a core that was ultimately molten, able to mean many different things to many different people. It offers an entirely deflationary conclusion about Hogue, but also one that is essentially meaningful in its seeming meaninglessness: “he wasn’t really a good man, he wasn’t a bad man. He was a man.” The point is that the West was always working against itself, and it couldn’t not do that. How to appreciate its ethos of spartan self-making, Hogue’s everyday atmosphere of living on and living through, and to recognize the violence done in its name – to see that its sense of affable humanity was also the engine of impossible suffering and terror – remains the essential question of the most American film genre reckoning with the contradictions of its national past. Hogue’s ability to give a name to the essential in the inessential, to find beauty in the ambulatory and seemingly irrelevant life of one man while also suggesting that he may not really be worth saving anyway, answers that question with another question. How could it do anything else?
Near the beginning of Antonio Margheriti’s And God Said to Cain, a man is suddenly told that he is free from a decade-long sentence in a murderously oppressive prison camp. The camera zooms in, a blinding light taking over his face. Freedom comes like a gift from God, but also a profound opacity. His life has been restored, but we sense that he can’t determine what that even means. He can only see manna from Heaven as an excuse to become Biblical Wrath, or to enact his own.
The man is Klaus Kinski, whose face was like an Expressionistic abyss, a tormented canvas that resonated inner anguish better than any before or since. When the light blinds this face, it also binds it. This is freedom overtaking a human void, but it is also the creation of a darkness incarnate, one laminated in divine vengeance. Kinski, a man who would soon create his most famous roles with Werner Herzog as, among others, an inhuman hell-spawn (Nosferatu) and a pitiful human who fashioned himself as an arbiter of the divine (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), conjures one of his cruelest cinematic creatures here.
In Aguirre, Kinski’s titular character framed himself as a benevolent light for those he understood to be in darkness, but he was really just obfuscating his own blindness, unable to see his idiom of natural mastery as a fallacious Western construct born in an imperialist fantasy. Margheriti’s Western offers no such pretense: Kinski is an angel of darkness, a movie creation born within the contours of the film and set loose by the film to send others to hell, but there is very little sense that anyone in this world is or could be “correct,” or even think of themselves as such.
Kinski plays Gary Hamilton, arrested a decade ago for a robbery committed by his ex-partner Acombar (Peter Carsten), who intentionally framed Hamilton for the crime. When Hamilton arrives back in town, he self-consciously refashions himself as a “a ghost returning,” a specter who takes up a kind of residence in a cave system underneath the town Acombar has turned into a fiefdom. Acombar plays a different sort of blinding God, a false idol, and Hamilton has no interest in offering a different one. His interest is in doing the devil’s work: using cunning, contingency, and tricksterism, he blots everything out like a gathering darkness.
Italian Westerns were always among the most willing to treat the American West as a transparently metaphysical contrast, a poesis of raw imagination with little tangible historical reality. Their interest was not in replacing the myth with a construction of “the real” but in mutating the mythology in increasingly exploratory, and often self-critical, dimensions. If the Wild West in American mythology is a canvas on which to enact escape into the future, Margheriti infuses it with a Gothic texture, where figurations of freedom are haunted by a not-so-dormant past. In exacting his revenge, Hamilton turns himself into a wraith undoing the town from below, a phantasm hunting the present from the caverns of the past. He takes up residence in a literal underground cave system, and in a particularly pregnant maneuver, And God Said to Cain allows him to peer up through the house of God, mocking the pretension of heaven in such a hellish place, and the idea that anything he will do throughout the film could meaningfully be called “redemptive.”
Margheriti’s film also figures Hamilton as a distinctly cinematic revenant, though, a man-become-cinema. He seems able to appear anywhere, to evaporate at will and teleport wherever he needs to, to edit himself into any frame via a filmic underground to manipulate to his liking. When his antagonists demand to “stop him, once and for all,” Acombar is backed by a many-sided mirror, a perversion of the cinematic Western hero as a noble pillar of transparent certainty via a many-sided mirror that refracts him to himself, that makes him the victim of his own ego. When Acombar accidentally shoots his son Dick (Antonio Cantafora), who is sympathetic to Hamilton’s cause but not enough to turn on his father, and then willingly kills his wife Maria (Marcella Michelangeli), Hamilton has turned Acombar into a light so blind he can’t even see himself, molded his mirrored vision into an insular, paranoid prison. A prison that Hamilton, late in the film, will finally turn into a conduit for his own metastasizing body, more a force than a human. This is a vanity project turned into a horror hall of mirrors turned into a cinematic shattered glass.
When one character, then, jokingly tells another to be afraid of “raspberry syrup,” it actually becomes a clandestine cinematic mission statement: artifice has become a weapon. This congealed liquid, so easily a fake blood for a classic film, can hurt perhaps more-so than the real thing. Art, and Hamilton’s capacity to weaponize a chthonic art of subterfuge against Acombar’s pretensions of order, strategically mobilizes his artificial illusions – Hollywood’s illusions of grandeur and moral righteousness – to undo them. When a preacher, freshly shot for hiding Hamilton, decides with his last breath to play an organ from hell that resonates all over the extra-diegesis, echoing throughout the world of the cinema, he seems to be becoming-cinema himself, turning his moral vision into raw art. As Hamilton leaves at the film’s end, he says that there is enough gold beneath the wreckage he has wrought to “find more than enough to rebuild your town.” This is, of course, blood money, in every sense of the term. He leaves a cinematic gift and a moral void, the detritus of a cinematic ground-clearing. He leaves not as a force for good but as, simply, a force, an emanation from the desert designed to return unnatural edifices to the ashes from whence they came.
The Long Take 