The Black Pit of Dr. M opens on a scientist’s rotting manse, its architecture crumbled and malformed into forbidding Xs: a bare geometry of egotism brought to its knees. When we see the building in its prime, though, its pretensions already seem pathetic. Pivotal early shots of the scientist’s laboratory present the impossible-to-describe location with natural outgrowths hovering just into the frame, fraying the clean edges of this image of modern science failing to keep the forces of nature at bay. The clarity of the frame itself, or rather the lack of clarity, becomes an evocation of the film’s critique of scientific hubris, an insidious reminder about the dangers of “the impossible … always within the realm of the possible.”
When it begins, The Black Pit of Dr. M seems almost fearlessly classical. Its major theme is horror’s ur-concern: the exploration of scientists searching beyond the pale of knowledge. We begin with two esteemed men of science promising one another that when one dies, they will find a way to inform the other about the secrets of death, the mysteries of the universe itself, from beyond the grave. When Dr. Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) does indeed pass away, his first ghostly call is to his daughter Patricia (Mapita Cortés), a more intimate encounter that will only figure in to the story much later. When Dr. Masali (Rafael Bertrand) is finally visited, though, the elusive nature of their encounter comes with unexpected consequences that expose the fault-lines of his quest to frame the essence of life as a question of rote knowledge of death.
1968 was a year on the edge of eternity, a transformational vortex of social revolution and political stress. Hammer Horror was, to put it kindly, not a company fit to weather the storm. Their moral universe was mostly conservative (in the small “c” sense). Their films, skulking with fiendishly recalcitrant minor currents though they could be, were fundamentally about staving off the forces of darkness, typically equated with dissent. While their films drew new blood from old horror chestnuts, they were very much playing the classics. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, horror cinema became very much contemporary. Anxiety about nuclear catastrophe and new technologies of mass destruction produced modern-set horror films with distinctly present-tense fears. The late ‘60s, meanwhile, would thrash horror into the future: influenced by the post-modern fragments of shattered reality coming from Europe and the acid baths of ‘60s psychedelia, they erupted the social canvas rather than creeping in the background. Hammer Horror’s heyday was in between these channels, the late 1950s and early 1960s, racing against a tide of history that would wash the company into oblivion.
The company’s most adept conduit of that fear was director Terrence Fisher. One of his final films with the company, The Devil Rides Out, is perhaps the paradigmatic ideal of a mainstream British horror film negotiating the Apollonian pull of order and the Dionysian energies teeming underneath society. The film exhibits a brutal, stone-faced rigidity, the product of obvious fear about the world coming undone around it and its own attempts to straight-jacket those tremblings. In its fear, perhaps without intending to, it also gives voice to that uncertainty, becoming a herald of an unquiet society. That it can’t fully appreciate its own tensions, can’t quite admit to its own inner restlessness, is all the more potent a suggestion that it knows the complexities of the world around it, and needs to deny them to survive.
Woman in the Dunes is the story of matter’s murmur, how it promises and then profanes. An unnamed entomologist (Eji Okada) opens the film wandering the coastal desert dunes of a seemingly out-of-the-way corner of Japan, far from his daily life in the doldrums of Tokyo’s burgeoning modernity. For the entomologist, the dunes promise relief from the workaday banality of modern city life, promising challenges to pursue, forces to explore, submit to, and command. He hopes they will unsettle him, that the romantic pull of the sublime otherness of these forbidding desert dunes will sink into his soul, that they will bring him outside himself and thereby return him to himself after communing with the world. But the film slowly impresses on us that his quest is a dangerously abstract escapade, one that takes him away from modernity’s tensions rather than into their conundrums. The titular dunes, with their eerie, eons-long omnipresence, their mixture of grace and gloom, lay his solipsism bare, drowning his ego in forces he wants to both dwarf and that he wants to dwarf him. The titular dunes are iridescence embodied, warping any meaning imposed on them. Alternately confessional stall, open-air penitentiary, and vast abundance, they can stand for seemingly anything and thus, perhaps, afford nothing other than a cosmic trick. The dunes offer this man his soul renewed before holding a mirror up to his inner cravings that he would rather not see. Woman in the Dunes understands that the line between spiritual purgative – hope for cosmic salvation – and menacing infinity – adriftness in a void of your own making – is gossamer thin.
Compared to many of Luis Buñuel’s earlier and later films, Belle de Jour is veritably chaste. None of the high-concept chicanery of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, nor the perverse, assaultive energy – the film camera as weapon – of Un Chien Andalou, nor the bracingly deconstructive arbitrariness of The Exterminating Angel. Buñuel, perhaps aiming for a mainstream hit, keeps the texture tight and controlled, even neutral, in his biggest crossover hit. Buñuel was incapable of not being mischievous though. Belle de Jour, with its steely screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere (based on the novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel), turns its own milquetoast limitations into a paradoxical stylistic coup, turns its lukewarm nature into ice-cold venom. The film’s occasional flirtations with fantasies of sexual ravishment feel like explosions of the repressed unleashing itself from the film’s cloister. They don’t structure the film but work like structuring absences for most of the text, things that must be kept off-screen for the narrative to function, pulsations that must be kept in check for society to keep afloat. Belle de Jour suggests that its own existence as mainstream narrative is a form of waking death.
Or perhaps the explosive visions aren’t so explosive after all. Perhaps they’re actually just as anodyne and chilly and washed-out as the rest of the film, and perhaps that’s the point. The text begins with a mock classicist sketch, in which the main couple ride through an autumnal setting in Victorian garb, dressed up in prim and proper bonafides. Suddenly, the moment morphs into a decidedly mechanical account of sexual frustration, an emergent erotic violence that feels like clockwork more than animal id. So much so that the blasé narration intimating that this is some sort of dream or fantasy feels less invasive than natural to the rhythms of the dream. The energy we’re supposed to feel, bare reality erupting through its Victorian cage, feels all the more artificial, all the more part of this cage. This desire to return to history as an escape from the present seems to fit so cleanly into a distinctly modern worldview. It implies that bourgeois modernity, so easily sliding into this repressed history’s fold, is itself part of the frustrated desire that the dream imagines. The 20th century, like the 18th, is a dream that is as repressive as it is liberatory for the film. The banality of it all channels into Catherine Deneuve’s icy, fiendishly interiorized performance, and it renders the bourgeois trappings of modern France decidedly, diabolically artificial, desperately in need of the shock that would come the ensuing calendar year.
For many film viewers, Ishiro Honda’s legacy rests almost entirely on one film. More populist than the Japanese masters like Ozu or Mizoguchi, less frenetic and frazzled than, say, Seijun Suzuki, and more sober and sophisticated, and thus more chaste, than the exploitation pictures riding in his wake in the 1970s, his films, eminently corporate in their way, can be parsimonious in doling out satisfaction for auteurists looking for the trademark stamp of a recalcitrant, personal touch. Functionally, this means that his straight-and-narrow sensibilities sometimes flatten his oeuvre out for an audience who mostly remember his epochal 1954 celestial howl Gojira and forget that the man who unleashed that scathing, wounded critique on the world had a career lasting several decades. While his style was more streamlined than many other concurrent Japanese directors, Matango serves him well: it boils down his populist horror sensibilities to the bone, perhaps because it is about the streamlining of humanity into a smooth paste of consumerist pulp. While Gojira lets the blood run raw, demanding to be witnessed in all its sublime monstrousness, Matango cauterizes the wound, slowing things way down for examination. And then it picks at the scab. It simmers down the former’s cosmic canvas of international panic for a seven-person cast waywardly trapped on a forgotten island of the soul.
Released a decade after Gojira, Matango depicts a recovering Japan, or one that never actually bothered to ask what genuine recovery would mean. It begins with a newly resurgent, distinctly modern bourgeoisie, twenty years on from the war and, apparently, relatively untroubled by and weathered from the immediate shock of absolute destruction. Although we know, beforehand, who the designated “survivor” of this story is, there’s little sense in which psychology professor Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo) is a protagonist, other than being slightly more level-headed than the other characters, all of whom, finally, prove susceptible to the call of another life beyond the one humanity has made for itself. Each, in their way, is entirely amenable to the siren song of a scientific homogeneity that presents itself as a radical otherization but, in fact, simply marks the blasé hollowness they’ve already accepted as their daily livelihood.
Few questions received such a pressing and recurrent tribunal in mid-century European intellectual culture as Theodor Adorno’s inquiry about whether there could be “poetry after Auschwitz.” For essayist, poet, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, poetry may be all we have. The problem, both Adorno and Cocteau understand, is that poetry is complicit in cruelty, that feats of human imagination are entangled with the abstracting violence of mass destruction and the failure to acknowledge human reality. Art, Testament of Orpheus proposes, has a “a very poor memory for the future,” and it can be complicit in its own metastasizing as weapon and mechanism of power. Its dreams of a better world, the film well knows, all too easily become fantasies of control and justifications for destruction, means by which the poet’s will creates a new world prey to their sovereignty. In “repeatedly attempting to trespass to another world,” the poet is “besieged by crimes (they) have not committed,” by the potential violence of escaping the world, by the horrors done via technology attempting, like cinema, to conquer time itself. Art, the film posits, is an “innocence” that is nonetheless “capable … of all crimes.” Cocteau’s film begins as an inquiry into art and morphs into a testament to the necessity, in spite of everything, perhaps because of art’s very ability to do evil, to artistic transformation.
I’m quoting from the dialogue so much because Testament is a poet’s movie, the kind of robust and self-referential text a film theorist (as Cocteau was) would produce, particularly a theorist so eager to tinker around in a world where the “living are not alive, and the dead and not dead.” It can be a little self-serving, and Cocteau’s smirk – both his directorial elan and the knowing grin he dons on camera, as “the poet,” an iconographic variation on himself – tells us all we need to know about how aware of that self-service he is. The artist, try as they might, “always paints his own portrait.” But Testament of Orpheus turns egocentrism into ecology, the inward gaze into the relational soul. Cocteau is keen to invite us to participate in cinema’s own liminality, to join hand in hand with its own navel-gazing. Its vision of art is a “petrifying fountain of thought,” and if it petrifies like Medusa’s gaze, it also reminds us that witnessing that petrification via art is the only path we have to confront the world in all its complexity and emerge galvanized for further inquiry. One would be hard-pressed to find a more petrifying vision than Testament, so completely does it stop and restart the rhythms of the mind via a cinema of perpetual free-fall.
One always gets the sense that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was entirely sincere in his affection for Douglas Sirk and mid-century Hollywood melodrama. His was a self-reflective cinema, but not a self-excoriating one. Melodrama, for him, is not just a manipulative fallacy or an ideological construct so much as a tragic mode of narrating the tensions between internal desire and external conditions. Fassbinder’s gaze, which seems to breach the prison of the skin and pull forth the evanescence of desire itself, seems genuinely descended from the expressionist tradition. His films aren’t deconstructions of his inspirations so much as meditations on them, ones that, because they actualize and then shatter the characters’ wildest fantasies and most disturbing dreams, expose the cracks in their hopes and articulate the jaggedness of their imaginations.
Veronika Voss was perhaps Fassbinder’s most obvious reflection on his cinematic origins, and that comes with enough baggage to risk turning the film into an obvious allegory of his love for classic cinema rather than a genuine interrogation of it. Veronika Voss is a relatively apparent variation on Sunset Boulevard: a titular former celebrity (played by Rosel Zech), desperate to reengage her career after the point where mainstream German cinema has cast her aside, increasingly confronts the limits of her drug addiction and the conflicting demands of an abusive doctor (Annemarie Duringer) who derives satisfaction from keeping Voss under her thumb. His final film released during his life time, the relative straightforwardness of Veronika Voss’s situation implies the consummatory quality of a director knowingly at the end of his time on earth, offering a final effigy for the inspirations that fueled him.
Yet this is no honorary replaying of an old standby, nor a mere post-modern ode to his fascinations. Veronika Voss is not Norma Desmond. Rather than a toxic statue striving to fully absorb Old Hollywood ghoulishness and exaggeration for her own malformed, abused ego, Voss is a drifting angel caught in modernity’s moonlight. Demond’s needs were gravitational, coaxing the entire film into her orbit. Voss’s are electromagnetic, loosely centering a field of particles, each character compromised by each other, everyone working a disruptive but also often empathetic malice upon each other as they harness one another for various ends. Fassbinder’s film isn’t the story of a lone, maddened, monomaniacal soul exerting force on others but a nebula in which everyone trying to fulfill their self-lacerating needs and hopes causes each other to come undone, in which individuals emit, radiate, and dissipate together for better or worse. Near the end of his career, perhaps because it sees him fading into the netherworld of cinematic afterlife, the liminal space where the dream factory goes to play afterhours, Veronika Voss feels like a ghostly transmission from another world, laying bare a dream Fassbinder has of artistic rapture – film fulfilling your dream life, allowing you to transcend into an artistic ether – that he can’t believe even as it lingers in his mind and shivers into his soul.
Early on in Roadgames, Patrick Quid (Stacey Keach), a lonesome truck driver presently cutting a path across Australia’s perilous and forbidding Nullarbor, is wasting away. The unmoving, apocalyptic expanse of pitiless landscape refracts the fatalistic hopelessness of his unceasing existence. The night before, he nearly missed an opportunity to pick up a nameless hitchhiker (Angie La Bozzetta) on the road and to preempt the man (Grant Page) who did. In the meantime, we’ve witnessed that man, face still unseen, emerge from a steamy shower and slowly creep up on the hitchhiker from behind as she plays a guitar, the camera cutting just at the moment he seems primed to strangle her with piano wire. Soon enough, Patrick will pass the hitchhiker on the road, mysteriously burying something in trash bags in the outback. Because we haven’t seen him, and because Quid only sort of wants to see what the man is up to via his binoculars, and because writer-director Richard Franklin was a protégé of the late Alfred Hitchcock, we can’t miss that we’re suddenly being strangled by a Rear Window riff.
Strangled, I wrote, and technically Roadgames concerns whether this strange other man did in fact kill the woman. But Roadgames is also Hitch liberated, set out on parole, adrift in the cosmic reflecting pool that is the open frontier of the Outback. Indeed, quicker than you can say “The Trouble with Harry,”or “Frenzy,” Roadgames reveals itself as a murderously ironic deflation of Hitch’s own icy brutality, a film that isn’t really interested in tightening around us but in suspending us over a void. While Brian De Palma was twisting Hitchcock’s voyeurism and autoerotic exploration of mastery and impotence into increasingly perverted, masochistic spaces in the early ‘80s, director Richard Franklin (who would next direct a sequel to Hitchcock’s seminally serpentine Psycho) unravels Hitch. Instead of tightening the vise, Roadgames fills the parched purgatory of the Outback with a mordant, off-kilter mischievousness, moving us from episode to episode as it proposes a kind of wry question: can a hang-out road movie, with its vague digressions and ambling waywardness, become the template for a claustrophobic thriller?
Latching onto Hitch’s self-amused self-mockery, Roadgames turns Hitch’s sardonic undercurrent of wry malevolence into a bone-dry comedy of missed communication, not so much between the people in the film but between the film and us. To that extent, Roadgames refers more to the game the film is playing with us than the game the characters play with each other. We aren’t privy to some conspiratorial match between one malevolent force and an unsuspecting everyman, one in which the character’s lack of knowledge exposes the void around us. In this case, the force is the film, and we are the everymen, unprepared for how disinterested this film is in thrilling us, how little it seems to want to use and abuse us and how comfortable it is drifting about. It seems to be doing everything in its path to not transform into the horror film it has generally been advertised as. It is paradoxically not by treating us as Hitchcockian playthings, puppets of a camera impresario, that the film is really having its way with us. Franklin twists the knife in by taking it out, letting the wound breathe and the entrails flail all over the ground.
Rosewood’s most salient character is a figure who seems to recognize that he has walked into Rosewood out of an entirely different film and that he wears a century of American cinematic lore on his back. He is a cowboy, a disciple of the wandering lifestyle that has its roots in the nebulous core of American life. He is an opaque drifter as archetypal as Shane or The Man with no Name or McCabe. Indeed, he isn’t even a man with no name. He is named Mann (Ving Rhames), a self-consciously iconographic masculine drifter who wears his self-composure and cultivated distance from history on his sleeve. His icy competence, ably displayed throughout the film, is tethered to his dispassionate reserve, his displacement from the forces of history that have shaped him and his aspiration to act as though he is beyond those forces even as he fully embodies an icon that itself constellates and coagulates the forces of American lore. He can help save the town of Rosewood, an African American oasis in the middle of Jim Crow Florida that he wanders into, for the same reason that he doesn’t want to. He has seen history weighted against his, and their, Blackness, and he has decided to abscond from history. Rosewood is the story of that man recognizing his own complicity with those historical forces. It is his attempt to redirect them in an insurgent, counter-historical assault.
This film’s obvious interest in Mann’s predicament, and its concern about that interest, is felt in every frame, not only because it is the film’s story but because it is its ontology, which is to say, its own being. That’s because Mann is also a cipher for writer-director John Singleton’s own combative, conflictual relationship to the Hollywood machine, to a force he both wants to claim as his and a fear that it neither wants him nor he it. In hoping to wrangle forces of history and structures around him like an itinerant, independent maverick, a man who is inside and outside the world, he weaponizes the forces of his oppression against them. Just as Mann tries to embody the American cowboy figure against itself and emerges unsure about its final value, Singleton plunders the American picture-book both to invest in the cultural markers of resistant Americanism and to imply that they may not actually be worth saving.
Singleton’s neo-Western style, reinterpreted and strip-mined for a radical poetics, finds a cipher in Mann, an ex-soldier who, like many other African Americans after the Great War, aspired to “close ranks” with white Americans, a showcase of American piety that quickly became a reckoning with the limits of sacrifice. For many returning African Americans, an aspirational hope of national togetherness quickly exposed feelings that their faith had been misplaced. Displays of support for the American spirit, they realized, had severe limits as a basis for a progressive politics or the facilitation of a joint racial venture of national development.
The war, then, was also a frontier of a kind, a space in which many African Americans reported experiencing the loosening of social structures and the inherited assumptions from their life in the U.S., seeing equal treatment for people of multiple races for the first time not in the U.S. armed forces, which were segregated, but in European society. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that African Americans “returned from fighting” and they “returned fighting,” and the renewed vigor to fight oppression felt by many African Americans reflected a sensibility girded against forces of oppression at home and abroad.
Mann begins the film reflecting this ambivalence. He is certainly unqualified in his agency. He has no qualms about displaying his frustration with racism. But his solution is a retreat into a decidedly individual life, a turn to a world apart, one within the confines of himself. His frontier horizon is not to change the system, but to escape it. Yet Rosewood, the town he discovers, is also a frontier in another sense. Rather than easing us into the acceptable pathways of liberal American multiculturalism, as most Hollywood history films of its vintage did (and still do), Rosewood makes a claim on a region of Black history outside the harmonies of what Gunnar Myrdal called the “American creed.” The African American town of Rosewood is one in which the Black residents have fashioned a collective rejection of America. They’ve accepted the Faustian bargain of segregation as a slantwise path to possibility, if not progress.
Indeed, Rosewood travels in one of history’s forgotten trenches here, an unexpected, seemingly oxymoronic frontier not in the Wild West but in the Deep South, where the seeming fixity and entrenchment of history can belie odd occurrences and improbable freedoms born out of the trickster god that is history, a space in which people do not act according to code. It was in the backwoods of Florida that the first independent Black town in what would be the U.S. was founded near St. Augustine, when the area was still controlled by the Spanish. It was in Florida where Mary McLeod Bethune led an African American school for girls. Authors like Zora Neale Hurston would go on to parlay their life within modern independent Black communities in the South (Florida, in her case, as well) into inspired cultural commentary on the beauty and complexity of communal Blackness uncoupled from any claims on white society. The independent African American town of Rosewood, much like Mann’s recalcitrant refusal, suggests a renewed commitment not to invest all of one’s faith in the gradual evolution of American civic-national opportunity. Instead, the people of Rosewood look to make freedom and progress on their own terms, not by kindling with America’s hopes but by tracing America’s shadows. Focusing on their own space, the people of Rosewood suggest, might actually attack discrimination from a different front, wielding the admittedly back-stabbing weapon of segregation in a way that carves out some opportunity, however dubious, within it.
As with Mann’s masculine individualism and Singleton’s Hollywood filmmaking, this path is also an attempt to wield structures of inequality as best they could, to survive and work with the devil, to hold one’s own in the belly of the beast. History has been ambivalent about these paths, as, importantly, have Black radicals, many of whom, even in the 1920s and 1930s, felt that interracial class-based solidarity was the only viable way to pursue real, lasting change in a world of increasingly interconnected capital. A Black town would never escape the structures of racial inequality. It could only, much like Mann’s projected vision of cowboy charisma, hold them at bay.
Rosewood recognizes this problem. While it is distinctly a film about a Black community’s hard-won, albeit incomplete, security, Singleton’s text is also unusually attentive to the dynamics of white attitudes toward Jim Crow, attitudes that inevitably limit the possibilities afforded the Black characters when a lie stokes the simmering racial tensions into a full-blown holocaust. When the white residents of a nearby town run riot over the residents of Rosewood, raising it to the ground, they show little remorse for their actions. Those who did, Rosewood suggests, may be no better. In a grave, gravitational shot, one that seems at once to center the film, to hold it close to the ground, and to force it to confront its demons, Sheriff Walker (Michael Rooker), who has been nominally trying to hold the white mob at bay, raises up in the foreground, center-frame, suddenly blocking the massacre’s first black body being hung directly behind him. This isn’t the film’s plea to empathize with this white man, a wounded expression of the white man’s soul asserting moral and epistemic precedence over the Black man’s body. The film will not shy away from raw confrontation with the desecration of Black flesh throughout, but, in this image, the point is precisely that this white man’s feelings of guilt are taking up time and literal screen space over the actual story of the dead Black person. Walker constantly adopts a masquerade of unearned beneficence in the interest of making the story about him rather than acknowledging the grotesque brutality he has condoned and legitimized. He looks forward in the frame, apparently certain yet actually lost amidst the contradictions of history he wants to have move forward and stand still, whereas someone like Mann effaces himself and relies on reticence and ambivalence to radiate a quiet dignity and, when need be, a brutal charisma. It is Walker who cannot see the myopia of his missionary self-image, and the limits of his self-aggrandizing brand of brittle liberalism, not Singleton. He is, as it were, an allegory for a white Hollywood happy to array itself against white racism when it is played with a country accent and knotted into a rope but not when it is wielded by apparently more enlightened forces.
Singleton’s investment in and ambivalence about Hollywood cinema is apparent in nearly every frame of Rosewood, a film that sees him shun the position of a fervent acolyte of cultural inclusion to become, instead, an armored interpreter of America’s worth. He adopts the position of a volatile vagabond moving through Hollywood’s trenches, a renegade man wrestling with his own inner frustration, perhaps his own inner complicity, and turning those aspects of himself against the system that condones them. His film doesn’t fully escape this system. But that’s the point. This is tenuous stuff for a provisional history. Rosewood imagines no inexorable march of progress. It doesn’t lead us, Moses-like, into a better world. It submerges us into a conflictual netherworld in which the forces at play in the world are never stabilized, in which the niceties of civilizational advance are always potentially surface level masquerades for churning material tensions that have to be constantly maintained by implicit threats and by the possibility of more overt forms of violence.
Ever attentive to these knots of history, Singleton does exquisite compositional work throughout. His multi-sided, prismatic frames situate humans with and against each other, their surroundings, and the wider world. Unexpected truths are clarified to our eyes that are only dimly apparent to the characters themselves. Late in the film, for instance, John Wright (Jon Voight), a liberal white store owners and one of the few white residents of Rosewood, walks back home to his house, perhaps the only building left standing in town, when the camera attunes us, but not him, to the body of his Nlack employee in the foreground. She lies dead in the road because she couldn’t bear the thought of being harbored by the man who, although seemingly caring, nonetheless showed little compunction about asserting himself onto her sexually earlier.
The shot inverts the image of the sheriff rising above the dying black man. Here, an ambivalent, if finally more heroic, white man recedes into the distance, perhaps to a renewed conviction or perhaps to an unchanged moral compass, as the camera moves us to the position of displacing him with the body of a dead Black women who he has, metaphorically, turned his back on. This is a vastly more frustrated, frustrating, hesitant portrait of white liberalism than another Hollywood film, with its self-serving, artificially redemptive aura, would have managed. Wright is an essentially permissive man, open to the structures of liberal modernity, but he is also a capitalist who obviously feels good about himself for exhibiting a more enlightened disposition to the Black residents of the town. He is a vision of Janus-faced white American modernity, embodied most clearly in the film’s final climax, where he boards a confiscated train, a symbol of modernity, to Jacksonville, while the two Black men who are the film’s other heroes ride off together on horses, unable to participate in this story of modern progress and unwilling to forget the violence it was built on.
When Mann and Wright salute at the end of Rosewood, having worked together to save the Black children of the town, the film doesn’t necessarily understand this as a moment of commiserative honor. Their ex-military camaraderie, consummated in a shared salute, is as much a display of their confusion about their own commitment to any cause other than their own survival throughout the film. These are the two most liminal men in the film, neither with or apart from the Black town. Mann, for his part, has finally decided where he stands. Wright, conversely, seems to want to sit on the fence. He is a man who is theoretically likely to go back to his own ways, who disowns abject violence but is also accepting of structures of oppression insofar as it suits him. Rosewood is fully aware that his participation in the heroism of the climax may be pyrrhic, that Wright may go back to his old life, whereas Mann and Rosewood resident Sylvester (Don Cheadle) seem to be riding through a nation that has no safe place prepared for them.
It is Sylvester, then, who exhibits the film’s other revealing arc, the one which forces him neither to recognize his participation in a hopeful community nor to reckon with his complicity with an oppressive one but to acknowledge the decimation of his community and apprehend its continuance, albeit in a new form. A member of Rosewood, Sylvester is an embodiment of the educated Black landowning class who is emboldened and hesitant, who knows how to wield a veiled threat and stand up for his rights and to demur and mask his indiscretion without fully denying it. He is, with a piano or a gun, good with his hands. Yet he can only survive the film by hiding in his mother’s casket at a pivotal moment. He is nearly buried with the remains of the woman who reared him, played by Esther Rolle, whose most famous role, matriarch of a compassionate, fragile Black family for the modern urban world, reared many youths on intra-relationships in the Black community and the liminality of freedom even in the “progressive” North.That character, of course, was named Florida, an echo of the Black Southern past still alive in the North. Sylvester’s return at the end of the film is a metaphorical rebirth born out of a closeness to death, a near-demise that hammers a new man out of the currents of historical oppression and human agency. His is a life through which Singleton weighs the competing urges of staying and going, resisting and demurring, holding onto the possibilities etched out of an oppressive past and locating a new future.
With a fire and brimstone cinematic charge, Singleton creates a historical double-sided sword that exhumes the hellish currents of Jim Crow segregation as a lamentable, damned land that nonetheless radiates collective humane warmth and possibility forged in spite of the structures around it. While Mann has to relearn what it means to connect to a history and a community, Sylvester transmutes his inheritance into a new creation, not as something to myopically hold onto and curate but as material out of which something living might be created. This is perhaps Singleton’s vision for himself, as an interpreter of classic Hollywood luster and a griot harnessing cinema’s potential for coaxing out the collective, compositional relations tying humans and structures. He weaponizes the history of people in place, living and dying in a horrible world, bearing witness to an imperfect existence as they act with the feel for a better one insurgently pushing its way into the grime of the now.
It is no secret that Clint Eastwood’s Hogan is very much the second “mule” in Two Mules for Sister Sara. For the most part, he’s a brute muscle whose soul is barely more tortured than a paper bag’s. If his taciturn efficiency and adaptable, survivable ethical relativism are treated with a tip of the hat by director Don Siegel, it is clearly Sister Sara’s unwavering moral vigilance that actually inspires the film. Without faith in a fundamental rightness, Hogan – and, implicitly, the archetypal wayward American with their hard, unmoving practicality – seems ready to drift in perpetuity, to suffer the fate of blind chance and mere circumstance that it mistakenly calls personal acumen. If Eastwood offers any contrapuntal critique of Sara’s spirited commitment and absolute belief in the first half of this film, a mid-film revelation that rounds out her character significantly implies that Sara is, finally, all that a human needs to be, and that Eastwood is just along for the ride. If, say, Robert Bresson sacralized the figure of the donkey in Au hasard Balthazar, creating an exalted mute witness lamenting humanity’s capacity for brutality, Siegel does the opposite. He profanes the human hero as little more than an ass.
This is an unusual thing for the signature Don Siegel-Clint-Eastwood pairing. Dirty Harry looms largest in their shared canon, and that film’s curdled vision of a thoroughly amoral world offers a backdrop for the film’s queasy call for a deregulated masculinity, unencumbered by government oversight, to personify that world’s awfulness, and, in doing so, hope to pacify it. But the men’s work together is far more slippery, and far more varied, than that epochal, and often grotesque, film suggests. The Beguiled, released between Dirty Harry and Two Mules, is a scorched-earth vision of American restlessness, implying that its rugged, creatively duplicitous loner protagonist is actually a cruel, conniving force, and that its coterie of Confederate women are really a menagerie of heated desires and malnourished souls in search of a pulse beneath their tenuous patina of harmony and ideology. And that’s not even mentioning Siegel’s earlier, non-Eastwood explorations like The Killers, which inverts the detective genre as two ruthless, reptilian assassins spend the entire film in search of an explanation for why their target was so willing to enter the wrong end of their gun.
Critical texts, certainly, but Siegel’s films are hairline fractures, not fissures. Little about his work announces itself as a critique of their zeitgeist, but in cutting into the world around him at odd angles, he can’t but fray its edges. Several of his key films take place in the modern-day West, and the most famous ones generally seem to affirm the Wild West’s mythology of ragged souls and recalcitrant spirits cleansing a tormented, unfinished land. The titular Dirty Harry, especially, clearly weaponizes anti-authoritarian dissidence and anarchic overflow as paradoxical tools of the state and harbingers of order, much like the Western cowboy beforehand. Yet Siegel and Eastwood’s actual Western is essentially a forgotten object, a self-consciously inconsequential text from a director and star working in a genre that, by any reasonable account, should have invited nothing less than a magnum opus. And, superficially at least, Two Mules leans fully into the signifiers of the baggage it carries, carting out Eastwood in his de rigueur poncho, scruff, cigar, and breathy husk, calling on the spirit of a man who had sacrificed his humanity to become an avatar of a set of ideas. How could this walking Western icon, working with his most important collaborator, not produce a masterpiece?
That’s the wrong question. A better one: why did they not seem to want to make a masterpiece? Siegel, in fact, was a journeyman by calling. He took his works as they came, and finishing one was an invitation to try on another, not an opening for an existential crisis. His vision of the West had little use for Sergio Leone’s abstract, metaphysical sense of bearing the weight of the genre’s accumulated trappings on his shoulders like an act of supreme penance. Two Mules for Sister Sara, comparatively, only initially seems like a brutal broadside of a Western, a film with a big idea about the genre that houses it. Within fifteen minutes, though, it seems like little more than a lark. An hour in, it has emerged as a wily, ornery, very ground-level thing, a merging of critique and nonsense, a film so seemingly superficial, and so obviously pretending to be serious, that we threaten to miss how serious it really is. It’s a veritable wolf in sheep’s clothing in wolf’s clothing.
The Long Take 