Three New Films (And a Tragedy)

Over the last week or so, the fact that I suddenly had a small amount of disposable income to my name, as well as a few days off, meant that I got to catch up on three recent theatrical releases which are all top contenders on “best film of the year” lists. None of them, in my opinion, come close to actually being the best film of the year. I know I have a hefty amount of catching-up to do in terms of seeing the year's most critically-heralded films (I haven't yet seen White Material, Carlos, Dogtooth, or Mother, all of which I imagine could skyrocket to the top of my list), and a number of the prospective bests have yet to receive a wide or limited release, at least in Minneapolis (Blue Valentine, The Illusionist, and Another Year among them). But a number of titans on critics' best-of lists in 2010 have left me uniformly lukewarm (or worse). The Social Network is solid and intelligent, but I wonder if it's telling us anything that any astute individual with a Facebook page didn't already know. Inception raises the bar pretty high for what summer entertainment can offer, but beyond its kinetic style and high-concept gimmickry, there's nothing there, and the movie's emotional center is almost completely hollow (save for a few scenes between Leonardio DiCaprio's and Marion Cotillard's characters). And The Kids Are All Right is the worst of the lot, an astonishingly dull melodrama of entitlement that offers absolutely nothing of visual or cinematic interest to alleviate the characters' fatuous, self-involved crises.

All of this is to say that, as it currently stands, my tentative “best of” list would be seriously unimpressive. Winter's Bone stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, an immersive and intense study of a young woman's violent thrust into an insular world that never approaches condescension or slum glamour. A Prophet and The Ghost Writer would follow—two movies that could also be considered 2009 releases, depending on the specific date of release you're using. And the fourth, Shutter Island, would already be a movie that I've defended vociferously but that I still never expected would stand so high on a best-of-the-year-list—it's about as exciting and playful as you can make a rote genre picture, but it is still a rote genre picture. A few notches down from there would be The Human Centipede: First Sequence, and although I do have some kind of masochistic respect for this Euro-horror shock movie, I'd still feel uncomfortable commending it so enthusiastically.

All of this is not to say that 2010 has been a weak year for movies: as always seems to happen, the best movies of the year—the most exciting and original, the ones that come in underneath the radar and that really stand out during awards season—usually seem to pop up after the calendar year has already ended. What this does mean is that the most popular candidates you've seen on best-of lists don't actually, really, seem to offer that much ingenuity, generally speaking. Does this hold true, too, for three recent heralded movies—Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, David O. Russell's The Fighter, and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours?

I was most disappointed by Black Swan, to my own admitted surprise—it was probably also the movie I was looking forward to most eagerly this winter. There are definitely things to recommend in the movie, most notably Natalie Portman's performance, which takes the plot's cliched character typologies and imbues them with real emotion, pathos, and pain. And a few of Aronofsky's jump cuts are effective shockers, and there's a hallucinogenic scene in which one character repeatedly stabs herself in the face that lives up to the movie's nightmarish premise. But for the most part, that premise is wholly unfulfilled. Black Swan is supposed to be a totally insane hallucination rising out of the main character's psychosexual desires, self-destructive ambition, and severe mental instability. So why does the whole thing seem so one-note, so predictable? It's not some stubborn sense of critical arrogance that makes me say I knew what was going to happen in practically every scene of the movie (or, not just that, anyway). The movie's pseudo-shocking sequences of bodily mutilation, its metaphorical doubling of Swan Lake's plot with Black Swan's own (Portman is the white swan! Kunis is the black swan, get it?!), the numerous scenes overloaded with reflections off of glass and mirrors behaving in unusual ways—the heavy-handedness of these stunts are worse than merely unsurprising, they seem to give the impression that Aronofsky has no faith in his audience to pick up on his themes, and therefore bludgeons us with them, without creativity or sophistication. Black Swan is able to achieve an air of the epic and the macabre, but even during its grandiose finale, the trajectory seems more schematic and self-congratulatory than inspired. The entire thing is spelled out for you in one line of dialogue, during which the ballet company's smarmy director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), summarizes the storyline of Swan Lake; that synopsis, transplanted into the world of Black Swan, is about all the movie has going on conceptually.

Over the last several weeks, bloggers and Internet critics have been writing about what may be Aronofsky's most celebrated movie, Requiem for a Dream, in a series of 102 posts commemorating the movie's tenth anniversary. Not all of the posts have been positive, though. John Lingan, for example, on his blog Busy Being Born, writes about how shaken and awestruck he was when he first saw the movie at 15 years old. Now, seeing the movie again ten years later, Lingan writes that he's “embarrassed because Requiem for a Dream is such an overwrought, self-satisfied, and juvenile film, and it appealed to me precisely because I shared all those qualities when I saw it... Requiem for a Dream, with its easy cynicism...and unremitting bleakness, is just the thing to make a person feel like they've lived a little and hardened in the process, particularly if that person hasn't really lived at all.” These are pretty harsh words—there are good things about Requiem for a Dream, and I don't think it's only identified with by bored suburbanite teenagers who want to feel badass—but in a way I think the general idea also applies to Black Swan. The movie, we're supposed to feel, is demented and phantasmagoric and nightmarishly lustful; if Black Swan is all of these things, it is so only in the most juvenile, simplistic, and self-satisfied ways. And if it's trying to be a horror movie (you know, one of those high-pedigree award-garnering horror movies), Black Swan absolutely needs to abandon the fathomable and comprehensible for at least some of its running time—but it never does, in an attempt to remain palatable to the crowd that wants to tiptoe towards the edge of their comfort zone but never really step past it.

Black Swan, at first glance, is a non-generic head trip that actually abides by the narrative and thematic patterns that we're used to; David O. Russell's The Fighter, on the other hand, is at first glance a totally generic underdog boxing story, but much of it is distinguished by aesthetic ingenuity and tricks of audience address that make the movie anything but stale. This is remarkable, considering how much the movie has in it that really should seem dreadfully cliché: it's the underdog story of Micky Ward, a boxer born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has to contend not only with a mostly-indifferent sports media but also with a larger-than-life mother and brother who care more about remaining in the spotlight than about young Micky's success. His brother Dickie was an aspiring boxer at one point in his life, whose main claim to fame was knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978 (many boxing fans say Leonard merely slipped). Now, Dickie is a bug-eyed crack addict living vicariously through his younger brother—he's the subject of an HBO documentary (a thought-provoking film-within-the-film) about the dangers of drug addiction. Micky's mother, meanwhile, is an overbearing matriarch still grasping at Dickie's one-time success, apparently unaware that her younger son has a greater chance at attaining the welterweight title.

It's telling that Mark Wahlberg is forced to underplay in this movie; Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, as Dickie and his mother, give such grandiose, showboating performances that no one else is really given the chance for speechy, Oscar-baiting thespian moments. These are the kinds of performances I usually detest: the kind that equate tears and the wordiness of speeches and the sordidness of the character with immersive personification. Here, though, Leo and Bale really do inhabit these characters, and the actorly moments remain integrated to what is going on in the characters' heads and lives. For example, during the scene in which Dickie, now imprisoned for a plethora of charges, bombastically hosts a showing of the HBO documentary about his crack addiction in the prison cafeteria, Bale's wildly hyperbolic performance gives way to shame and rueful anger, and we realize that the overacting he offers throughout much of the film parallels Dickie Ward's efforts to convince himself and the world that he is still relevant. Later, when Leo's character intervenes between Micky and Dickie as they fight (verbally and physically) on the day of Dickie's release, Leo's embodiment of the crass Boston-matriarch stereotype softens into a portrayal of a mother torn between two sons—one cyclonic and narcissistic, who uses his personal troubles as an avenue for public performance; one timid and sensitive, who channels his feelings of aggression, inferiority, and neglect into his performance in the ring. There are better and quieter performances than both Bale's and Leo's this year, even though the two of them (or at least one) will almost certainly win an Oscar, but at least they are indeed portrayals rather than opulent shams.

Russell, the director of I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings, here tones down most of his auteurist touches, taking a backseat to the gigantic performances and the by-the-numbers script by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson. But Russell still visualizes the story intelligently, stylishly, and excitingly. The oft-mobile camera is as athletic as the fighters onscreen, and the seemingly effortless blend of production design, set design, costuming, and cinematography evokes a naturalistically seedy, rundown setting. Russell uses the filming of the HBO documentary within the film as a comment on his own film's fictionalization of reality, and even as a self-criticism of his crew's intrusion into and evocation of Lowell, Massachusetts. And a brutal scene of Dickie's delusional withdrawal in prison superimposes multimedia imagery of Dickie's win against Sugar Ray Leonard as well as him sparring with younger Micky in their front yard as a way of emphasizing how our conceptions of ourselves are essentially montages of filmed scenes (and how self-visualization is a sort of addiction in itself).

Aside from these more attention-grabbing moments, Russell is surprisingly skillful at getting the most out of this cliched underdog story. So much of this should reek with mustiness, especially Amy Adams's character (a bartender—or “MTV girl,” as Micky's sisters call her—perceived as haughty because she went to college for a couple years) and the climactic boxing match in which Micky puts all of his aggression towards his brother into the ring, fights for Lowell, and goes several unimpressive rounds before knocking out his opponent for the title. (The first two of these ideas are explicitly voiced by Dickie in the film—you know, just in case we didn't get it.) But amazingly, Adams's character remains sweet and effective, and that final match is incredibly exciting (the audience I saw it with responded viscerally). It's unfortunate that The Fighter still abides by cliché so much of the time, but the fact that it manages its cliches so well and is still so invigorating is some kind of compliment for the filmmaking prowess going on here.

In between Black Swan's hollowness and The Fighter's sense of excitement lies Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, a film that's frustrating because half of it is so intense and sophisticated, and the other half is totally self-defeating and counterintuitive. First, the good things: James Franco's performance, first of all, is just the right mixture of shallow self-absorption and ingratiating cavalierness. It's essential to the movie that we identify with the main character, Aron Ralston's, desire to abandon modern society and venture into the canyons near Moab, Utah, but we also need to realize that his deluded self-satisfaction and callousness are what lead him into his dire situation in the first place. (For those who don't know the plot: that situation entails Ralston being pinned between a massive boulder and a canyon wall for more than four days, eventually extricating himself only by cutting off his right arm with a pair of mountaineering pliers.) Boyle has often sought to speak to and for the younger generation (Trainspotting, The Beach), and it's obvious that he intends 127 Hours to be the broad story of an impetuous youthful generation whose steely self-reliance may ultimately leave it stranded, emotionally as well as physically. Franco perfectly embodies that generation here; he's a charming asshole throughout most of the film, even when he's immobilized.

More problematic is Boyle's typically relentless style. The kinetic whiplash aesthetic that we've grown accustomed to through Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, The Beach, and so on is still present in 127 Hours, which may seem ironic given that the movie is largely about stasis, claustrophobia, abandonment, and helpless desperation. Half of the time, this aesthetic is appropriate: the movie nails the euphoric rush of escaping society and immersing oneself in pure nature, for example. Some of its split-second intercuts of the inner workings of digital camcorders, too, make clear the importance that self-mediation and digital technology hold in the lives of young people (and subtly criticize the main character by revealing that, even when he abandons modern society, he never really abandons modern society). In addition, the increasingly surreal overlays of Ralston's memories, premonitions, and hallucinations sometimes seem to burrow in to the very root of this character—in particular, flashbacks to a traumatic breakup and Ralston's apparent indifferent to a girl who loves him work surprisingly well.

But the movie often seems to be working against its central concept. The idea is right there in the title: the movie is supposed to be about the 127 agonizing, grueling, desperate hours Ralston spent anticipating his own death. We should be stranded in that canyon with him; we should feel the cruel march of time with him, and we should be equally hopeless about his chances to survive (even if we know the outcome of this story, Boyle could have at least temporarily persuaded us through style and plotting that Ralston may not survive this experience after all). The main flaw of the movie is ironic: it's simply too entertaining. The movie is only an hour and a half, and it feels like it: it flies by in a kinetic rush, and those 127 hours spent trapped in the canyon feel like little more than a really extreme sport.

The scene in which Ralston amputates his own arm is actually quite successful: Boyle doesn't spare us the grisly, sinew-snapping brutality of the self-mutilation. We are made quite aware of the horrific extremes that Ralston had to go to to save himself, which is only fair. The rest of the movie, though, lets us off easy, as Boyle's naturally invigorating style holds our hand through what should be a grueling experience. An example is the inclusion of Scooby-Doo in the film, thrown in because two girls that Ralston happens to meet in the canyons invite him to a party the following night with a huge inflatable Scooby-Doo: the first time the animated character appears in 127 Hours, it makes sense as a nagging vision of life's fleeting pleasures that are now unavailable to Ralston; the second time Scooby-Doo appears, it turns a horrific, demented sequence into a jokey prank, deflating the scene of the very real idea that Ralston is now facing his own mortality.

There's another huge, overarching problem in 127 Hours: it seems like the movie is supposed to be about how man's arrogant sense of his own superiority over nature can ruthlessly backfire on him. I haven't read the book on which the movie is based—Between a Rock and a Hard Place, written by Ralston himself—but it seems to entail a recognition that his foolhardy tackling of the extremes of nature, his cocky jaunt through a landscape that remains treacherous and indifferent to humanity, could have very easily killed him. The movie acknowledges this at times, too; it beautifully evokes the 15 minutes of sunlight that Ralston is granted each morning, as he stretches his left leg out into the light that cuts through the jagged canyon, his foot and shin basking in the warmth for a mockingly short period of time. It's as though nature is laughing at him for his arrogance: offering him a scant fraction of the light and warmth he could have experienced so easily, had he not thrust himself into this situation. It seems like the frenetic montages that open and close the movie, with modern businessmen and stockbrokers hustling down metropolitan streets in contrast to the solitude that Ralston will soon experience, is meant as a comment on our naïve assumption that humans can master everything that they come in contact with. (These montages are not at all infused into the fabric of the film, though, so they may just be two examples of Boyle's hollow restlessness.)

This criticism of man “dominating” nature is part of what the movie is about; but how does the film end? Of course Ralston survives, amid a victorious musical score (by A.R. Rahman) and swift editing (by Jon Harris) that turns Ralston into a triumphant victim. (That he may be, but by making the climax in this way, the film totally defuses any criticism it may have posed against its main character or against modern people in general.) Furthermore, after this climax, onscreen titles tell us that Ralston continues to climb mountains and explore canyons and now tells all of his loved ones where he is off to, which is a legitimate, true-to-life, and inspiring ending; but by emphasizing the inspirational aspects (the real-life Ralston also appears at the end with his wife and daughter) and eliminating the self-criticizing aspects, the movie leaves us with the idea that human beings really can conquer anything they confront, including nature, despite the billions of years that is has on us. This is totally antithetical to what the movie is at least partially about. 127 Hours tries to tell us that, by stubbornly believing we can trump any harsh landscape around us and, in fact, proving it, humans are practically invincible.

These problems aside, 127 Hours is still intense, exciting (to a fault), and complex. It is certainly better than Boyle's previous film, Slumdog Millionaire, although I'm one of the few people who thinks that most movies made over the last two years are better than Slumdog Millionaire.

Neither Black Swan, The Fighter, nor 127 Hours are great; I would be disappointed to see any of them on my top ten list at the end of the year. Here's hoping that the upcoming end-of-the-year releases will indeed be some of the best of the year, and that some of the highlights that I've missed will trump most of these award-garnering critics'-best-of candidates in terms of creativity, sophistication, complexity, and beauty.



A final note: you may already know about the recent court decision in Tehran that has imprisoned one of international cinema's foremost modern directors. Jafar Panahi—the director of The Circle, Crimson Gold, and Offside, three of the most beautiful, humane, and passionate films made anywhere over the last decade—has been jailed (along with many other Iranian filmmakers, writers, and artists who have commented upon the current state of affairs in their home country) for purported sentiments against the state. (This, despite the fact that Panahi's newest project is only 30 percent shot, and has not yet been edited.) Panahi has been sentenced to six years of imprisonment, accompanied by a ban of twenty years from writing and making films, giving interviews for the press, leaving Iran, or communicating with foreign cultural organizations. For any artist, such a harsh ruling meant to suppress one's personal creative voice would be a travesty; it is especially tragic in the case of Panahi, for it will deprive us of one of modern movies' most sincere and powerful voices.

If you'd like to sign a petition calling for the release of Panahi, here is a link to an online petition that has just been posted by almost twenty international cultural organizations in tandem: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/solidarite-jafar-panahi/. Watching Offside again certainly isn't a poor form of tribute either.

A Face in the Dark

Below is the first chapter of some new fiction I'm working on. It may end up being a long short story or a short novel or something in between—not quite sure yet. Subsequent chapter(s) will be posted before too long.


Chapter one 'an uptown linoleum box'

In the waiting room I stood, stretching my legs after ninety minutes of crooking them up underneath me at jagged angles. The tiled floor was a paisley green, and it clacked with an unsettling echo any time someone's shoe flitted across it. It smelled like a hospital. Like chemicals and like sterilized death. My nostrils puckered from the stench. You could hear oppressive buzzes and hums from every direction: the fatigued breathing of an overworked air conditioner; the muffled broadcasting of a news program on the television suspended, hovering, from the corner of the ceiling, that no one was watching; the steady cyclical movement of wheels of carts being guided through the hallways; the flickerings of fluorescent lights casting a strobe-light illumination onto ailing bodies; distant conversations, hushed worries, solemn and dire diagnoses. Waiting rooms facilitate exactly that: waiting, worrying, mindless prolongation. No respite. Orange plastic folding chairs. The thick air of intense sadness. It's hard to move through it. It feels like a muddy haze.

I paced back and forth, slowly but anxiously. That made it worse. I glanced at the three other people waiting there, careful to avoid their glance. I did not want to connect with them, didn't want to convey a look of pity, a look that said I'm here for you, I know what you're going through. That sympathy would not have alleviated my distress. It would have amplified it, solidified it. If I had seen the same look of pain in their eyes, I would have become aware that my plight was not a cruel affliction meant for me alone, but was a simple and merciless fact of humanity. That pain, that cruelty—I wanted to feel like it was directed at me for some unknown and overwhelming wrong that I had done. To know that it was, in reality, directed at many people at many times as a simple derivation of their being on this earth—that would have been too much to handle. Too cold, too harsh. So I did not look at them with any sort of interest or compassion, I only knew they were there. They did the same thing for me—benevolent antipathy.

It was night, late. Almost midnight. The waiting room was on the fourth floor of the hospital, and the dim yellow glow of streetlights was filtering through the smudgy windows. The hospital was located in a decent part of town, in the business district, protruding from a thicket of towering skyscrapers that housed banking firms, advertising agencies, real estate companies, conglomerates and oligopolies. Near the corner of 92nd and Lexington, far from where we lived. The walk across town had been torturous, each step thudded in my brain, punctuating uncertainty and dread. But the hospital was across the street from where my wife worked, at a consulting firm that served as a last resort for floundering businesses not yet willing to declare bankruptcy. She—Lena—my wife—would leaf through ledgers and profit reports and performance charts, endless sheaths of business minutiae provided by executives and accountants with worry painted on their faces. She would review the information and provide advice for the slow and painful return to financial stability. Sometimes there was no hope of recovery. Ruin was inevitable for some; some of them had no hope of pulling themselves out of debt and failure, and my wife would have the unpleasant obligation of telling anxious businessmen that, yes, perhaps it would be better to declare bankruptcy after all. That there are second chances. Failure is not permanent. She worked late that night. Her eyes were strained and her fingers numb from clutching writing instruments all night. She knew I was at home, probably asleep on the couch already, and that cold, sticky leftover Chinese food was waiting for her in the fridge. She was in the hospital before the end of the night.

The windows in the fourth floor waiting room of the hospital did not look onto a glittering nighttime view of the city, shimmering in the dark. I, we, were surrounded by the nocturnal vibrancy of the city, but out of the windows we could see no headlights swooping down busy streets, no grid-like patterns of fluorescent lights still on in the offices of diligent workers high above, no neon signs or streetlights reflected on black pavement. Instead our view was of a brick wall across a narrow alleyway. Shabby and sickly and depressing, just like the rest of the place. I surmised that the layout of the hospital must have been planned meticulously so that the waiting room would offer us this disheartening view. So I continued to pace and kept my glance down towards my feet, which were now moving of their own accord.

I had, in fact, been asleep on the couch when I got the call. Above the low muttering of the forgettable cop show that I had disinterestedly left on the television, the shrill scream of the phone snapped me awake. I answered groggily, expecting it to be Lena, telling me not to wait up, that it would be another late night. Even when I processed the frenetic sounds of the emergency room filtering over the phone, I still didn't shift into panic mode—half-asleep, I listened but didn't really hear. They said my name, inquiringly, the soft voice of a woman who sounded businesslike but compassionate. “Michael Davenport?” I grunted yes. “We're sorry to say your wife's had an accident.” Half a second later I shook my head vigorously as the words seeped in. All other noise dropped out, my brain hit some selective mute button. I said nothing, waited for her, my bearer of bad news, to continue. She didn't, and I felt obligated to respond. “Yes?,” I said. “She's at Mercer Hospital. Please come right away.” Her words were hurried, and I wondered, much later, how many times she had had to say the same words to people like me that night, and on similar nights beforehand. And innumerable nights afterward. The gravity of what she was saying was starting to take effect on me. Her words came in through the ear, hovered somewhere in my brain for a moment, then plummeted sickeningly to the deepest recesses of my gut as though I swallowed them with a gulp. And there they stayed, expanding, nauseating.

“What happened?,” I said finally, dreading the answer.

“A car accident. Hit and run. I'm very sorry, Mr. Davenport.”

I exhaled somberly, a mix between a sigh and a grunt. I stared off into space but saw nothing. Things seemed at once unreal and viciously hyperreal; I knew I was not dreaming, but everything at once took on an alien and awful demeanor. The quiet sounds of the cop show emanated from the television, but they may as well have been a mysterious transmission from another world, buried in static and emitting a diabolical message. I moved at once, my legs stiffened and I rose from the couch. I could feel my body move but I felt as though I was not controlling it—as though I was on the end of a puppeteer's strings. I mechanically threw on some shoes and a hooded sweatshirt, ratty and unwashed, that I had thrown on our bedroom floor earlier that day. I left.

The night air was cold and bitter, but I welcomed it as soon as I stepped outside. It dulled my sensations. It allowed my terrible dread and horror to commingle with more immediate, physical thoughts—walking briskly, exhaling condensation, shivering with my hands in my pockets. I wondered for a second if I should take the subway to 92nd and Lexington, since the walk would take at least twenty minutes, probably thirty. But the thought of confining myself to that steel coffin of a subway car, with nothing to do but imagine my wife's agony, was too much for me to bear. Besides, in my present state of mind I felt that I could superhumanly outpace a subway car, that my sheer desperation would impel me to cross the city in half the time I normally would. So I picked up the pace and walked uptown. I got to the hospital in a little over twenty minutes. I walked up to the reception desk. The attendant there had the phone crooked between her cheek and her shoulder, and was flipping through a binder briskly. I rudely ignored her current task and said—declaratively, not inquisitively—“Lena Davenport.” She raised her eyes towards me, bore a 'not now' stare directly into my eyes for a half second, then returned her glance to the papers before her. I dug my fingernails into my palms in my pockets. From behind her, another attendant approached the counter and leaned his head towards me. “Who are you looking for?,” he asked. I answered. He said she was still in the emergency room, they were doing all they could, I would have to wait, they would let me know. He told me that she was on the fourth floor; I could take the elevator up, exit and take a right, the waiting room was at the end of the hallway. His eyes were empathetic, but his voice was cold.

Last night was a rare thing: a night when Lena got home before me. At half past five her final consultation was finished—she had finished giving hope to a group of executives whose passions had disintegrated despite all of their diligence. She had reviewed the ledgers and was sincere in her reassurances: with some shrewd financial maneuverings and some corporate backpedaling, there was hope for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance after all. Consolidated Metropolitan had ascended to a problematic middle plateau in the insurance industry. What had begun as an operation ran out of an escrowed three-story Colonial-style house just north of the city, attended to by six agents who predicated themselves on a neighborly sense of trust and decency, had meteorically grown to become one of the most profitable insurance companies in the northeastern United States. It had become so profitable, in fact, that increasingly, foreign parties who dealt a considerable hand in the New York Stock Exchange had approached CMI with dubious intimations of partnerships that might behoove the company financially—to be more precise, well-dressed and well-mannered stockbrokers, idly discussing the ease with which stock bids may be disguised (or, perhaps, smothered) within the complex logistics of insurance accounting. The six agents who had built Consolidated Metropolitan into a mid-level empire were also wise; they knew the internecine nature of modern finance well, and in addition were astute judges of character (an apt quality for insurers). They knew, then, that the powerful gentlemen from the Morrow & Hemmings Company who ushered them into the city's most prestigious penthouse bars, nonchalantly sliding crystal glasses of expensive aged brandy across red oak tables, were proposing financial felonies that could not only place CMI's investors and clients in destitution (of more than a merely monetary sort), but could also misrepresent the company's financial holdings so irreparably that there could eventually be, in place of actual money, only a gaping scribbled-upon ledger page of distorted numbers and meaningless dollar signs. So CMI initially resisted the advances of Morrow & Hemmings, and even operated under the stubborn and outdated assumption that its obligations were to the people who had purchased policies under them. But inevitably the wisdom of CMI's board members commingled with a clear-eyed and realistic truth: the company was failing, primarily because, unlike the majority of equally powerful insurance companies who dominated the Eastern metropolises, CMI could not rely upon its allegiances with federal banking institutions and top-level financiers to bolster its earnings through misappropriation and “creative” investments. And as often happens, wisdom ultimately leans in favor of self-preservation; the end—survival—is shrewdly ascertained to justify the means; and the arrival of a clever financial panacea, deus ex machina like, is grasped in favor of impending ruin. But CMI's temporary solution to its dire financial straits caught up with itself less than a year later. The snake had coiled around itself and was chomping feverishly at its own tail. The company's year-end reports listed premium revenues from the previous three quarters which, any perspicacious accountant could tell you, were actually loans extended by CMI's pecuniary bedfellows—loans that now needed repayment. Furthermore, stockbroking advice proffered by Morrow & Hemmings as doubtlessly profitable (for some at Morrow & Hemmings claimed to have an uncanny prescience in regard to certain economic developments) turned out to be remarkably foolhardy, deepening the hole that Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance had flung itself into. The symbiotic relationship between CMI and Morrow & Hemmings had morphed into a parasitic one; the latter made a small killing on investment fees. Lena Davenport of Perpetua Financial Consulting waited upon the board members of CMI patiently and with open ears. She heard their story of victimization (and slight, intermittent, yet shameful self-reproach) sympathetically, and her sympathy was sincere. This same story had been told, with hardly any variation, throughout the year by several other similarly exploited corporations—its pattern of meteoric success, tragic overconfidence, and weary resignation had taken on the vagaries of cliche—but every time it was told to Lena by the people who had found themselves immersed in it, it assumed a new sense of tragedy, and struck her with a whole new wave of ghastly horror. Their meeting was supposed to have ended at 4:30. It was extended an hour. The level of desperate but impassioned diligence among them all steamrolled until it was too intense to be interrupted.

It was winter, so the sky was a dark gray by the time Lena stepped outside—the dourest moments before dusk. She got coffee from the Starbucks next door—her habit that I loved, she never drank coffee in the morning, only at night, never decaf. She was energized by the meeting she had just had, and the burgeoning optimism of the six board members was infectious. She called me, expecting me to be home, hoping to tell me that we were going out for dinner tonight, for once we would have time for a long, lazy night, glasses of wine drunk as slowly as we wanted, a long drunken walk afterwards, not sleeping til two in the morning, clothes left on the floor. But I wasn't home. It had been a long day for me, too. There had recently been a rash of burglaries on the Upper East Side. The targets were remarkable only in their mundaneness: no jewelry stores or bank vaults, mostly department stores and pawn shops and convenience stores. But this glut of seemingly spontaneous robberies appeared to be the work of the same individual, judging from the fact that, in each instance, the poor soul stuck behind the cash register was found dead, felled by a point-blank gunshot to the head. Same weapon, judging from the bullets' striations. The murders struck me more deeply than I had anticipated they would, especially since I had handled about a half-dozen similar robberies-gone-wrong during my three years as a plainclothesman. But these were different. Security videos at two of the sites (the only two, out of five, that had functioning security cameras that actually detailed a comprehensive view of the location) displayed that, in fact, nothing had gone wrong with these particular robberies. A man of average height, in each of these two instances, had apparently targeted locations that were clear of all customers: at 8:48pm, mere minutes before closing, a trendy clothing store whose walls were lined with full-length mirrors had been struck; and, four days later, a pawnshop fortified with rusty metallic grating and dusty black walls witnessed its owner's death at 10:10am, barely after the front doors had been unlocked. The culprit wore a dark ski mask and thick winter gloves. The cashiers were compliant in each case, wasting no time, handing over the cash instantaneously; yet each time, this man unhesitatingly fired at them only a moment after receiving the money, then brusquely stormed out the front door, thrusting the cash impatiently into his pocket. The amount of money was insubstantial in each case, particularly with the pawnshop, which had not yet made a single sale. One could only conclude, then, that money was not the motivation; burglary may have been a secondary boon, it may even have been carried out from a sense of grim and absurd obligation, but the real impetus here, it seemed clear, was to take lives. This is what haunted me. Robbery was a rational crime—tragic, foolish, but rational, a means to an end, a shortcut to survival. Human. Explicable. But petty amounts of cash accompanying cold brutality could not be explained by human necessity, by cause-and-effect patterns. It made no sense. Something more evasive, more troubling, was at play.

I was wholly wrapped up in the investigation until 10:30 last night. I didn't even listen to Lena's message until half past eight; when I called her, she had already had pizza delivered and was reading a trashy thriller. She said she understood, that there would be half of a cold leftover pizza waiting for me at home, and that she would struggle to stay awake until I came back. Her voice sounded soothing, tired, tender, and painfully sweet. I ached to be home. “I love you, Mike. See you soon,” she said. “Love you. I'll be home as soon I can,” I promised. I hung up; I went back to poring over a list of every Springfield .45 ACP pistol that had been purchased in the city over the last two years. I felt schizophrenic, my head ached. An outdated map was crumpled at the corner of my desk, scribbled with notations where the murders had taken place. I rubbed my eyes, pushing roughly, forcing myself to feel a tinge of pain. I concentrated on the patterns, trying to discern some sinister method, until a pulsating ache directly between my eyes became debilitating.

I did not return home until almost midnight. Lena hadn't been able to stay awake; her head was arched backwards over the edge of the couch, her mouth formed a small open ring and she snored gently, the paperback she had been reading was still resting lightly between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. For a moment I hated myself for being unable to come home at a reasonable time, unable to be with her that night. But she looked so calm, so untroubled, lying there that I was also comforted by the sight. Seeing her sleeping on the couch singlehandedly upturned the foul, morbid mood that the night's work had put me in, and I smiled wearily. I kissed her lightly but didn't wake her. I knew she liked sleeping on the couch every once in a while, and as much as I wanted to talk to her—say anything to her, even a single thing—it felt inhumane to rouse her awake. I sat on the other end of the couch, resting her feet in my lap. I fell asleep there too, in what felt like less than a minute. Two hours later I felt her hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake; half-asleep, I felt her lips on mine and I smiled. I was sweaty and my neck was sore, but mostly I felt a disoriented, dreamy happiness. Wordlessly, we stumbled to the bedroom and collapsed on top of the covers. My tie had been loosened but it still sagged, disheveled, around my neck. Her arm rested lightly across my back, and I quietly relished the feeling of it rising and falling with each breath. We fell asleep again, quickly, after eyeing each other for a few quiet minutes.

I always awoke earlier than Lena, usually around five-thirty. I liked to stop at a diner halfway to the precinct, around 70th and Virginia, sip two cups of coffee and pick at a greasy pile of eggs while I read the Times. (Newspapers give you such a comforting and misleading sense of certainty; they contain no ambiguity—the world, it seems, is explained within.) I was hurrying out of the front door a little after six, when Lena was still stretching herself awake, having been awoken by the pounding of steaming shower water. I leaned over her as I tightened my tie, she was spread out lazily on the bed. Kissed the back of her neck and leaned my lips close to her ear. “Bye. Have a good day.” She smiled and arched her head backwards, towards mine. “You too. Love you.” I kissed her then on the lips for the last time, first briefly, then a long and surreptitious kiss, as though I knew I had to make it count. “Me too. Let's go out tonight.” She mumbled an assent and collapsed back into her pillow. I left.

In the hospital eighteen hours later, I was dragging my shoes roughly over the tile floor of the waiting room. At first I didn't realize how despondently I was shuffling my feet as I walked; then it became an experiment, seeing how little I could raise my step as I moved. I lifted my glance towards the view out of the fingerprint-smeared window, but the scene that greeted me was the same as before—a wall of brick, black rusted fire escapes, unlit windows. Five minutes later I heard steps approaching and then coming to a halt a few feet behind me, but I still didn't turn around. It wasn't until a husky, tired voice said “Mr. Davenport?” that I did an about-face and stepped wearily towards a short woman draped in a white coat with frizzy, unkempt hair, banded together hastily into a ponytail.

“Yes?”

I came up close to her, and then she took a few steps towards an empty hallway, distancing us from the other people in the waiting room. She gently touched my arm as she stepped away, gesturing that I should walk with her. A few steps into the drab, pale hallway, she continued, lowering her voice to an ached whisper.

“Did the reception desk tell you at all what happened?”

“Kind of. Not really. They said it was a car accident, a hit and run.”

She nodded. “Your wife was struck by a car directly outside of the hospital. She was rushed in immediately. Lena”—she said her name as she exhaled protractedly—“unfortunately sustained severe internal damage during the accident. We've been operating for hours to relieve the bleeding. Mr. Davenport, we've done all we could, but her injuries were simply too severe. She passed a few minutes ago. I'm so sorry.”

She said some other things, reassurances, mouth open and sounds emitted they fluttered past my ear. I became aware of myself standing rigid unmoving. My bones had become petrified. I looked at her and through her at a pale wall of whiteblue tile. Her fiftyeight words from a moment ago replayed overandover again endlessly on a broken loop in my brain. The needle was skipping and the crackle was painful, fiftyeight words telling me my wife was dead the doctor touched my arm fingernails through fabric saying maybe I should have a seat was I okay?. No images of Lena were projected by the flicker of my brain, light on the inside of my eyelids. No montage of memories, only fiftyeight words on a loop and the visual accompaniment of nauseating carcinogenic electric lights in a hospital hallway that was pale whiteblue smudged insulated with death. I didn't want a seat but my knees bent and my legs moved backwards. My back touched the wall and I leant against it. I didn't cry but I wanted to. There was too much pain in and behind my eyes for the saltwater to formulate. Let's go out tonight. The marionette pulling my strings must have been furious because he jerked all of them at the same time with one fistclenched tug, so rough and unexpected that I really think my skin should have soared upwards and my innards should have suspended there confused just because they didn't want to flop upon the dirty floor. The doctor said something again, not once but a couple times I don't know how many. Eventually the words became sequential and made a certain bland sense. “Is there anything you'd like to say to her? You can have a moment.”

After I nodded yes, I didn't know what I wanted to say to Lena or what my goodbye would sound like because there were too many jagged words tumbling around upstairs. The doctor ushered me through three hallways, all pale whiteblue, until we came to two thick-swinging grayish doors that declared emergency and that word seemed more alien yet somehow more appropriate to me now than it ever had before. The room was empty when we entered. It was saturated with a sick, dense, and noxious green color that I had never seen before, I suppose because no one so close to me had ever died before, so unexpectedly. I hope you have never seen that color before. It manifests itself only at such times. A body was lying prostrate on the emergency room table. A sheet covered it now as we entered but I could clearly make out the contours of my wife lying underneath it, and I could barely stand to look at it. The white of the linen sheet draped over her was astoundingly bright, contrasted with the sickening and muggy green that hovered throughout the rest of the room. The actuality of her death started to come to me now, the physicality of it, its tangibility. I had to cover my mouth with the back of my sweaty arm, whether to keep myself from exclaiming painfully or from throwing up, I don't know. The doctor looked from Lena to me, and back again, and shuffled carefully backwards towards the door. “I'll give you a minute,” she said, and stepped outside of the room. I was somehow able to lift my left foot, move it forward a couple of feet, and set it down again, even though something immense and inextricable suddenly seemed chained to my legs. I repeated the same motion with my right foot, then the left again, until I was standing next to Lena's body. I couldn't take my eyes from the peaks and valleys where her face came up to the sheet underneath; I still, out of stubborn desperation, expected it to stir slightly, to move somehow. I waited for minutes, but it didn't. I said some words to her quietly, within myself—I don't know what the words were now, and maybe I didn't know then. They just uttered themselves instead of me conceiving of them. She heard them. I held out my hand towards her and left it hovering over her right arm. I wondered if I should feel her skin, through the fabric, one last time, simply as a parting touch, but after debating this for long and painful moments I harshly told myself that she wasn't here anymore, that this body before me, shrouded in white, was not where my wife was now. I pulled back my hand decisively. My last touch of her, I reminded myself, would be the kiss I had given her the previous morning, when she was still mostly asleep; and this thought comforted me slightly, slightly.

How did I see her now, my wife? No distinct memories came flooding back to me. I saw a vivid still image of her instead, a snapshot that came to me from some unknown repository of images. In this fantasy that came to me now, she was walking through a path in the forest that had recently experienced its first snowfall of the year. There was a white and crisp dusting of wetness and coldness on the ground, though the messily forged trail was mixed with gray slush and dark mud from the feet of unknown hikers. The black skeletal spires of the trees poked through the thin snow and reached upwards into the gray sky; they had lost their leaves already, so it was only the black limbs of bark that spread out, weblike, in all directions. This was an image of winter that I loved and found beautiful, though it was gray and cold and wet; this was the quiet scenery that comforted me when I was young. In the scene that played out now in my mind, Lena was walking about twenty feet in front of me, and I was happy simply to trail behind her, to take in her movements and relish them. I knew she was smiling though I could only see her black hair swinging rhythmically behind her. I didn't know where these woods were, and I know I never could have been there with Lena (we had found it increasingly difficult to leave the city over the last several years), so this scene came to me like a hallucination, or better yet, a flash-forward—I was somehow convinced that this very image was one I had yet to experience in an impossible future. At the same time that this wistful certainty comforted me, it also struck me with a wretched immediacy that Lena was no longer available to me. We couldn't whisk ourselves away to some hidden refuge now, if we wanted. My refuge now would be solitary. It was a strange comfort that this blissful illusion came to me now instead of a memory or, even worse, overwhelming blackness, a void; but the image also seemed to mock me, as though reminding me that every time I would see Lena from now on, it would be an illusion.

I don't know how long I stood by Lena's body in the emergency room, hands clammy at my sides, wanting to touch her but being unable to bring myself to do so, and walking behind her on a snowy trail that didn't exist. It felt like half an eternity, but it couldn't have been very long. The doctor came back in as quietly as possible, and it sounded like she tiptoed up to me in a few swift steps. She lightly placed her hand on my shoulder and asked if I needed anything, I suppose as a way of suggesting that it was time for me to leave Lena. I told her no, I didn't need anything. She ushered me to a desk that was down two hallways on the fourth floor, where I was given a small sheath of paperwork to fill out. I was given a blue plastic Bic pen and it was suggested that I fill out the papers in a nearby waiting room. The papers were affixed to a clipboard that sat heavily on my lap. A smattering of black lines and characters stared back at me from the whiteness. It took me an inordinately long time to complete the paperwork that had been given to me, since I had to struggle with each new shape to decipher what the characters were supposed to mean. They were wholly abstract, they meant nothing to me—the curves of an S, the right angles of an E, I couldn't care less what the designs were supposed to denote. But somehow eventually I filled out the forms. The insurance policy. Death certificate. Pamphlets about funeral services, cemeteries and graves. Even now it seemed ludicrous to me that these papers were being held in my hands—what did I have to do with them?

I completed the forms and returned them to the nurse at the desk, who was typing away frantically. She raised her eyes disinterestedly to me, and then, remembering who I was, and what had happened, her harried demeanor softened and she gave me one of those sympathetic half-smiles that I had already received several times that night. She cursorily checked over the information on the paperwork, thanked me and said there was nothing else I needed to do, I could go home if I wished. I nodded and smiled, it was all I could bring myself to do. But I didn't want to go home, and even though the heavy pale greenness of the hospital was beginning to suffocate and sicken me, I didn't particularly want to go anywhere. My feet moved of their own accord, but I simply did an about-face and roamed aimlessly down a nearby hallway. What was one to do? Where was one to go upon departing from a hospital in which one's wife has just died? Any answer seemed paltry and ridiculous. I just walked.

Eventually I found myself at a bank of windows that looked out over Lexington Avenue. It had gotten late, about half past one in the morning, without me even realizing it; time, for a bizarre interval, had both dragged on interminably and rushed past me in a blur. The sidewalk four stories below, however, had begun to take on renewed life with the barhoppers and drinkers who were stumbling through swinging glass doors as closing time approached. Taxis began to congregate at curbsides, blocks of yellow that seemed to organize themselves according to some pre-arranged plan, like automatons. I stared at the life below, blankly. I wondered whether I should simply wander around outside, busy my thoughts with the immediate and physical task of moving my legs, just to do something. The cold air would do me good; I could quite conceivably simply walk the time away for several hours, start work early, five in the morning, occupy my time and my thoughts. I was about to turn away and stumble down the staircase to the exit doors. I raised my head and took in the towering building that was directly across the street from the hospital. It was now mostly dark, save for a few rectangles of dim light emanating from the offices of overachieving workers. I glanced at these few remaining occupied offices and wondered about the people inside—did they care about the job that had them working until the early hours of the morning, did they have someone at home who was either struggling to stay awake for them or had given in to sleep and would see them tomorrow? It was only then that I realized, with a mixture of self-reproach and painful longing, that it was the office building in which Lena had worked—Perpetua Financial Consulting was located on the eighth floor. I counted eight rows up from the revolving doors at street level, and tried to determine which darkened office was Lena's. I thought back, with stinging preciseness, to the times that I had visited her at work, and seemed to remember that her office was located approximately halfway down the hallway that faced Lexington Avenue. I remembered her office number: 817D. I skimmed over the row of dark windows until I landed upon where I thought her office was.

I felt a slight and confused surprise when I realized that the lights were still on in this office approximately in the middle of the bank of windows. Lena's office. Surprise, then astonishment.

There was a man in the office. He was standing as I was: only inches away from the window, facing outward, hands in pockets, legs spread slightly. He was casting his gaze out at the world, and it seemed to me he was overseeing it tyrannically. In that moment, it didn't even occur to me to question his being in Lena's office so late—the illogic didn't occur to me. I was struck only by the power of the sight, by the harshness of his presence.

Only a few seconds after taking in this dark vision did I realize, with a debilitating shudder, that he was returning my stare. As my head was inclined upwards, taking him in, his was arched downwards, his stare penetrating through the two banks of windows and burrowing directly into my eyes. Did I imagine this? This cruelest of coincidences? The longer I questioned this occurrence and realized the absurdity of it, the longer I took in the vision across the street from me, and the more incontrovertible was its actuality, the more irrefutable was its presence. And worst of all—worse than his being in Lena's office, worse than his inextricable stare returning mine, worse than this image following my wife's death like the cruelest questionmark—was the man's face, which I now could not avert my glance from.

I saw this face. A horrible face. Like nothing I had ever seen before.

One Twenty Fourth: An Affair to Remember

I finally saw Leo McCarey's half-silly, half-sophisticated An Affair to Remember (1957) last night, and aside from the troupe of plucky multicultural youths who regale a bedridden Deborah Kerr with shrill holiday songs, the thing that stands out most is the movie's use of offscreen space. Examples abound throughout the film. Significantly, the artworks painted by Cary Grant's character, impetuous lothario Nickie Ferrante, are never seen directly onscreen: we receive only glimpses of them cut off by the edge of the frame, and even when we catch sight of the most narratively crucial painting (which finally reveals to Ferrante how the titular affair was impeded), we only see it reflected in a mirror as the camera pans slightly, subtly to the right. The death of a major character takes place entirely offscreen, and the accident that cruelly injures Deborah Kerr's character is suggested only by Kerr racing offscreen to the right, followed by a screech of tires and a plethora of screams on the soundtrack. There are actually several considerable pleasures that the movie offers—among them Kerr's and Grant's heavily-improvised rapport, which does seem remarkably different from the scripted banter that characters in romantic comedies from the 1950s were too often forced to recite—but this suggestive use of offscreen space may be McCarey's and cinematographer Milton Krasner's finest achievement with An Affair to Remember.

While the canny use of offscreen space could simply be passed off as a concession to censors at the time (the more carnal aspects of the affair of course could not be depicted onscreen, nor could the movie's most violent moments), it in fact ties in closely to the emotional states of the two main characters. For them—or, at least, for Kerr's character, an aspiring singer engaged to a prominent businessman—tact and a sense of domestic obligation are primary concerns. Though both characters are engaged to other people when they first meet, it is Kerr's singer, Terry McKay, who initially resists Ferrante's advances, unwilling to betray her fiance's trust. And although Ferrante is a notorious playboy who, though engaged to one of the richest heiresses in the United States, flirts unabashedly with beautiful women, he tries to keep these romantic conquests out of the public eye, maintaining a show of marital fidelity that practically everyone knows is a sham. So both characters, unable to resist their attraction to each other, still hope to keep their relationship “offscreen”—hidden away from the voyeurs around them, the public audience.

Which brings us to the still on which I'd like to focus (placed above): the moment at which Ferrante and McKay consummate their affair (sweetly, innocently), with a kiss. We don't see this kiss: on the deck of a cruise ship, the two characters begin to descend a staircase, only to retreat a few steps and pose mid-embrace. Ferrante's left leg hovers diagonally as he leans in; McKay's right arm rests at the same angle on the railing; the beams and angles of the ship provide an almost-abstract backdrop, and the lightbulb burns behind them suggestively; a lifeboat is suspended behind them, suggesting both the refuge that their affair currently offers them and foreshadowing the extent to which their affair will capsize. Throughout their kiss, the camera—which, throughout much of the movie, tracks and pans gracefully through the scene to accommodate the movements of characters (practically any shot set at the Italian villa of Ferrante's grandmother is a perfect example of this)—is here resolutely static. Even within the context of the film, then, the moment is a still image: the romance between Ferrante and McKay, which beforehand had been rushing forward so swooningly and irresistibly, now halts itself in mid-motion for that sublime first kiss.

Aside from its narrative and symbolic significance—or, to refer to the Barthes article which inspired this series of analyses of stills, the first and second meanings—this image strikes me for several reasons (“obtuse” reasons, Barthes might say). I briefly mentioned a few of them above: the architecture of the ship, which looks fairly artificial but somehow more beautiful because of it, in that distinct Golden Age of Hollywood way; the sweet and intimate way that both Kerr's and Grant's bodies are angled parallel to each other; the contrast of the single lit bulb against a void of blackness.

But this still may be especially striking in the way that it is placed along An Affair to Remember's “diegetic horizon,” reflecting, playing off of, and foreshadowing what has come before it/will come after it. For example, immediately after this moment in the film, Ferrante and McKay decide to act completely platonically aboard the ship, greeting each other as they pass by in the manner of aloof, cold acquaintances, in order to keep their affair from the other passengers on the ship and conceal their infidelity. One such exchange takes place on this very same stairway (or one exactly like it). McKay stands in the middle of the stairway, slightly below her position in the above still, as Ferrante dizzyingly wanders around the stairway below her, wanting to talk to her but unwilling to get too close while other passengers are around. While the above still is about stasis, about time standing still while lovers embrace, this subsequent scene is all about movement, anxiety, desire, uncertainty. The first is romantic, darkly (but evenly) lit, and takes place primarily offscreen; the second is farcical, bright, and plays out in full view before us. Both scenes take on added effect when we compare them to each other, and while the effect of the second scene could not really be approximated in a still image, the effect of the first is neatly encapsulated by the still I have included above.

In “The Third Meaning,” Barthes claims that the obtuse or third meaning of film stills is, to an extent, counter-narrative: “disseminated, reversible, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences, and syntagms (technical or narrative)—an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'” What does this mean for the still above? How is its temporality different from that of the image as it is placed within the context of An Affair to Remember, as a moving film? In some ways, the temporalities are similar—stasis, stillness—but in some ways, it is true, they are different. As we see this still now, here, outside of the movie, we have bodies that are placed in a pleasing graphic alignment; the emotion of the interaction as it exists in the still may be confrontational or intimate or awkward. The power of the image is really only discernible when placed within the context of the film, when it is suspended or “stilled” in the midst of many other rapidly moving images. But in this particular case, it is powerful precisely because of its stillness. This, in fact, would (it seems) entirely correspond to Barthes' claim that the still is “a fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment; film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is on top of the other or that one is extracted from the other” (his emphasis).

But maybe the still is most powerful because it disrupts the phenomenon of cinematic time so completely. The temporality of cinematic images is incorruptible: they are projected at twenty-four frames per second (in most theaters, anyway; I'm going to brush off the existence of 16fps or 32fps projection speeds for now) in order to maintain persistence of vision, so whether or not the images are in slow-, fast-, or “real-time” motion, they operate according to their own rules. Not so of the still, which operates at one frame per...minute? Hour? Eternity? So the still above somewhat benevolently allows Ferrante and McKay to indulge in their kiss without any obstacle or interruption, basically forever. If, however, we wanted to cruelly overtake their lives, we could capture a film still at the moment later in the film in which Ferrante and McKay meet in the audience after a show, wanting to speak volumes but able only to utter “hello,” still burning from desire, but also now from anger and confusion and desperation. Now forced to live out these combustible emotions for an eternity, Ferrante and McKay would be imprisoned in a film still that would not benefit (nor would it suffer) from the sweetness that preceded it nor the reconciliation that followed.

One Twenty Fourth: The Third Meaning

In his essay “The Third Meaning,” cultural theorist Roland Barthes—maybe the man who has written most compellingly about the ways in which we receive visual media—conceives of three levels of signification shared by all film images. The first two of these meanings make logical sense: they encompass the predominant ways in which audiences usually process the flow of images projected before them. According to Barthes, the first meaning represents an informational or communicational level: the image(s) offer information about the setting in which we're currently situated, about the characters within that setting, about the situation or series of events that is currently playing out onscreen, and so forth. This first meaning is narratively significant, then, but it's also sensorial: the images tell us what's going on, but they also signify simply where we are, how things look, observing scenes and scenery as they pass before the camera. The second level in Barthes' schema is a metaphorical or symbolic level, in which distinct images may represent larger, theoretical ideas with which the film is preoccupied. In his essay, Barthes is analyzing a series of still images from Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible; as an example of his second meaning, he cites an image from that film in which a shower of gold rains down upon a character, conveying not only a narrative event within the setting, but also one of the film's broader metaphorical conceits—that greed can literally overwhelm and suffocate human beings. The second meaning still communicates information, then, but of an implied, symbolic sort. When we watch, process, respond to, and evaluate cinema, it is usually according to these first two meanings that we operate—narrative, aesthetic beauty, metaphorical meaning and theme.

But Barthes' third meaning may be his most fascinating, and it's the category with which his essay is predominantly concerned (as the title makes clear). We watch the images within a film, flowing before us, and something strikes us, something uncanny, whose meaning cannot be so easily discerned. These are small but significant visual features that do not convey narrative or symbolic information, but still do contribute to the overall visual fabric of the film. A flicker of light reflected off of water; the contrast of a red shirt against a pale blue wall; a bizarre-looking extra who happens to stroll through the background of a street scene; the worn texture of a wooden table, a blatantly artificial prop, the toothpick that dangles precariously from Bogie's mouth—these are things that add to your movie-watching experience, but on a level of signification, they don't really mean anything.

This third meaning—which Barthes also, importantly, labels the “obtuse meaning”—is something that seems to extend outside of culture or knowledge or information. It is what it is: it's pleasing quite purely in the way that it looks. It is something that can only be achieved by the visual media—in other words, by something non-real—but its appeal is broader than mere artifice; these cinematic images are real, in the sense that we see them, respond to them, love them. In the fissures and cracks of the filmic image, when we realize that pictures on film are indeed unique in a limitless number of ways, the transfixing real-unreal rift by which cinema operates becomes quite clear. This is what the third meaning is about: realizing that these images are illusions, and becoming simultaneously enraptured by how immersive, striking, and real they are.

Barthes then arrives at a paradox of sorts, which is the heart of the matter, as far as I'm concerned: this third meaning is so alluring, Barthes writes, because it is purely cinematic, a pleasure that can only be derived from the act of watching film. In other words, we can adequately relate in words what a film's story is or why it is told well or how it conveys its themes intelligently, but we can not really explain the third meaning in words; it is entirely visual. At the same time, however, Barthes declares outright that the “third meaning” can really only be gleaned from a film still, not from motion pictures—only when we halt the ceaseless flow of celluloid, breaking down persistence of vision into its fragments of one-twenty-fourths of a second, can the third meaning be discovered. The “specific filmic,” Barthes writes, lies in this third meaning “that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume since they lack the diegetic horizon.” What he seems to suggest here is that the essence of the film is not in visual movement but in suddenly arresting that movement, defining a still image by its context within the diegesis—what comes before and after it. By revealing the machinery by which cinema operates, we can parse out its essence.

This does indeed run counter to what most theorists claimed at the birth of cinema, and even what many critics and theorists continue to believe (and which I've always believed): that film is distinct because it's the only art form that catalyzes visual media into motion. (Digital moviemaking is thus included in the broad rubric of “film,” even though that categorization is of course totally incorrect. Film and video are different art forms. But for our intents and purposes, they do operate according to similar processes of mediation and vision.) In the 1910s especially, theorists like Hugo Münsterberg and Jean Epstein claimed that projecting a rapid succession of still images onto a flat two-dimensional plane—thus animating still photographs into movement—encompassed an entirely new mode of vision, not only of viewing art. They thought that the simultaneous artifice and apparent actuality of cinematic images allowed for manipulations of visual form that made film the most beautiful art form they had yet witnessed. It's hard (for me, anyway) to disagree with this theory; the obvious artifice of cinema combined with its totally immersive and convincing visuality is what makes both its realism and non-realism so potent. But Barthes disagrees that the convincing illusion of cinematic movement is what defines the art form; as he himself writes, “the 'movement' regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, 'life,' copy, but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding and a theory of the still becomes necessary.”

But even since the writing of this essay (Barthes originally wrote it in 1970), a theory of the cinematic still has rarely been satisfactorily achieved, or even attempted. Most viewers do indeed still perceive of film as a moving art form, which is totally understandable and seems justified: they are, after all, “motion pictures.” The transfixing nature of cinema means that we usually don't think of the hundreds of thousands of still images that make up the flow of life before us. But should we? Is Barthes correct that the essence of cinema can only be ascertained by suspending or halting this motion?

Ergo, I'd like to start a series of articles that does indeed posit a “theory of the still,” which I will (somewhat self-indulgently) label One Twenty Fourth. These articles will take a single film still, one-twenty-fourth of a second, from a single film as a jumping-off point for theorizing about cinematic sight, movement, the nature of narrative, the rift between realism and non-realism, the mechanics of filmmaking and projection, how the similarities or differences between cinematic sensation and real life unsettle or astound us, and so on. I have no idea what conclusions these articles will lead to, and have no preconceived theory about the cinematic still that I'd like to arrive at. I'd simply like to further explore the anomaly, the almost-oxymoron, of the cinematic still. What happens when we take these images out of their movement?

A few additional points in Barthes' article that I'd like to keep in mind while writing these articles: What does he mean when he writes about film's “diegetic horizon” or its “permutational unfolding”? Or when he claims that the cinematic still “offers us the inside of a fragment”—how does this temporality differ from that of real life or other art forms? What does he mean when he claims that analyzing a filmic still requires a “syntagmatic disjunction of images” and for a vertical rather than horizontal reading of cinema? When he says that the still is not a sample of a film but a quotation? These thoughts and others are points that I hope will take on further depth when applied to specific film stills in this series.


If you'd like to read the entirety of Barthes' article—which I recommend, since it remains one of the most thought-provoking and complex articles on cinema I've ever read—here's a link to it:

http://thethirdmeaning.blogspot.com/2007/10/roland-barthes-third-meaning.html

Faat Kiné

The Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène is probably the most well-known African director outside of his home continent. Beginning to work in the early 1960s—the decade in which some African countries began declaring independence from their colonial occupiers, and in which African artists could now comment upon their countries' own turbulent colonial histories with greater freedom—Sembène made the first feature film released by a sub-Saharan African director, Black Girl (La noire de...), in 1966. Two years later, in 1968, Sembène would release Mandabi, the first movie that was entirely spoken in Wolof, one of Senegal's major dialects (and Sembène's mother tongue). Throughout his career, he made provocative, didactic, progressive, proudly Senegalese works that criticized the new African bourgeoisie, grappled with the polyvalent and troubling colonial history of Senegal (and numerous northern African nations), and commented upon social woes such as the oppression of women and religious intolerance in a society well-known for the oft-contentious cohabitation of Christianity and Islam.

There are many reasons for Sembène's comparative prominence among African directors. Some of these reasons are controversial and are common among some African directors, such as the co-funding of some projects by European production companies (which provides films with a more pervasive distribution outlet in Europe and overseas) and Sembène's progressive critiques of some facets of Senegalese culture, which would likely be sympathized with by the majority of Western viewers who would be interested in exploring African film. More importantly, though, Sembène is probably the best-known African filmmaker internationally because he is one of the best, at least at what he is trying to accomplish. Among African directors who repeatedly comment upon the sociocultural states and political histories of their countries, Sembène is likely the most impassioned, creative, unique, and compassionate. It would be foolish to claim that his forward-thinking social commentaries are pandering to liberal Western audiences who support the films' critiques of traditional Senegalese culture, for it is obvious through Sembène's use of numerous Senegalese cultural and artistic traditions (among them the employment of a griot character to comment upon the events in his stories, or evocative observations of modern Dakar's vibrant and eclectic cultural community, or the use of Senegalese dialects rather than French) that the director deeply embraces his homeland and employs a uniquely Senegalese cinema to criticize the country's injustices.

Following Sembène's death in June 2007 at the age of eighty-four (he completed his final film, Mooladé, only three years prior), there was a mild growth in interest in the director's filmography. In the United States since then, retrospectives of Sembène have been popping up at film festivals and specialty movie houses. And while many African directors' films have yet to be released on DVD in this country in any fashion, six of Sembène's films are fairly readily available (although what I see as his greatest film—Ceddo (1977)—still is not).

A few days ago in Minneapolis, as part of their eight-film series paying tribute to Ousmane Sembène, the Walker Art Center played his 2000 film Faat Kiné (which is available on DVD). It is the eighth film that I've seen by him, and I would count it as one of his three masterpieces (along with Ceddo and Xala [1975]). It is most remarkable, perhaps, for its general air of joy and optimism, although there are considerable amounts of pain and tragedy to be had as well. The emotional climax of Faat Kiné features a rousing speech by a young high-school graduate who has already been preemptively elected as President of the Society of West African Nations by a Senegalese youth club; hearing him speak, and uninhibitedly ridicule the Senegalese bourgeoisie who drastically mishandled the country's newfound independence in the 1960s, we leave the theater feeling that, in the hands of a politician like this, the future for Senegal (and other African nations) may not be destined to flounder like so many people seem to think.

Lest we conclude that Sembène offers us a false sense of hope in Faat Kiné, though, the director makes sure to remind us that a system of restrictive patriarchy and religious intolerance is still very much in place in Senegal. The movie concerns a woman named Faat Kiné, a single mother of two who owns her own gas station in Dakar. Her first child, Aby, was conceived during a fling with a high school professor who subsequently refused to provide for their daughter and, furthermore, denied Faat Kiné her high school baccalaureate (a feat which is basically necessary in modern Senegal in order to land a self-sustaining job). The father of her second child, a son named Djip, was a petty gambler who stole Faat Kiné's life savings only to be imprisoned in France. Faat Kiné's father, shamed that his daughter has become an unwed mother, tries to burn his daughter (quite possibly to kill her), but, in a surreal and nightmarish scene, inadvertently torches his wife instead. (A grisly close-up in the following scene shows us Faat Kiné's mother's still-scarred flesh. Rather than seeming self-consciously shocking, this jump cut from a flashback to the present day fully makes us recognize the sacrifices made for Faat Kiné by her mother, and correlatively by Faat Kiné for her own children—perhaps the movie's predominant theme.)

Amongst so much tragedy and heartache, Faat Kiné has persevered and has managed to provide a solid future for her children. Having been lucky enough to land her gas station job in high school, she has climbed to the top of the ladder there, earning derisive stares from male customers but the respect and admiration of her friends and employees. (In one amusing scene, as Faat Kiné and a former lover argue in her office, her assistant manager eavesdrops nearby as he meticulously restocks the office—ready to protect his boss, though he is well aware that she can protect herself quite sufficiently.) In one surprisingly frank scene, Faat Kiné's mother confesses that, although she would protect her to the death, she wished for a time that Faat Kiné would die, so that she would not have to experience the pain and oppression to which she would certainly be subjected. But immediately after this confession, her mother commends Faat Kiné for doing what she herself could not do—providing her children with a promising future and teaching them that individualism and self-reliance are more valuable assets than depending on others to survive. Implicit within this interaction—and voiced explicitly later in the film—is the suggestion that this life lesson of self-reliance is something that was not widely accepted in the first decade of Senegal's independence, and that it has taken new generations of younger Senegalese people to recognize their own patriotism and independence. One of Sembène's most hopeful themes here is that the youth of Senegal's urban areas may be able to remedy the mistakes made by the country's first two generations during independence, a theme which is all the more remarkable considering that Sembène was 67 when he made the film, and that old age is traditionally revered in Senegalese society. (The young politician that I brought up before—who, not coincidentally, is Faat Kiné's son Djip—reminds us that this reverence is only appropriate if it is deserved.)



Individualism and selfhood are two of the recurring themes in Faat Kiné, then, but one of Sembène's most impressive feats is in wedding these ideals to a sweet portrayal of intimacy and budding romance. While the movie is subversive and clever, it is also cheerfully generic and didactic, which should not be perceived as criticisms here. In an attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible, many sociopolitical filmmakers in northern African countries inject their themes into light and breezy romantic comedies. They hope to entertain and instruct. Sembène has often eschewed straightforward generic elements from his films; though often funny, movies like Mandabi (1968), Xala, Ceddo, and Camp de Thiaroye (1987) disregard romantic subplots and zippy dialogue in order to deliver their social commentaries as forcefully as possible. Faat Kiné, then, may be Sembène's most entertaining and fast-moving film, a movie that provides vibrant romantic comedy while addressing pertinent issues in modern Senegalese life. Understandably, Faat Kiné has discarded the notion that she needs a man in her life; after having been horribly abused, on two different occasions, by the father of her children, she has decided that she can be happier, more successful, and a better mother without the companionship of a husband. Not that she hasn't been sexually active; one altercation is between Faat Kiné and a male gigolo that she used to pay for sex, and several dialogue scenes between her and her female friends offer frank discussions of condom usage and the threat of AIDS. The gender roles, which are so extensively reversed in Faat Kiné, are subverted here as well: Faat Kiné uses men to satisfy herself sexually but then shuns their companionship, in a manner all too often practiced by the men in her society.

But the end of the movie—one of the best endings to any movie I can think of in recent memory—shows us that Faat Kiné is still looking for love and, only after considerable reticence, is willing to give in to it. Having been hardened by life for so long and forced to depend only on herself, Faat Kiné is ultimately reminded that intimacy and companionship are possible. Her own children, self-reliant and progressive though they are, struggle to find Faat Kiné a man throughout the film—they believe, despite all of her declarations to the opposite, that a husband will make her happier. The end of the movie wisely offers no guarantee of marriage or even a lasting monogamous relationship, but it does have Faat Kiné ultimately relinquishing herself to desire, letting her armor down just momentarily for the companionship that she's been resisting. This allows for a laugh-out-loud moment towards the end of the movie: after her girlfriends try to convince Faat Kiné to take an eligible suitor home with her, she proudly says, “You're too late, I already screwed him at the toilet.” But the final image, coyly sexual, is more sweet than vulgar: Faat Kiné reclines and beckons smilingly to the man before her; in close-up, her toes begin to wiggle as their affair consummates itself offscreen. Remarkable for portraying a group of women who are proudly, independently, and intelligently sexual (even one married woman, who mocks her husband for losing his erection immediately after she suggests using a condom), Faat Kiné is both wise and joyful, pragmatic and romantic; it may be a more agile balancing act than Sembène has ever accomplished (or, perhaps, attempted).

If the movie portrays a harshly patriarchal society yet ends by relishing the sight of a group of empowered women, it also laments the religious intolerance of modern Dakar, yet ends by offering a hopeful reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. Implicit references towards religious intolerance pop up frequently throughout the film—for example, when a Muslim customer at Faat Kiné's gas station asks an attendant if they have a prayer area, then glowers at the helpful employee because he's wearing a crucifix around his neck. The conflict between the two religions is a common theme in Sembène's cinema, particularly in Ceddo, which was heavily censored in Senegal due to its purported anti-Muslim sentiment. (That movie features a bizarre and fascinating interlude that suddenly flashes forward centuries to modern Dakar—it may be the most abstract and metaphorical moment in any of the director's films.) This antagonism is also referenced in Faat Kiné, when several of her possible suitors are deemed unworthy because they are Muslim while Faat Kiné is Christian. But at the end of the movie, as Djip and one of his friends smilingly observe Faat Kiné and her newfound paramour dancing intimately, they plot to reconcile their union by providing a marriage for them. Djip, a Christian, claims that he won't allow Faat Kiné's marriage to take place in a mosque; his friend, a Muslim, says he can't have the marriage take place in a church. There's a moment of awkward silence. Then they smile at each other, and say, simultaneously, “At City Hall!,” and shake on it blithely. The moment is didactic, even cheesy, but shamelessly so; Sembène poses troublesome questions but offers possible and inspiring answers, which is arguably a more effective tool for social activism than simply providing embittered social commentary and leaving it at that.

Speaking of didacticism: Faat Kiné may be Sembène's most straightforwardly didactic film. This is coming from a director who ended Mandabi with a series of superimpositions of relevant dialogue from the entire film, and has a postman say, quite literally, to the main character, “You are the future of Senegal!” But this brand of didacticism is not, in my opinion, a detractor. Sembène has said quite explicitly in interviews that he wants his movies to be a form of night school for his viewers; he wants to leave absolutely no ambiguity as to what he's trying to say and he wants to suggest possible avenues that audiences may take after the movie is over. So while I do appreciate movies that are mired in ambiguity, mysteriousness, abstraction, and are open to interpretation, I just as equally respect movies that work towards political and social activism in as direct and emphatic a way as possible. With Faat Kiné, we always know exactly what Sembène is trying to tell us: the Senegalese bourgeoisie and its country's leaders mishandled the first decades of independence by disregarding self-reliance and depending upon their colonial occupiers (who continued to occupy); this political oversight can be reflected in modern Senegal's patriarchal system, which suggests that single women must find a man to provide for them instead of relying upon themselves; but in order to thrive, Senegal must, in the future, rely upon its youth and its women to provide eclectic democratic voices to their society, and it must find a way for Christians and Muslims to coexist peacefully in urban areas. It's impossible to walk away from Faat Kiné without recognizing these ideas, some of which are voiced directly. It's not the only kind of socially-commited filmmaking (a more cryptic movie can inspire outrage and change—say, the Dardennes' Rosetta, for example), but it is an effective style that Sembène has mastered throughout his decades of impassioned filmmaking. So while it's a shame that so many excellent African filmmakers remain mostly unnoticed in this country and overseas, Sembène's prominence cannot possibly be viewed as unfortunate, especially when it makes available a film as funny, powerful, unique, and humane as Faat Kiné.

The 50 Best Films of the 2000s: Numbers 10-1

10. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (d. Spike Lee, USA, 2006) Whether viewed as a process of fact-checking and historical investigation, an outlet that allows the victims and survivors of Hurricane Katrina to speak their minds, an impressionistic exploration of what New Orleans represents and the images it conjures, and/or a striking ethnography of American cities' problematic yet electrifying melting-pot populations, When the Levees Broke is among the most valuable films made in this country since the new millennium. The movie is actually all of these things and many more, which helps to explain the documentary's four-hour running time (it was originally released as a miniseries on HBO). While some topics that the film attempts to uncover are exposited less successfully than others (many have criticized, for example, the film's disturbing but convincing claim that the shoddy craftsmanship and possibly intentional destruction of New Orleans' levees represented a far-reaching governmental conspiracy), that exhaustive breadth is also what makes When the Levees Broke so valuable. More than a document of an overwhelming tragedy in American history, it is a document of a specific place and time and the people who came together (whether violently or peacefully) within that setting.

Seeing the entire film not on television but at a premiere screening at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I realized the overwhelming social power of the movie—with all of the pain and tragedy that the documentary evokes, it ultimately seems to be an act of cultural unification, asking that we not forget about the significance of New Orleans and really explore the context in which Katrina struck. When the Levees Broke manages to do what countless news media outlets couldn't in the aftermath of either Katrina or 9/11: simultaneously commemorate the victims of these tragedies and investigate what they meant sociohistorically. Among the brutal images of Lee's film—bloated victims floating through flooded streets, dilapidated houses marked with foreboding X's—audiences can band together in outrage. Look at what our government has done, how drastically they failed; look at this country's myths so incontrovertibly proven wrong.

Lee, a director often prone to grand stylistic tricks and a blatant authorial hand, here suppresses his own voice. Certainly, he makes his points through canny editing, through allusion and through suggested historical parallels, but this is no Michael Moore diatribe. Consisting primarily of talking-head interviews and unaired news footage, the embittered power of the movie emerges through montage. Contradictions and lies are exposed when the claims of FEMA, Michael Brown, George W. Bush, are placed adjacent to footage of people suffering without aid—treated like outcasts, aliens, refuse. Lee's most remarkable feat here is in taking himself out of the picture (at least explicitly), allowing the people of New Orleans to tell their own story. I've always been a fan of the director's work, but When the Levees Broke is on a level all its own—more powerful, in its own way, than even Do the Right Thing, and evoking an even greater level of impassioned outrage.

9. The Seeds (d. Wojciech Kaspierski, Poland, 2006) The limited theatrical exhibition outlets for short films in this country have led to the assumption that films' running times are somehow in direct proportion to their value, or at least that a movie less than an hour may be worth watching as a television interlude but not as a self-contained film in itself. Because this pattern of film viewing has much to do with the high price of renting celluloid film for theatrical exhibition, and the high number of tickets that need to be sold to recoup this price, and the desire for people who are going out to catch a movie to be provided with several hours of entertainment, the general dismissal of short films will probably continue. But if somehow, at some point, you get the chance to see The Seeds, don't waste the opportunity; it packs a wallop rare for a film of any length.

I saw Kasperki's film at the Milwaukee Film Festival in 2006, where I happened to be volunteering as an intern for the short film viewing committee. After watching a handful of good-not-great shorts that were being considered for inclusion in the festival, I was unprepared for the haunting power of The Seeds; even without the benefit of comparison, it would have been clear that this film was in a league of its own.

Set in a secluded village in southern Siberia, the movie observes an agrarian family struggling with their intense love and hatred for each other. There is a violent tragedy in this family's past that is not ever entirely exposited for us; a daughter in the family also seems afflicted by some mental illness. Resistant to explain anything to us clearly, The Seeds simply observes and suggests, portraying a turbulent family life that probably could not be elucidated for us anyway, even if we did know exactly what was happening. The family's interaction with each other is rough, their pain apparent, but this is because of the fact that they love each other rather than despite that fact. A scene suggesting the family's cruel indifference towards one daughter can be followed by a painfully tender scene between the patriarch and that same daughter; we realize that familial love and anger may sometimes go hand-in-hand.

It may seem hyperbolic to compare the movie to Tarkovsky and Bergman simultaneously, but that was my honest reaction when I first saw the movie; never before have I seen a film that combines so intensely the almost cosmic sense of alienation that defines Tarkovsky with Bergman's harrowingly magnified evocations of pain and passion. In thirty minutes, we bear witness to a family struggling with life on the other side of the world, isolated both geographically and emotionally. Out of something so common and relatable as familial woes, The Seeds manages to create a majestic and troubling sense of wonder.

8. The Wind Will Carry Us (d. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 2000) Among the most unique movies I've ever seen, Kiarostami's sublime dark comedy is both absurd and modestly realistic, documentary and fiction. An engineer (known only as The Engineer) and his two assistants travel from Tehran to a remote Kurdish village; throughout the movie, we don't know exactly why they have traveled here, only that they have come to visit a remarkably old woman (also never seen) and perhaps to work on completing a film that, seemingly, gets no nearer to completion. Rather than explain these mysteries to us, The Wind Will Carry Us coasts by on observing the daily lives of the residents of Siah Dareh (hence its documentary aspects) or crafting sublimely subtle sight gags out of deft manipulations of sight and sound, relying especially on the edge of the frame and offscreen happenings. J. Hoberman likens Kiarostami's stylistic punnery to the films of Jacques Tati, which helps to explain why I love this movie so much; its wonderfully stilted, almost-absurd dialogue also reminded me of Jim Jarmusch.

Themes regarding the rift between modern technology and Iran's or Kurdistan's traditional societies seem almost to rise to the surface (the main character keeps on having to run up the village's highest hill in order to receive a cell-phone call from Tehran—this is also where the village's graveyard is situated), but, in a bemused style that I tend to favor, these themes are only hinted at rather than voiced explicitly. We can ponder such ideas if we want, or we can laugh at Kiarostami's sly sense of humor, or (just as satisfyingly) we can look at the countryside. The director's style is democratic: the viewer decides what he or she will concentrate on, what he or she will enjoy. And here, there's much to enjoy.

Detractors may claim that this blithely oblique style, this evasion of any specific plot or thematic concept, can lead to inconsequentiality—that we may walk away from The Wind Will Carry Us with our curiosities piqued, but unenlightened. Assuming that “enlightenment” is actually something that movies should be expected to offer, I would counter that confusion can, in fact, lead to enlightenment. Lacking a specific narrative or thematic guide to usher us through a film, we are left to our own devices, and fumbling with our own bewilderment, we may personally arrive at something far grander within ourselves than what any filmmaker can suggest to us. Films that at first seem to be about nothing sometimes seem, by their end, to be about everything.

7. Kabala (d. Assane Kouyaté, Mali/France, 2005) I've always enjoyed African film (despite the fact that an entire continent's cinema cannot and should not be grouped together into a single subset), but the complete uniqueness and striking narrative styles that define so many of the films from Mali and Nigeria and Senegal and elsewhere are also what make them largely unsuccessful in this country. Because distributors and exhibitors in the States are often unwilling to give African films even a limited release (Bamako and Tsotsi—otherwise known as Crash in Africa—are two of the few that I can think of over the last couple years) most American audiences have to rely on film festivals and online DVD companies to get their hands on African movies. Which is a shame, since many of them are so beautiful, majestic, and (to use a problematic and potentially condescending word) exotic that they really should be seen on the big screen.

Kabala is the best example from the last decade, a Malian-French co-production that has a story and a primary theme that are actually quite familiar from numerous recent international productions, but that still seems totally different than anything else you've seen. It's about a sacred well in a Malian village that has recently become contaminated. The elders decide that a traditional fire dance is required to rid the well of its impurities. When one young man's torch doesn't light during the ceremony, he is suddenly accused of illegitimacy and cast out of the village. Years later, he returns home to provide further assistance to the still-plagued village, only to find that much has changed since his departure.

Like numerous other recent films from Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and other Northern African countries, Kabala is about the rift between traditional religion and modern resources; about the coexistence of contemporary business and economics and a more mystical form of ancient spirituality; and about the dangers and benefits that may be gained from depending upon outside sources. The movie is faced with a difficult enigma: it may simultaneously seem to pander to Western audiences (in its criticisms of established conservative traditions and insularity) and to indulge in a brazen form of traditional African folklore that seems totally alien to most Western viewers.

But this enigma is really what the movie is about—coming to terms with the difficult decision of whether or not to depend on outside resources to “modernize” some African regions. Since this is what the movie is concerned with, its simultaneous indulgence in and subversion of traditional religious tenets makes sense, and contributes to a bewildering style that encapsulates the movie's difficult sociocultural quandary.

It also makes Kabala astonishingly beautiful. The Malian settings are gorgeous to begin with, but they are filmed so lushly—and Andrée Davanture's editing transitions so smoothly between powerful close-ups and majestic long shots—that this terrain takes on a mythical quality. Just as ably, though, Kabala can intensify its human relationships into the stuff of grand melodrama—the movie is as striking in its drama as in its scenery.

6. Hero (d. Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2004) As a middle-schooler just beginning to embrace my love for film, I would rewatch kinetic (but undeniably silly) kung-fu films like Fist of Legend and Twin Warriors over and over again, transfixed by the propulsive acrobatics they offered (and, perhaps, also by their cartoonish plots). I still think these films have value in an almost-abstract, motion-and-light kind of way—the graceful movements of bodies in these films may be favorably compared to the lights and shapes flitting about the screen in animated works by Len Lye and Norman McLaren, for example—but I can just as easily recognize that the majority of kung-fu films have as little interest in innovative storytelling, aesthetic ingenuity, or thematic heft as they have great passion for their action sequences. (This is to disregard peculiarities like Wong Kar-wai's hybrid Ashes of Time or some obscure and magical Shaw Brothers nuggets from the '70s.) I've never denied that I love these movies, but sometimes they are a bit of a guilty pleasure—hypnotic, dizzying, electrifying, but hardly groundbreaking.

Hero is something else entirely—a kung-fu film about pacifism. In it, the warrior Nameless (Jet Li) arrives at the court of the King of Qin claiming to have killed three of the most deadly assassins in the kingdom, all of whom had been trying to kill the King. Flashbacks are employed, but all of them are equally untrustworthy—nothing is as it seems to be, as every epic battle and meticulously choreographed duel may or may not be a ruse undertaken for a larger political purpose. Its fight scenes are gorgeous—shot by Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's frequent cinematographer), they embellish their color-coded pageantry, as crimson leaves flutter around warriors and drops of water cascade through the screen while fighters skip blithely over the surface of a lake—but the movie is just as much about political machination as fight scenes. In its own bombastic way, Hero is about politics as much as some of Zhang Yimou's previous works (such as Ju Dou or Raise the Red Lantern).

If the movie indulges in martial arts operatics but is still, essentially, about the power of peaceful resistance, that contradiction never really seems hypocritical. The violence here almost always takes on a plaintive, tragic tone; transcending action-movie filler, the martial arts in Hero are likened to traditional Chinese music, calligraphy, and theater, and thus are posited as an essential aspect of China's cultural history. The real coup is not in suggesting that the martial arts are an integral component of Chinese culture, or portraying them as a ballet—numerous kung-fu films have done this, including, most famously, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—but in theorizing about how this history and this art form can be used in order to prevent further political tyranny and violence. (J. Hoberman claims that Hero is a Leni Riefenstahl-esque indulgence in the aesthetics of fascism—that the movie condones the actions of a despot killing in the name of eventual unification—but it seems that Hero's admittedly overblown pageantry is meant as an indictment of shallow political theatricality, not a celebration of it.)

Zhang's best film is probably still the quietly enraged Ju Dou (1991), but it undeniably belongs to a different career timeframe than Hero. In some ways, we may lament Zhang's move towards incredibly expensive kung-fu epics (Hero had, at the time of its release, the highest budget of any Chinese movie ever made), especially since it seems Hero was put into production partially as an attempt to one-up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While Zhang would make the equally impressive (yet less complex) House of Flying Daggers immediately after Hero, he would also go on to make the ugly, empty Curse of the Golden Flower. (I haven't seen his latest feature, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, but the majority of reviews suggest that it's similarly garish.) Whatever Hero means in the context of Zhang's career, though, it does seem remarkably unique within the martial arts genre—a deft and exciting action picture that uses the tropes of its predecessors to question the political repercussions of violent force.

5. The Holy Girl (d. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Italy/ Netherlands/Spain, 2005) The subversive power of Martel's incredibly sly dark comedy is so reserved that it takes a while to sneak up on you; when it does, though, you realize that Martel's half-blasphemous/half-reverent take on sin, pleasure, redemption, and Catholicism is worthy of Luis Buñuel (only Martel's humor is a little sprier than Buñuel's atheist absurdity).

Following a Catholic-school lecture on faith and vocation, 14-year-old Amalia (María Alche, whose face always appears half angelic and half devilish) is lured by the heavenly sounds of a theremin being played during a street performance. While she and a small crowd observes this theremin player, Amalia suddenly finds herself being groped by a tall, middle-aged doctor standing directly behind her. She soon discovers that this doctor is attending a medical conference being held at the hotel owned by her mother. Deducing that the lustful Dr. Jano—who somehow seems more despondent than lecherous, despite the fact that he's feeling up a teenager—has been sent to her for the salvation of his soul, Amalia undertakes her newfound, heaven-sent vocation.

With The Holy Girl and its predecessor, La Ciénaga (2001), Martel has forged a totally unique style in modern cinema. It's tempting to compare her deadpan, formally-based humor to Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki, but Martel's comedy somehow seems even more devious than theirs. Deploying off-kilter perspectives and disorienting editing structures to bizarre effect, Martel and her crew attempt to create a world that always seems alien, mythical, disorienting in its perpetually hazy humidity. (Martel's films are set in the small northwest Argentinian town of Salta, where she also grew up.) We usually don't know what's happening within a given scene, or even in the movie as a whole, until we're well beyond the establishing point. (This is actually somewhat of a flaw, I think, in Martel's 2008 film The Headless Woman, but in her first two features, it's sublime.) This is why it feels we've made a discovery whenever we detect one of Martel's clever in-jokes, and why we may identify so fully with the characters' sense of detachment and profound confusion.

The Holy Girl ends on a high note, almost effervescently, making it clear that Martel's aim is not to mock her characters but to identify with their ethical confusion. With astonishing formal exactness, she lets these prickly webs of human interaction play out; we are bemused by the irony and the unexpectedness of these interactions, but at the same time we identify with the sexual confusion and religious doubt that plagues the main characters. That numerous reviewers read the film in almost diametrically opposite ways (some saw it as liberating, dexterous comedy; some as a haunting and bleak cautionary tale) is a testament to how ambiguous and non-judgmental the movie is.

4. Beau Travail (d. Claire Denis, France, 2000) What the hell happens in Beau Travail? It should come as no surprise to fans of Denis that that question can't really be answered. It's a loose adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, set amongst the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, but beyond that—as in L'Intrus, 35 Shots of Rum, I Can't Sleep, and some other Denis films—the movie is mostly about observation and atmosphere. Denis seems to recognize that she is a perpetual outsider to this isolated cadre of militaristic men in eastern Africa, the most stereotypically masculine subculture you can imagine; so instead of offering any moral interpretations or narrative motivations, she (and her cinematographer, the great Agnés Godard) simply watch the men interact with each other. Small hints at their characters may be gleaned through looks, gestures, fleeting actions, but none of these men can be “explained” in their entirety.

Beyond some of the most beautifully photographed scenery you'll ever see in a movie, Beau Travail is notable for adapting Melville's incredibly cryptic and metaphorical prose to the cinematic form. Of course films can be elusive and cryptic, but seeing images play out before us lends things a concrete, actualized nature—the transformative power of movies makes us believe that these things are actually happening (even if we don't always know exactly what these things are). Denis's sublime skill with Beau Travail is to transpose Melville's ruminations to a visual form that ponders the nature of good and evil, camaraderie, repressed homosexuality, and other intangible notions solely through observation. Although we can't specifically put a name on the heated emotions and moods that Beau Travail puts us through, it does undoubtedly work us into a frenzy; we are transported to an unnamable and overwhelming mindstate.

The half-naked bodies of the soldiers exercising in the blazing sun are a common visual motif in the movie; Denis and Godard do aestheticize the men, and such scenes do take on an air of eroticism (which makes sense given the homoeroticism Melville included in his story), but most of the men are never exactly explored as flesh-and-blood individuals with real inner states. The men, like the movie itself, are mostly about immediacy, corporeality, physicality, the things we can see on the surface that suggest something deeper (but only suggest it). The final scene of the movie is a bewildering summation of liberation and chaos, but it's only the breaking point of what the movie is trying to do all along, only in more restrained ways—tear out of its shell and flail at us, mystifyingly.

3. Kings and Queen (d. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2005) Kings and Queen has, at one point, one of the most purely bizarre and unexpected interludes I've ever seen in a movie (it involves Mathieu Amalric's character, a neurotic charmer named Ismaël, bursting into a breakdancing routine in a sanitarium); shortly thereafter, it offers us a madcap, hilarious scene in which Ismaël and his smarmy attorney try to steal drugs from the sanitarium's pharmacy, a sequence almost unparalleled in its unbridled energy; and finally, at the end of the movie, it offers us a sweetly awkward interaction between Ismaël and his surrogate son, Elias, that is among the most tender and affecting portraits of familial love that you'll ever see in a movie. The greatness of these scenes lies partially in the performance by Amalric, France's best actor working today, but it's mostly the result of Arnaud Desplechin. The director is more than a brilliant dramatist or comedian or postmodernist or innovator; he's all of these things at once. Desplechin manages a deft balancing act that is most impressive because none of these various styles or conceits seem pranksterish or disingenuous.

As impressive as Mathieu Amalric's performance is Emmanuelle Devos's as Nora, the queen of the title. Her kings include four men with whom she's been in love: her son, Elias; Elias's deceased father; Nora's own father; and Ismaël, an impulsive musician with whom Nora lived for a time. The relationship between Nora and Ismaël is now more platonic than sexual, though no less genuine; this is why Nora asks Ismaël to act as Elias's father.

Like A Christmas Tale, this basic storyline, reminiscent of a number of family melodramas, is merely a jumping-off point for Desplechin's numerous tangents and ruminations—on love, on French history and classical art, on hatred, on the difficulties of communication. Even when the movie focuses on advancing its plot, its aesthetic ingenuity continues to overwhelm even as its narrative captivates us—for example, during the sequence in which we discover how Elias's father died, an unsettling scene portrayed in the style of modernist theatre, with abstract lighting and evocatively spare sets. Miraculously, the movie's experimentation with style and narrative never serves to undermine or weaken its emotional aspects. An unexpected insert of Nora's father reading to her a vitriolic letter—as he's framed in an almost direct frontal composition and the film stock takes on an extremely grainy, blue-gray quality—could have been an indulgent misstep in another director's hands, but here, her father's words become even more passionate, more obliterating, thanks to the scene's aesthetic excess.

Simplistically, one could claim that Nora's storyline in Kings and Queen represents the style of grand melodrama, that Ismaël's takes on the traits of screwball comedy, and that the movie itself is about the overwhelming highs and lows that everyone experiences, and how the movies as an art form, throughout their entire history, have helped us persevere through them. Parts of this appraisal would be accurate, but it also seems too easy, too schematic, which Kings and Queen definitely is not. It may be more apt to say that the movie is about how happiness necessarily carries with it a twinge of sadness and vice versa, and that love, true love, is so passionate and unrestrained that it cannot survive without madness and anger and desperation. This is why the tumult of emotions and styles in Desplechin's movies never seem parodic or insincere; his movies are about how real life is closer to this maddening whirlwind than to the convenient genres and emotions we usually find in films. While Kings and Queen is resolutely cinematic, then, it is also closer to bewildering (and wondrous) reality than almost any movie you will see.

2. Head-On (d. Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2005) The title is appropriate; so is its original German title, Gegen die Wand, which translates as “Against the Wall.” The movie rushes at you without restraint, angrily, ferociously, passionately. It's raw and aggressive, which befits a movie about lust, the alienation of immigrants in their adopted country, the conservatism of religious and cultural tradition. It will likely turn you off, and only a scene later seduce you again with its intensity and bravado. It's that kind of movie.

The movie is about two Turkish immigrants living in Hamburg: Sibel, a beautiful 22-year-old woman desperate to escape her restrictive home life with her parents; and Cahit, an aimless drunk perhaps twice her age who she asks to marry her so she can leave home. Both characters are suicidal—they meet in a mental institution after she tries to slit her wrists and he drives full-speed into a brick wall. (Only one of the many ways in which the movie's American and German titles are manifested.) Initially, their marriage is completely emotionless, an act of desperation. Even as their compassion for each other deepens, their sincerity is always tinged with a sense of desperation and futility.

As you may be able to surmise, this is not a pleasant movie. It has moments of levity, even sweetness, but for the most part we are reminded of how much these characters hate themselves. While Head-On is in part a movie about the alienation and loneliness felt by immigrants in a foreign land (and the genuine sense of community that may nonetheless be achieved there), it is more generally about reaching a point in your life when everything seems hopeless, and trying to find a way in which that bleakness may be alleviated. To criticize this movie for its overwhelming unpleasantness is to miss the point; it's one of the few films I've seen recently that wants to portray lives at their bleakest, darkest, lowest points, not in an attempt at shock value, but to reach out to viewers who have felt this way and may still feel this way.

Funded by both German and Turkish production companies, the movie was heralded by audiences and critics in both countries as either a German or a Turkish triumph, respectively—an irony that points towards both the economic co-dependence and implicit contentiousness between the two countries, especially in Germany. This, too, is partially what the movie is about. The power of Head-On's implicit sociocultural commentary is epitomized by repeated shots of a traditional Turkish band performing on a carpeted stage in Istanbul—a reminder that Fatih Akin is not decrying traditional Turkish culture, but lamenting how that culture may not transplant to a new land so easily, and also how that traditionalism may stifle younger generations more than it unifies them. Even more broadly, the film may be about how, in the modern world, distinct ethnic cultures must be increasingly assimilated into other ways of life, forcing all of us to establish new identities and moralities without depending upon traditional national codes and mores.

Head-On is not remarkable simply because it is so bleak; it evokes, instead, a desperate passion that most lives must deal with at some point. Raw and volatile, hauntingly beautiful, and acted by two performers (Birol Ünel and Sibel Kekilli) who appear immersed in the act of baring their souls, it is one of the most emotionally turbulent movies you will ever see. Afterwards, you won't be uplifted, but you will feel like you've lived through, and rebounded from, immense tragedy.

1. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (d. Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan, 2000) Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half”; I find it more accurate, if less impressive, to claim that Yi Yi (A One and a Two) is the world in three hours. Edward Yang's majestic, light-footed, sublime, funny movie spends about a year with three generations of an affluent family in Taipei. Nothing momentous happens, but at the same time, everything that happens is momentous: characters ponder infidelity, the meaning of their lives, choices they've made, lost opportunities and shattered dreams. Most broadly, Yi Yi is about the unexpected turns that our lives take and the fact that, for years, decades, lifetimes afterwards, we wonder if the choices we've made are right. How would our lives have been different if we had done this differently, if we had chosen to do this instead of this?

The movie goes about these questions in unassuming, clever ways. Successful businessman NJ, the patriarch of the central family, bumps into his first love on an elevator; realizing that his workaday lifestyle is so hurried that he has neglected his own happiness, he regrets standing her up a long time ago, confessing these doubts and concerns to a Japanese business partner. (The Taiwanese man and his Japanese friend must speak English to each other; it's the only language they both understand.) NJ's son, eight-year-old Yang-Yang, ponders what he sees and wonders if he can really trust his vision all the time. He also experiences his first love with a classmate; in sweet, fumbling fashion, he tries to drop a water balloon on his crush, and accidentally hits the principal of his school instead. In a miraculous scene shortly thereafter, during a school fieldtrip, Yang-Yang observes his classmate in a planetarium with a vista of sparkling stars in the background, and you begin to fall in love yourself. Meanwhile, NJ's wife speaks to her mother-in-law (who is in a coma) and realized how flat and unfulfilling her life is. Their daughter, Ting-Ting, wonders whether or not she should start a fling with her best friend's boyfriend. Death, birth, and marriage also happen. A checklist of what happens in the movie can't do justice to how sprawling and affecting it is. Each tiny happenstance, no matter how slight, takes on epic proportions, because we realize how differently things may turn out if only one other thing had happened instead.

More ably than any other movie I've ever seen, Yi Yi evokes the difficulties and joys of living in the modern metropolis. Scenes are often filmed via reflections on the windows of stores and automobiles; other scenes play out in extreme long shot, as intimate relationships take place amongst thousands of passersby. Modern life here is seen as electrifying and overwhelming; technology and consumerism are ubiquitous, but so is a sense of community and possibility. This depiction of modern life and technology bears specifically upon Taiwanese culture, as NJ's generation finds themselves immersed in a booming industry of computer products and a globalized electronics industry. As economics and technologies change drastically around us, so do families and personal lives; Yi Yi eloquently empathizes with these unsettling changes at the same time that it embraces them.

The director, Edward Yang, who passed away in 2007, achieved his masterpiece with Yi Yi (almost as good is Yang's sprawling 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day). It has its moments of tragedy and lamentation, but mostly, we are filled with a great sense of elation, a reassurance that the doubts, regrets, and difficulties that we deal with in our own lives are in fact shared by people throughout the world. Yang can achieve this grand sympathy because he loves his characters, and, despite the turmoil through which it puts us, he loves life.