The Lubitsch Touch: "The Merry Jail" and "The Eyes of the Mummy"

What is "the Lubitsch Touch"? A phrase beloved by Hollywood marketers, the Lubitsch Touch was meant to denote sophisticated comedy, sparkling dialogue (an impression even conveyed, somehow, by his silent movies), urbane treatment of sex and desire, and a seemingly effortless grace that could convey complex jokes and punchlines in a single camera movement. Lubitsch was arguably the most famous emigre director in 1930s Hollywood, as gradually the Lubitsch Touch transformed into its own brand name: a near-guarantee of reliable craftsmanship and elegance. Only Hitchcock's "Master of Suspense" moniker rivaled the Lubitsch Touch for most well-known directorial catchphrase (reportedly, Billy Wilder struggled to find a similar slogan for himself in the 1940s and '50s, and eventually gave up). In Ephraim Katz's estimation, the Lubitsch Touch "was characterized by a parsimonious compression of ideas and situations into single shots or brief scenes that provided an ironic key to the characters and to the meaning of the entire film."

Irony, subtlety, elegance – these descriptors offer an impression of what the Lubitsch Touch might have been, but it's something more than that, too. Some aspects of the film image can't be put into words (that's what makes them cinematic), and in danger of sounding too hyperbolic, this ineffable visual quality seems to subsume Lubitsch's movies. Since I've become a fan of the director (which is basically since I first saw Trouble in Paradise eight years ago) I've suspected that the Lubitsch Touch is more of a fleeting aura than a quantifiable stylistic trait. Hopefully, if visual evidence of the master's touch can be parsed out, I'll be able to do so by charting his filmography, in chronological order, as fully as possible (which unfortunately is not as full as one might hope: many of Lubitsch's films, including most of his silents, are now lost).

A young Mr. Lubitsch

Lubitsch was born in 1892 Berlin to a Jewish family. His father was a tailor (a profession that features prominently in some of Lubitsch's films, notably The Shop Around the Corner) and Ernst, drawn to acting but encouraged to continue the family business, led a double life, serving as bookkeeper for his father by day and acting in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911, he joined Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater; a year later, he was hired as the handyman for Bioscope Film Studios, and in 1913 began acting in a series of film comedies as a character named Meyer, who represented a then-popular brand of ethnic Jewish humor. (This is according to Lubitsch's biography; these films are now lost, so it's hard to know exactly what this "ethnic Jewish humor" constituted.)

Gradually turning his attention to directing, Lubitsch garnered acclaim in Germany for his tragic fantasy The Eyes of the Mummy in 1918, but it wasn't until 1921 that he found success in the US. In that year, three of his dramas – Madame du Barry, aka Passion, 1919; Anna Boleyn, aka Deception, 1920; and Carmen, aka Gypsy Blood, 1921 – were released stateside and chosen by The New York Times as three of the most "important" movies of 1921. (His 1919 comedy The Oyster Princess, though now seen as his first masterpiece, was less famous at the time.) Lubitsch left Germany for Hollywood in 1922, and it was there that he solidified his legendary status.

Yet if it was his historical epics and dramas that first brought him esteem, it's his sophisticated comedies that eventually revealed him as a master of the craft. Whether in elaborate musicals or smaller-scale comedies, he seems to display a bemused fondness for his characters and their sexual hangups and desires. Indeed, some of his movies, joyous as they are, were scandalous upon their release: as Michael Wilmington writes, his films were "at once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well." Another of Lubitsch's favorite satirical targets was money, specifically the kind of excessive wealth that carries a semi-automatic excuse for horrible behavior. Both sex and money were touchy subjects for American audiences, but Lubitsch's elegance and wit turned self-ridicule into a gentle diversion (particularly during the Great Depression, when Lubitsch was arguably at his peak).

The Merry Jail (1917)

But let's flash back to Berlin, 1917, when Lubitsch made his earliest surviving film: The Merry Jail. It's surprising how much this early effort encapsulates and foreshadows Lubitsch's later comedic style: a movie about shameless carnality, both spirited and subtle, The Merry Jail lampoons a wartime Berlin in which wealthy aristocrats entertain themselves by initiating torrid affairs and getting obscenely drunk. The gravity of the Great War doesn't seem to affect these characters at all. If the interwar Weimar period of Germany was known for its amoral hedonism and the disastrous simultaneity of lavish spending and severe poverty (a social unrest ridiculed by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, among other films), that period seems to have its origins in the freewheeling culture portrayed here. Lubitsch, though, doesn't judge his characters or this society, perhaps seeing moral conservatism as a restrictive force.

The plot is a familiar one (it was actually adapted from Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus): Frau von Reizenstein, an aristocratic wife well aware of her husband's adulterous affairs, attends the same costume ball as he does one night, unbeknownst to him; they end up flirting unabashedly, with Herr von Reizenstein unwittingly attempting to initiate an "extramarital" tryst with his own wife. There are other dalliances transpiring: between the Reizensteins' maid and a doddering aristocrat (Mizi the maid is clearly enjoying her sexual liberty: upon tripping on a staircase while entering the costume ball, she turns to the gentleman escorting her inside and flirtatiously says, "That was my first bad move of the day"); or between Frau von Reizenstein and an overzealous suitor named Egon Storch. Basically every relationship is a potentially sexual one, with a passionate affair always lurking in wait. The sexual openness is summed up by a piece of advice given to Mizi by her sister: "If someone tries to kiss you, don't giggle. That's not chic."

There's also the merry jail of the title, a jail that Herr von Reizenstein is supposed to occupy: given his "scandalous behavior" one drunken evening, the police have issued a warrant for his arrest and one-day imprisonment (a warrant he ignores in order to attend the costume ball). The jailer at the prison, Quabbe, is at least as sexually frank (and as drunkenly lecherous) as the rest of the ensemble, and his homosexuality is displayed brazenly: he continually strokes one prisoner's arm, kisses another on the lips, tells another one that he really likes him. (Quabbe is played by Emil Jannings, who would become famous for complex dramatic roles in later classics such as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel. Here, outfitted with a gnarly mustache, Jannings demonstrates devious lunacy in one of his rare comedic roles.) Lubitsch's pre-Code Hollywood movies are known for their sexual openness, but the jailer's homosexuality is a liberty that would be unavailable to him later on in his career – a surprising indication of movies' licentiousness before the strictures of social censorship clamped down.

The Merry Jail

While most film comedies in 1917 were essentially vaudeville acts performed in front of the camera (which isn't necessarily a criticism – Chaplin made poetry out of such a setup), Lubitsch here shows an early flair for using the camera and montage editing to deliver the punchline of a joke. The film opens, for example, with Frau von Reizenstein searching throughout the house for her absent husband; when she retreats to the den and reads the arrest warrant that's been issued for him, the camera slowly tilts down to reveal the presumably-still-drunk husband passed out underneath the desk. The joke's not quite over yet: feeling something brushing against her legs, Frau von Reizenstein agitatedly informs Mizi that the house has mice. In response, the maid offers her an elaborate mousetrap, unexpectedly conveyed to us via a close-up insert. Throughout this sequence, Lubitsch reveals himself as a master joke-teller through purely visual means (camera movement, varying shot scales and edits) as the scene culminates in what might be the visual equivalent of the punchline: a close-up.

Sometimes, on the other hand, Lubitsch's jokes are so subtle you're not even sure if they're jokes at all. At the end of the aforementioned sequence, for example, the besotted husband gingerly gives the maid his cane and top hat. As he extends his overturned top hat to her, he seems to look inside and come perilously close to vomiting into it; when the maid takes it, she glances into it, recoils in disgust, and holds the hat at arm's length while she exits the scene. Lubitsch doesn't offer us a closer angle so it's impossible to know for sure, but the suggestion is that this callow aristocrat lives a life of privileged luxury while overdrinking so heavily that he throws up into his accoutrements – itself a sly and subtle conflation of elegance and vulgarity.

Herr von Reizenstein is undeniably a shallow cad who inflates his self-worth by racking up adulterous affairs – in a modern romantic comedy, he'd be the smug asshole competing with the sensitive hero for a woman's affections. But all ends well in The Merry Jail: the following morning, as the whole ensemble is deliriously hungover, Frau and Herr von Reizenstein make up after she reveals she was the masked paramour from the night before, Mizi and her aristocrat drive off together, and Quabbe the jailer admits his suppressed feelings for the unreciprocating prison warden. Sexuality is an amusing riddle here: Lubitsch doesn't judge Herr von Reizenstein's adulteries or Quabbe's homoerotic longings. Most mainstream romantic comedies are obliged to supply a happy ending which takes the form of a man-woman romantic union; The Merry Jail suggests a more chameleonic sexuality, which doesn't abide by the rigid contours of a cinematic genre.

The Eyes of the Mummy (1918)

Unfortunately, there's a lot less to say about The Eyes of the Mummy, which Lubitsch made a year later (1918) for the UFA film studio. To modern viewers, it may seem strange that Lubitsch first found success and acclaim thanks to large-scale dramas like this; even the visual style of Eyes of the Mummy seems less exuberant than in his comedies, and the narrative is patched together from a number of outworn Gothic horror and melodramatic cliches.

The Eyes of the Mummy was the first film collaboration between Lubitsch (graduating to feature-length drama) and Pola Negri, who would be invited to Hollywood (along with Lubitsch) by Paramount in 1922. Negri would go on to become one of Hollywood's most adored stars (especially in her roles as Rudolph Valentino's love interest) and the first in a long line of "exotic" actresses imported to the US from Europe (Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc.). Here, she plays "Queen Ma" – actually not a queen at all (much less a mummy), but a young Egyptian country girl kidnapped by the villainous Radu many years ago and imprisoned in a tomb located in a pyramid somewhere outside of Cairo. (Emil Jannings, in semi-blackface, appears once again as Radu.) When Ma is rescued by a German painter on vacation and returns with him to Berlin, Radu follows soon after (now the servant to a nobleman named Prince Hohenfels) and vengefully searches Berlin for his "queen." Firmly placed in the genre of tragic melodrama, Eyes of the Mummy proceeds to its inevitably bleak conclusion; there's not much in the way of horror (and, as many critics have pointed, nothing at all in the way of mummies), so we're basically left with a lugubrious drama about starcrossed lovers.

Both Negri and Jannings belong to the emotive, theatrically-based style of silent-film acting that puts off most modern viewers; while their performances here can be enjoyed in a markedly distinct, almost abstract time-capsule way, they do little to draw us emotionally into the movie. The problem is compounded by the fact that the story is riddled with irrational holes (who exactly is Radu? why does he seem supernatural at times and powerless at others? what were the painter and Prince Hohenfels doing in Cairo?) that demonstrate a reliance on secondhand genre tropes and plot structures. Quite obviously shot on a low budget (the interiors of the "mummy's" tomb especially emphasize the barebones nature of the production), The Eyes of the Mummy today seems like little more than a curio in the director's early career, although there is one shot that nearly makes it worth watching: a reverse tracking shot during the climax that retreats in horror as Radu approaches menacingly. It's a sequence of visual intensity and narrative engagement that most of the film is sorely lacking.

An UFA advertisement for Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy Ma), 1918

NEXT UP: Another blithe sex comedy, the cross-dressing I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918); and another exotic melodrama with Pola Negri, Carmen (aka Gypsy Blood), 1918.

Screening Log, May 30 - June 5

Moonrise Kingdom (d. Wes Anderson, USA, 2012) B

As you can probably tell from the still above, Moonrise Kingdom has Anderson continuing to preserve his hermetically-sealed diorama of the world, this time telling the story of two young lovers, Sam and Suzy, who run away (from their Scout Camp and their crumbling home, respectively) to live together in a secluded cove on the island of New Penzance in 1965. You know whether or not you'll like the movie depending on your existing opinion of Anderson. As a fan, it's always a pleasure to spend some time in the director's meticulous playground (he also wrote the screenplay, with Roman Coppola), but those pleasures seem to be diminishing each time Anderson returns to the well. (At least Fantastic Mr. Fox departed from the template a bit.) The stellar cast brings droll life to the characters, but they're not given a chance to turn them into flesh-and-blood people: there are some melancholy undercurrents to the story (failing marriages, extramarital affairs, self-loathing), but Anderson oddly mutes and rushes past their suffering, whereas in his best movies (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic) he would have respected and fully conveyed their heartache. The movie ends up being pleasant, spry, and (it almost goes without saying) visually intoxicating, but it's also completely inconsequential: the pitfall of an auteur being able to do whatever he wants is that his characters and sets gradually come to seem like toys shuffled around for the director's own amusement.

Pépé le Moko (d. Julien Duvivier, France, 1937) A
In many ways the French prototype for Casablanca (made five years later in Hollywood), Pépé le Moko shimmers with a tragic beauty; it attains the kind of cinematic poetry that American and French studios managed occasionally in the 1930s. French gangster movies are a lot like the American films noir made a decade later (which they themselves influenced): unassuming genre pictures that smuggle great beauty and despair into their seemingly simple bloodlines. The inimitable Jean Gabin plays Pépé, a gentleman's thief more elegant than Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean put together: a Parisian transplant stuck in the Casbah of Algiers, he's a jewel thief and bank robber who remains outside the grasp of the French and Algerian police, thanks to the shady cohorts who sequester him in the Casbah's alleyways and terraces. He's already imprisoned, in other words: all he wants is to return to grand Paris, a desire that burns even brighter after he meets Gaby, a beautiful Frenchwoman staying in Algiers with her rich husband; her sparkling diamonds tempt Pépé less than her dazzling beauty and bona fide Parisian elegance. Like most heroes in French crime movies from the '30s, Pépé steps headlong towards a doomed fate, and he seems to know it: he considers death for the sake of freedom and love more honorable than his slum notoriety. The movie achieves an effortless grace and overflows with one astonishing sequence after another: an early montage of the Casbah's labyrinthine exoticism, a hyperreal murder scene in which a dying hood guns down the man who betrayed him, the simmering chemistry between Gabin and Mireille Balin as Gaby, and most of all a climactic series of rear-projections that foreground Pépé against a dreamy vision of death-soaked Algiers. You want to criticize the movie for its complete indifference to the actual city and people of Algiers (the movie is practically an apologia for colonialism), but it so obviously takes place in a realm of heightened visceral poetry that real-world political quibbles hardly seem to apply.

Persepolis (d. Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, France/USA, 2007) B+
Satrapi's series of graphic novels, which detail her childhood in Tehran and ambivalent feelings towards postrevolutionary Iranian culture (the overthrow of the Shah, the Iran-Iraq war, and so on), are condensed into a film that employs deceptively complex black-and-white compositions to magnify her tempestuous emotions. As headstrong young Marjane listens to Western punk and rock-and-roll and defies the men who, thanks to the paternalism of her culture, treat her with callous entitlement, the movie becomes both flippantly entertaining and harrowingly tense: her youth is built off of the carefree verve she wants to embrace and the oppressive regime that won't let her have it. Persepolis is eye-opening and engaging at the same time, but it also moves so quickly that certain images and emotional traumas don't have the chance to register, and some of the stylistic tricks are too self-conscious for their own good. (The anarchic spirit of Satrapi's illustrations work better in still images than moving ones.) But it's hard to disparage the turbulent history undergone by both Marjane and her country, even if this movie only offers us a hasty Cliff's Notes version of it.

Monkey Business (d. Howard Hawks, USA, 1952) B–
There's an incredible wealth of talent at work on Monkey Business – Howard Hawks behind the camera (with Milton Krasner his cinematographer), Ben Hecht and I.A.L. Diamond as writers, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe onscreen – so this amiable screwball comedy inevitably disappoints a little bit. It's nowhere close to the freewheeling lunacy of Hawks' better comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and the humor dates more awkwardly than in many of Hawks', Grant's, or Rogers' finest hours. (Today's audiences probably won't find jokes about early-50s clothing and automobile fashions particularly hilarious.) At its best, screwball comedy is pure anarchic zeal, but the subgenre has a tendency to try too hard, screaming its jokes at us and hoping that its sheer bombast will cover up the weaker spots. For the most part, Monkey Business is best at its quieter moments: the sweet and witty interplay between Grant and Rogers (when they're not under the effects of Grant's disastrous youth serum), some chimpanzee actors who threaten to upstage their human counterparts, and a ludicrous but laugh-out-loud gag with an infant that Rogers assumes is her husband, reverted to his newborn years. Monroe, unfortunately, has little to do but look astounding (which of course she does).

4:44 Last Day on Earth (d. Abel Ferrara, USA/Switzerland/France, 2012) A–
Ferrara's latest is set on the day of the apocalypse, as a couple (Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh) deal with the impending end of the world, their own failed relationships and broken friendships, and past demons. They have sex, struggle to abstain from drugs and alcohol, paint, wander around; much of the movie is comprised of Skype sessions and grainy digital videos viewed online. If this sounds hilariously anti-special-effects for an end-of-the-world movie, that seems to be the point: these two people spend their last day on earth as they would most any other day, albeit with a greater sense of immediacy and regret. As in Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, the apocalypse approaches quietly, unavoidably: humans are powerless to thwart it, and simply go about their routine until they can't anymore. Yet if Tarr's film is more bleakly existential (emphasizing the insignificance of humans within the cosmos), Ferrara's allows room for a bit of humanism: in their last moments, these characters at least try to reach out to their loved ones, the pain of mistakes and unclaimed futures unspoken yet written on their faces. (Equally existential, then, yet in a different way: if there's no pattern to the cosmos, all people can do is forge their own relationships, writing their legacy by the way they lead their lives.) Quietly thought-provoking, 4:44 Last Day on Earth also has a fascinating view of technology as a bridge (rather than a hindrance) for human interaction – a theme devastatingly conveyed by a Chinese delivery man, who uses the main characters' laptop to Skype (in an unsubtitled conversation) with his family back home, tearfully saying his last goodbyes.

Accattone (d. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1961) A
Besides Buñuel, no other director mixes the profane and the sacred as audaciously as Pasolini, a tendency exhibited even from his feature debut, Accattone. Vittorio is a lowlife pimp on the outskirts of Rome; known as "Accattone" (a disparaging term for scrounger or beggar), he wanders the slums, visits his estranged wife and the son who doesn't know him, exploits the prostitute Maddelena (whose name pointedly echoes Mary Magdalene) until she's beaten by violent thugs and imprisoned by the police, and makes a fleeting effort to go straight for a beautiful peasant girl named Stella – an attempt at an honest living that doesn't last very long. Emblems of Catholic piousness (statues of angels, iconography of the crucifixion) commingle with the crumbling buildings and decrepit streets of the slums, turning Accattone into a spiritual story of degradation and the illusion of redemption. The movie is bleak and unflinching in its portrayal of the main character's coarse selfishness, but it's also tremendously sympathetic and humane: as in neorealism (the movement in which Accattone is usually, somewhat misleadingly, placed) the characters' everyday lives take on the vivid scope of real human experience, but Pasolini's formal ingenuity and gritty symbolism transcend neorealism, attaining something more spiritual.

The Merry Jail ("Das Fidele Gefängnis," d. Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1917) B+
Lubitsch's earliest surviving film is an interesting precursor of things to come for fans of the director, not to mention a blithe sex comedy (made in Berlin during the first World War!) that revels in carnal pleasure. More will be written on this soon, as I'm starting a series of articles about Lubitsch's filmography; here, I'll just mention that "the Lubitsch touch" is on display right from the beginning, especially in the director's subtle visual touches, which can deliver an entire joke and punchline through a simple tilt or pan.

Screening Log, May 23 - May 29

Ten (d. Abbas Kiarostami, 2002, France/Iran/USA) A–
One of Iranian cinema's most cerebral pranksters, Kiarostami here places a tiny digital camera on the dashboard of a taxicab in Tehran, then steps back and allows semi-improvised conversations to take place in an uncanny valley between fiction and documentary. In an example of his graceful minimalism, Kiarostami auditioned a large number of non-professional actors, then simply provided the subject matter for their interactions and allowed them to forge their own characters and conversations. Kiarostami is hardly absent, though; he steers the conversations into feminist territory, evoking female characters grappling with unfaithful lovers, a restrictive patriarchy, crises in religious faith, divorce, motherhood, and other issues that Iranian women typically aren't allowed to confront so explicitly in movies. Because of this, Ten is at once an emotional depiction of universal themes, a revealing snapshot of modern-day Tehran, and a striking formal experiment in fortuitous improvisation and a sort of laissez-faire directorial style.

Bronson (d. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009, UK) B–
Refn's stylish biopic relates the unsettling story of Michael Peterson, a London lad from a middle-class family who was imprisoned (initially to a seven-year sentence) for robbery, then spent the next 30 years in prison (most of them in solitary confinement) for instigating brutal brawls among prisoners and guards. Fittingly, he takes the alias Bronson – in honor of the Death Wish actor – for his vicious exploits. We should be thankful that the movie doesn't try to psychologize Bronson: there are no childhood traumas or mental anomalies to explain away his behavior, which of course makes his animalistic bloodlust all the more disturbing. While this means that there are no lazy plot devices to wrap up the main character with a tidy bow, it also means the movie can seem like all style and no substance: Bronson's violence is presented to us with a hypnotic arsenal of slow tracking shots and vivid patches of color, but any interpretations for its existence (a latent libidinous male impulse; society's propensity for turning violence into awe-inspiring spectacle) are entirely up to the viewer. But if the movie's point sometimes seems a little muddled, at least we have Tom Hardy's awe-inspiring lead performance and Refn's reliably dynamic style. (If he ever incorporates some strong ideas or genuine emotion into his aesthetic, he could be brilliant.)

This Is Not a Film (d. Mojtab Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, 2012, Iran) A
The production backstory is well-known: sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking by the Iranian government for allegedly "conspiring against the state," Jafar Panahi enlists the help of a friend (documentarian Mirtahmasb) to film his house arrest as he ponders film and the creative process. Meanwhile, the anti-government demonstrations of Firework Wednesday erupt on the Tehran streets outside — only a wall away, yet infinitely further. Knowing these circumstances won't prepare you for the singular experience of watching this quasi-film, though; the title, while a coy evasion of the punishment that was handed down to Panahi, is also correct in that you've never really seen a movie exactly like this. Close to certain essay films by Chris Marker or Agnès Varda, This Is Not a Film stands in awe of the creative process, cherishing the unexpected difficulties and fortuitous mistakes of the act of filmmaking, alleging that often it is the movie who "directs" the director. There's deep sadness, inevitably, as Panahi wonders if he'll ever be able to continue his next film project; but there's also a palpable love for Panahi's homeland and compatriots. Infinitely more complex than its anti-censorship foundation might suggest, This Is Not a Film ultimately makes the inspiring case that artists will continue to create, even after the tools of their expression have been cruelly taken away.

The Kid with a Bike (d. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2012, Belgium/France/Italy) B+
The Belgian masters of spare minimalism turn their attention to a motherless boy in a Parisian foster home. His immature dad works at a nearby restaurant but wants nothing to do with his own son, desperately holding any kind of responsibility at arm's length. (He's played by Jérémie Renier, a longtime Dardenne regular, in an echo of his deadbeat-dad role in 2005's L'Enfant.) The boy, compellingly played by Thomas Doret, is a red-haired spark of energy: we typically see him biking, running, flailing through the frame, often pouncing on boys much larger than him in a torrent of pent-up adolescent confusion. Really he's just looking for love, which sounds trite here but never comes off as stale in the film itself: the characterizations (sparse dialogue, seemingly effortless naturalism) convey emotion and honesty as subtly as possible. Ultimately The Kid with a Bike may seem less momentous than the Dardennes' The Son (2002) or less intense than L'Enfant, but it's also much more hopeful and has some of the brothers' most beautiful cinematography to date (it's shot by Alain Marcoen).

Cat People (d. Paul Schrader, 1982, USA) D+
Schrader's sexed-up remake of Jacques Tourneur's 1942 classic is a perfect summation of the writer/director's bizarre mix of Catholic conservatism and drugged-up, lustful hedonism – which, it turns out, isn't a good thing. Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell play sibling members of an ancient race of Cat People; if they make love with anyone outside their own race, they revert to their feline form at the point of orgasm, and can only become human again if they kill their lover. The story is ridiculous in a grandiose, mythical way, and it works whenever we're only watching Kinski: she has the kind of innate movie-star beauty where she only has to stand in front of the camera and we're instantaneously awed. An incredible movie could have been made around her alone. But unfortunately there are other characters – as her brother, McDowell is all bug-eyed insanity, an over-the-top self-parody that contrasts absurdly with Kinski's slow-burning passion; and as the zoologist who is irresistibly attracted to her, John Heard is an obnoxious epitome of crass early-80s machismo (you want to see him mauled by leopards as soon as possible). The movie is visually intoxicating, but its style can't mask a ridiculous moral prudishness: the underlying theme is that Kinski will unleash her dangerous wiles if she succumbs to her sexual impulses, but thankfully she's literally caged at the end of the movie, domesticated into obedience in a repellant metaphor for marriage. If the ending is supposed to be depressing (i.e., if Schrader finds marriage a soul-crushing imprisonment), you still have to notice the hypocrisy: he puts Kinski's nubile naked body on display for most of the movie, only to suggest that that kind of uninhibited sexuality has to be subdued and controlled somehow (preferably, it seems, by the arrogant zookeeper who's allowed to indulge his sexual whims any way he wants).

Cinévardaphoto (d. Agnès Varda, 2005, France)
Actually a triptych of short documentaries by one of the progenitors of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda. In the first short, Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc..., Varda employs digital video to peruse an art exhibit curated by vintage-photo collector Ydessa Hendeles. The exhibit covers several stories of an art gallery, overstuffed with photos from the early 20th century that somehow involve teddy bears; the gimmick is ostensibly a "narrative that explores world memory," and it's true that the photos (especially those of Nazis and Jews before and during the Holocaust) allow us to pore over them intently, trying to inscribe some sort of family history into the compositions (an investigation Varda accommodates by showing numerous still photos onscreen for long durations). While it offers a dense entryway into Varda's themes of photographic composition and its imprinting of memory, the next two shorts are more successful, especially Ulysses (from 1982), the high point of the collection. Varda re-explores a still photo she took in the late 1950s, a mysterious image of two naked male figures on a rocky beach, with the corpse of a goat in the foreground. Ulysses finds Varda at her most intellectually lively, drawing allusions and remembrances from a visual enigma; it also displays her blithe sense of humor (witness the follow-up interview with one of the photo's male subjects in the nude, or the scene of a goat proudly devouring a photographic print of one of its dead brethren). Finally, the last short – a documentary about the Cuban revolutionary movement made in 1963 – may be less dense and thought-provoking than the first two, but it offers a glimmering snapshot of an idealistic time and place that now seem petrified in history. Together, the three shorts provide a surprisingly entertaining deconstruction of notions of composition, remembrance, and community.