Object #65 - Ladder - A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972)

Dir. Francois Truffaut

People who call Truffaut over-rated are fools. Dismissing films like Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows, or Day For Night can only be done by someone who's trying to make a point, be that against Truffaut, or against the entire French New Wave. I'm not one to dismiss criticism lightly, because frankly, to do so is to stifle your own growth as an appreciator of film. That said, if you dislike all of Truffaut's films then I'm sorry, there is some cinema greatness that you will be worse off for not having in your life. We're all allowed one or two, after all, you can't love every film by every great director, I understand that. But my fear is that someone will view, say, 400 Blows and write off the 'lesser' films of Truffaut as a complete no-go, as why bother with the lesser works of a director you don't appreciate? I feel this fear because I did it myself. 

Yes I know, look at me the Truffaut spokesman speaking ill of the Oh-Great Master. But I did. I saw Shoot the Pianist and thought: "Not bad. Not entirely my cup of tea.". I then ignored his films for nearly two years. Then I saw Jules and Jim, and boy, I dug that groove hard. Since then I've been playing catch up. Digging into the 'lesser' works, the B-Grade, say The Soft Skin (which to call B-grade is massively insulting, but there you go), I was still digging it. Then I came to A Gorgeous Girl Like Me, which has only gained a bit of traction lately due to a new HD transfer, and said to myself: "Just get this one out of the way, and move on to the later stuff". For the record - I'm a fucking moron who should never listen to himself. 

A Gorgeous Girl Like Me is a film that once you watch it, you wonder where it's been all your life. Let's talk about the object to illustrate why. The film opens with a young sociologist (Andre Dussollier) entering a female prison-ward to interview Camille Bliss (Bernadette Lafont), imprisoned for the murder of her father, early in her life, and her lover, more recently. The young sociologist, Stanislas, is out of his depth the moment Camille first interacts with him. This is entirely within character for her. She is a woman who throughout the film, can dominate men to do her bidding with the mere promise of sex, the provision of sex, or the withholding of sex. Now, this may give you the wrong impression, but rest assured, Camille is an incredible character beyond her sexual appeal. The sex-drive of men makes them buffoons, and their sexual quirks are exploited by Camille to full effect. Like an unwitting insect, Stanislas has walked into her spider-web, and she will spins her charms on him, to his full knowledge, and yet he will find himself unable to resist. He will help free her from prison, and it will sting him, but to him, oh what a pleasurable sting.

The playfulness of Camille, brought to vivid life by Bernadette Lafont, makes her stand out, even in the drab prison environment. Her choice of song to test the microphone for the interview, the very fact she chooses to sing, paint a picture of a woman un-encumbered by the worry of a prison sentence. It is very rare to see Camille entirely alone, so we can't tell if she's putting this on to charm Stanislas, but it seems to be 100% her, which is both endearing and terrifying, as prison is no deterrent at all to her. 

The filmmaking reflects this playfulness, which comes as no surprise considering it's Truffaut. Saying that, most of his visual and editing uniqueness is contained in the early flashback to Camille's murder of her father. Her father argues with her mother, off-screen, as we see a young Camille pluck at a banjo. This annoys her father, who throws a box at her, and we see him burst out of the house - a rotund, bullish man, who steps down, kicks at the dirt, then steps on her banjo. He literally kicks his way about the farm, kicking his young daughter on the butt. If nothing else gives you the tone of the film, it's the fact that she is sent boosted into the air, with a whimsical musical note, and lands in a hay-bale. It's clearly an effect, what looks like by wire, and that's the point. Truffaut does not constrain himself to hard realism, and casts it aside when needed. The recollection of Camille is entirely hers, and is one where a kick up the arse sends you up like a cartoon character.

Very quickly, the screen geometrically closes up on her surprised face, blackening the rest of the frame. It's not the first time Truffaut has used such a trick, but the inclusion here adds to the playfulness, not in any massively significant way, but it's a touch that simply by being unique and unexpected, gives the scene (and the film as a whole) a levity, life. Her father climbs into a barn-loft used to store wood, and again, stomps his way about looking for a right piece. The next shot has the ladder float upwards, being carried by someone as the camera pans left following the ladder, before it is lowered and falls out of frame to the right, revealing in the next shot that's it's Camille carrying it. We hear her father shout, a loud thud, see Camille briefly turn her head and smile, nodding to herself at a job well done. She leaves screen-left, the ladder trailing behind. We see the father dead on the ground, surrounded by chickens, having fallen out of incompetence at the ladder's disappearance. 

I've seen playful murders on screen before, but never quite like this. The way the ladder floats, Truffaut withholding the identity of the carrier, almost making it seem as if the ladder is literally floating away of its own volition. It isn't a mystery by any means, we know Camille will be involved, but it's playful, and I love the fact that it's done with some nice camera work. The fact that it's a little girl efficiently killing her father adds to the humour as it's treated as such a non-event. What the editing achieves, as I alluded to earlier, is a setting apart of Camille's recollections in comparison to the dull prison environment. This doesn't really last or become a pointed rule and that's why I love it. Childhood is a playful time, so why not have some fun with film conventions as we show the plot-necessary event?

Even in the 'lesser' Truffauts, you will find gems like this. I enjoy the entire film for being so fun, and for its full embrace of sex as a tool for humour. You look at your trash like Sex-Tape and compare it to this, and it's night and day; where one treats sex as a cheap punchline, this revels in using sex on a character, plot, and thematic level. But I like the Carry On films, so take my judgement as you see fit. My point with this post is to remind myself, and you the reader, to never underestimate or put down a filmmaker that is great, or that you appreciate, as what drew you to them in the first place is oftentimes not a fluke, but may not express itself as fully in some works as in others. Also in this case, fuck general opinion as you could be seriously missing out on something that just clicks with you, like A Gorgeous Girl Like Me did with, well, me. 

Object #64 - Bucket - Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Dir. Vittorio De Sica

There is power in reflecting life on film. Objectively, the ability to empathise with characters on screen shouldn't matter in our appreciation of a film. Subjectively, and in practice, that's bullshit. Take one look at the Harry Potter fandom and it's clear that a large majority of those fans love the world of Hogwarts because they would wish to be there themselves, in the shoes of Harry, Hermione, or Gryffindor Student #84. Hell, some people watch Breaking Bad and empathise so wholly with the journey of Walter White from chemistry teacher to drug baron, that they whine and moan about how horrible a wife Skylar White is. Objectively, she is the wife of a man who, while suffering from cancer, spends his remaining time not with his family, but cooking and selling drugs to pay for his treatment. That excuse is lost as the series continues, and he cooks for the pleasure of it, but still, some people stand with him, and the amount of times I've seen Skylar called a bitch is unbelievable. But is that a bad thing?

The answer is of course, yes, one of the reasons being the above. But arguably, the show-runners and filmmakers of Breaking Bad succeed in making us empathise with Walter to such a degree that we at the very least understand his drives as a person, whether we support him is a different matter, but many do. Skylar doesn't support Walt, and so she becomes this shrewish woman to some viewers, bringing down this outlaw, drug dealer vibe that the show bathes us in. Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street does the same thing as in a drug-haze Jordan Belfort attempts to drive away with his child, crashing the car, his child's head slamming into the seat - it comes like a bucket of cold water, breaking us away from the outrageous fun of the previous two hours, and showing us the true Jordan, an incompetent, dangerous father.

Speaking of buckets (how's that for a clunky segway?), we have Bicycle Thieves. Here, as with most Italian Neo-realist films, the goal is to portray the lives of present-day (post WWII) Italians, often poor, and to have us see them not as larger than life characters on a screen, but as real people, merely shown to us via the screen. I spoke in my last post about Vertov and the cinema-eye, showing us the true world, well this is it again, however it is no documentary. It is fiction, but done in such a way to reflect real-life that it may as well be a documentary. The plot has a political bent, as we see how the country fails to find work for all the returning soldiers of WWII, and this tale, of a man and his family making ends meet to afford a bicycle so that he can hang posters of new Hollywood movies over Rome, is one of many. 

The film opens with Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) learning of the job opportunity that he's chosen for, but to accept it he must have a bike. He says he does, although he doesn't. He returns to his wife, Maria (Liannella Carell), she fetching water in two buckets for the house. She is clearly doing her bit, like the other wives, as housekeeper. Antonio relays the information to her, his personality apparent - slightly feckless, a worrier, who is lost in his own problems but doesn't solve them directly. She struggles to carry the buckets and he does nothing. He turns around to see her reaction to his worry that they cannot afford a bike, and she articulates her neck to the buckets. Almost snapped back to reality, Antonio reaches over and takes one of them, saving her the struggle.

The scene continues, as the walk back to their house. But that's it. That it the moment where the promise of Neo-realism, which I'd read up on a little before viewing the film, was met. See my previous Ponyo post to see how much I appreciate human moments on film. This was glorious. The detail adds nothing to the plot, but it provides spades of character-building. The way Maria struggles for a while, not even prompting Antonio, as she is used to this absent-minded treatment from her husband, who she nonetheless adores. The way Antonio immediately rights the wrong, and welcomes her input after taking the bucket. 

As they return home, we get another of these moments, as Maria goes into the bedroom and begins to take the sheets off, to Antonio's befuddlement. In that wonderful, determined way, she does this, then reaches into the cabinet drawer to remove the spare blankets, so that they can be sold to afford the bike. But wonderfully, the drawer sticks a bit, and in her frustrated mental state, this annoys her even more. She doesn't want to deprive them of the simple warmth of a bed, but she must do, and will do, so that her husband can afford the bike, get the job, and earn enough money to buy food, pay the rent, and eventually buy the sheets back. We've all had drawers stick when we're in a hurry, and it's doubly frustrating, and so what do we do? We empathise almost fully with Maria, and we see her as a real-person, dealing with real issues - Neo-realism in a nut-shell, accomplished not with camera trickery, but with the documentation of real, trivial things like forgetting to carry heavy buckets, or a stuck drawer.

As the two pawn the bed-sheets later, they sneak a look through the window of the warehouse and we see rows upon rows of similar sheets plied high, as the warehouse attendant must climb the wooden shelves to find room for them. This is how the film links to the wider social issues of the country, as hundreds, if not thousands of families go without necessities like bed-clothes to keep themselves alive. The much needed sheets however sit, among hundreds of their type, in a warehouse, benefiting nobody but the pawnbroker, and even he benefits little as who has the money to buy sheets? The film points fingers, but does it with an understanding that the person you point fingers at is just that, a person, with their own story, their own troubles.

The thief of Antonio's bicycle is later found, and is defended by his neighbours as an upstanding man. The old man who spoke to the thief only wants to be left alone, and the churchgoers look down on Antonio for disrupting their service. I mean it when I say that every character in Bicycle Thieves is believable. Each character has a story that can be inferred from their place in this era of Rome, and that story tends to be one of poverty. Antonio, Maria, and their son, Bruno's (Enzo Staiola) story is only one such story. In the close of the film, Antonio he attempts to steal a random bike, and he is accosted by the crowd, who see him as little more than a weak-willed thief. We know different, but only because we have been shown his story. Even the 'villains' of the world should be given the utmost empathy, as under poverty families begin to look out only for themselves, and this tends to harm others, ironically it is normally the poor, thus creating a cycle of misfortune for those already under economic blight. The world is not black and white, but grey, and on film, that grey is a rainbow of opportunity to explore.

Object #62 + #63 - Film / Camera - Man With a Movie Camera (1929) / Amy (2015)

Dir. Dziga Vertov / Asif Kapadia

We take for granted the artifice of film. Film, that is, a movie, a motion picture, is simply a quick succession of still images played in sequence. These sequences convey motion, the passage of time, and can be edited after the fact to create anything the director wants. The magic of cinema is the ability to manipulate images to create moving art. Now, this can happen in a Hollywood effects studio, where Chris Pine's Kirk will have a little touch up to make him the hero we know and love - a stunt rope edited away here, a blemish digitally removed there. That is art, the creation of a Hollywood hero, and don't let anyone tell you different. But what is oftentimes more difficult, and what the best filmmakers can achieve, is the editing of the real world, before it is captured on film - the immaculate staging and framing of Ozu, whose sets were constructed in such a way that they are almost symbiotically linked to the camera placement. One could not exist without the other to create the final, stationary shot.

Ozu is a wonderful example as he is at arguably the furthest extreme of moving image on film. Ozu's films are like those magical photographs of Harry Potter, the frame remains stationary, but the composition of the shot (or photo) allows the actors within the frame to play out the most human of drama. Ozu's films are windows into the worlds he has created. There is no clear opposite end to this spectrum, as once the camera moves, it has gone 360°, even if it doesn't use the entire spectrum available to it. You could say the quick-cuts of Greengrass in the Bourne films, which then includes those like Megaton who take it to the nth degree, nullifying any composition at all, and indeed, coherence. Found-footage movies are interesting spin-offs here as they are composed by a filmmaker and yet they are also not, as the freedom of movement creates spontaneity - almost filmic jazz, where no two takes will be the same.  

Frankly, what you will discuss down this road is the entirety of cinema and the field of cinematography, so it's best to talk about the early avent-garde genius of Dziga Vertov before we get carried away. The 68 minute movie (available on wikipedia in full) is not just a classic of cinema, but an educator. The film displays a dizzying amount of camera and editing trickery to simply document a Russian city and its people. It was both a culmination and ongoing experiment of the Kino-eye movement, which Vertov wrote at length on, and was used as a manifesto, alongside the other Kinos, to show how the camera would reflect the truth of the real-world. A political statement of Marxism as science - fascinating to read the passion of Vertov for this concept, even more fascinating is viewing his experimental films, which convey the concept. Film schools are built on this stuff, and lectures given. I've no doubt you could fill a semester or two discussing each technique used by Vertov in the film and what effects he wanted them to have. 

There is a sequence early in the film, where, after seeing Vertov film a group of men and women in a horse-drawn carriage, the so-far moving images suddenly stop. The horse's legs frozen mid-gallop. The carriage riders no longer move but stare at each other, frozen. The entire hustle and bustle of the street cut to a single frame. Before moving film, this was the artform to capture life - photography. That field also has rules of composition, and indeed motion pictures are by their very nature slaved to photography. What Vertov succeeds at doing here at a practical level is display to us the mechanics of the capturing of film, which is shown directly, as we see the editor at work, splicing these still images, on physical film, together. 

But emotionally, my god, what he does is a revelation! Life and death in the palm of our hands, nestled between running metal, captured on chemicals. The cameraman atop a moving car, filming the carriage - motion, excitement, the very thing Hollywood has perfected, like a roller-coaster the simple act of moving quickly gets you going. The added dimension of the cameraman being filmed to show us his actions, adding a meta notion to the camera-as-eye, as the cameraman filming a moving object is filmed by another cameraman atop another moving object. The street, full of people, going about their lives, frozen in time. It's something I touched upon in my piece on Chaplin's The Circus. As the moving image becomes still, life is stripped away, and we are left with but a taxidermy of the real-thing. A butterfly collection is beautiful to look at, like a collection of photographs, but it is static, dead, an approximation of the beauty of a live butterfly in motion. 

But Vertov goes further, as this entire emotion is only felt due to his editing of the sequence, an irony that I'm sure he grasped. Despite the documentary reflecting life as-is, the story it tells is done in the editing room - look no further than Charlie Brooker's demonstration of narrative editing of reality-TV. The spirit of film as a great step forward in our ability to capture life is playfully shown by Vertov in his experimental stop-motion sequences, his double-exposures, and techniques that to this day make you ask: "How the fuck did a guy and his camera do that in the 20's?".

Skipping over 85 years of filmaking, not least the entire genre of documentaries, we've reached Amy. Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. Life is now captured by hand-held phones of the late 90's/early 00's, the picture quality worse than that of film as digital capturing of moving images are traded-off and balanced with the ergonomics of a multi-use media device. Over the course of Amy, phones become steadily smarter, starting to offer high-quality image capture and even motion-picture capture of a decent quality. As we begin the film with artifacted, low-meg phone footage of house-parties and teenage fun, and digital camera footage of an up and coming young Londoner, shot by her similarly young and up and coming manager, the world is ok. It's actually surreal to be utterly back in the 00's British world, with Tony Blair, crappy flip-phones, CD sales topping charts, DVDs as something new, fashion becoming that much more dated by the hour.  

    

Unfortunately, as the fame of the talented Amy Winehouse grows, the attention of those with more sophisticated technology comes a-calling. Paparazzi cameras now capture every public moment of Winehouse's life, in high quality, ready to be printed in crappy magazines, and crappy newspapers who dwell on the lows of the vulnerable star. Vertov, I think, would have embraced the earlier form, and I like to think he'd have done some fantastic work with it. There is a true-to-life beauty in those early videos of Winehouse, often done by herself, occasionally turning the camera to capture her own face, in raw detail. There is no Hollywood removal of pimples, dodgy mascara, or tear-stained make-up. Vertov's vision would have had to include this, and today, the everyday artistry of a Snapchat story, as how is that not the capturing of life? Every embarrassed look away from the camera, every knock-out performance in an underground bar, everyday life. 

There's a sequence towards the end of the film, where Winehouse leaves the hotel she is at to visit her husband who's in jail. What Kapadia does, as the director of this succession of images, both moving and still, is convey the extent to which Winehouse's life was not her own. Traditional moving image, i.e video footage from the phone of one of her entourage is replaced by a rapid succession of still, paparazzi images. The clicking, flashing, cacophony of noise and light is reflected, literally by Winehouse, as she is lit in that sickly bright way, separating her from her surroundings (the poorest imitation of a show spotlight), and reflected in her dead eyes. This is someone numb to the invasion of her privacy, no longer able to react to this machine-gun-like barrage on the senses in any way but getting to her destination as quickly as possible. We see the tragedy of her life in Kapadia's selection of images. There are enough photos taken of Winehouse stepping outside the doors of the hotel, to the door of her car, to actually, almost stop-motion-like, show us the movement. 

It uses the editing of film, here entirely digitally created, to make us feel that experience of the paparazzi hell. But the irony is, is that Winehouse as a subject thus allows us to fully understand her experience, due to this widespread documentation, both within and without. Quite simply, Kapadia has all the footage he needs to make his film from photos, and video footage shot by the paparazzi, the journalists, from the reality-TV show following her life (to make her father a quick buck), her friends and family, and of course, Amy herself. But Amy Winehouse was not a filmmaker, and as true to life as her phone-calls, texts, photos, and videos are in a Vertovian sense, the self she chose to express is found in her music. As the credits roll to her cover of Valerie, white words on black like a tombstone, we can mourn her with a greater understanding of her troubles, her passions, and the meaning behind her music.