Intolerance (AKA
Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages, Intolerance: A Sun-Play of
the Ages)
Dir: D.W. Griffith
Prod: D.W. Griffith
Scr: D.W. Griffith,
Anita Loos, Hettie Grey Baker, Tod Browning, Mary H. O’Connor, Frank E. Woods
Phot: G.W. “Billy”
Bitzer
Premiere: August 6,
1916
210 mins., original
cut; 197 mins., most existing cuts
Like his other notable epic The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffiths’ Intolerance is an eroded monument, one that doesn’t really live in
people’s hearts as Citizen Kane, Casablanca, or The Gold Rush do. In critical estimation, like Nation, it is cherished for its technical achievements but not much
else. It’s one of the first “art” films – a label that usually means – it’s
brilliant but nobody watches it.
Birth of a Nation,
the Civil War saga made by Griffith two years before Intolerance, was a stupendous filmic achievement and huge financial
success. However, it was also grossly racist. This sparked an immense pushback
from African Americans and social progressives across the country. (It is also
cited as singlehanded reviving the white-supremacist terror group, the Ku Klux
Klan.) In one of the supremely ironic moments in American film history,
Griffith conceived of Intolerance in
response to the liberal censure of his openly racist thinking.
Christ preaches
In this project, Griffith literally outdid himself. He
dreamed of going far beyond what anyone else had done with film narrative, and
he succeeded. Intolerance is
structured like an immense musical fugue – different passages that all relate
to a central theme. There are four different narratives – a story set in
ancient Babylon, the story of Christ, a story of the St. Bartholomew’s Day
massacre in 1572 France, in which Catholics slaughtered Protestants, and a
‘modern-day’ story concerning the deadly influence of socially progressive
do-gooders. The result: a film originally nearly four hours long, catnip for
critics but baffling to viewers.
So what makes it so great? It’s Griffith’s idea that not
only was he capable of telling stories this way, but that the viewer is capable
of understanding them, to synthesize the stories and relate them to the central
image, the recurring image of the Eternal Motherhood rocking a cradle,
symbolizing continuity and rebirth (with the Three Fates sitting ominously in
the background). It’s a faith in the audience that Hollywood would never test
again.
'Out of the cradle endlessly rocking . . . '
The modern story, “The Mother and the Law,” was in the
planning stages even before The Birth of
a Nation. It has the most solid storyline of the four, and the wooliest
thinking behind it. In it, Griffith indicts the idle rich, the capitalist
bosses, the striking workers, the criminal element, but above all the
horse-faced biddies whose intolerance of the working class’ simple lives and pleasures
leads them to interfere with and destroys the lives of the powerless The titles -- 'Jealous of youth and laughter,' '' We must have laws to make people good" -- lay out his message. All seem
to conspire to deny The Dear One (Mae Marsh) and The Boy (Bobby Harron). happiness,
their baby, and The Boy’s life. (Griffith prefers his characters as archetypes
rather than as rounded personalities.) It a conventional tale, complete with a
race to save The Boy from the gallows.
Racing eagerly alongside and amongst this are the other plot
threads. The Babylonian sequence is by far the best realized visually,
sumptuously designed and innovatively shot (the track-in shot of its mighty,
elaborate setting is the best remembered part of the film). Beside these two,
the French story seems perfunctory, and the Crucifixion almost an afterthought.
The film’s pretentious intertitles don’t help. These, combined with the film’s
visual grandiosity, make Intolerance seem
hopelessly pompous and condescending.
But if you ignore the words, something happens. Every single
frame is carefully and beautifully designed for maximum effect. Every scene is
fully inhabited, with hundreds of actors in character and in harmonious action,
even in the deep background and at the edges of the frame. The four stories are
told with perfect clarity, using close-ups, dolly shots, irises, frame masking,
panoramic sweeps, and more – none used
gratuitously, all subordinated to service of the narrative. (The four
storylines are even given distinctive tints as a visual aid.) The film’s insane
budget of $2.5 million ($47 million today) is sell-used, up there on the
screen. Most astonishing is that the script was unwritten, existing only in
Griffith’s head and explicated to an army of designers, technicians, crew and
cast on a daily basis.
Griffith's scenic vocabulary: from panoramic vision
to excruciating closeup
The most important innovation is the film’s editing. With
musical grace, Griffith cuts brilliantly not only within but between the
stories, maintaining a hypnotic rhythm that imperceptibly speeds up throughout
the film, until all four stories climax in a brilliant rush of imagery that
leaps dizzy into the viewers’ laps. This achievement opened the eyes of
directors and editors around the world. More than 100 years later, it still
looks fresh. No wonder it perplexed many at the time.
Despite the critical praise and success at the box office, Intolerance was doomed never to meet its
costs, and the losses dogged Griffith for the rest of his career. He tinkered
with Intolerance’s editing for years
afterward, even producing stand-alone versions of the modern and Babylonian
stories. Today, when “director’s cuts” are all the rage, no definitive cut of Intolerance exists. He went on to make
other great films such as Way Down East,
Broken Blossoms, and Orphans of the Storm, but never again
was he allowed to on as large a scale. Hollywood’s business model would, with
rare exceptions, no longer tolerate auteurs.
The NFR Project is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry,
in chronological order. Next time: The Curse of Quon Gwon.
Dir: Charles
Swickard, William S. Hart (uncred.), Clifford Smith (uncred.)
Prod: Thomas H. Ince
Scr: C. Gardiner
Sullivan
Phot: Joseph H.
August
Premiere: March 5,
1916
64 mins.
It seems highly unlikely now that
William S. Hart could ever have achieved the iconic status he possesses in
cinema culture. Even during his heyday, he was viewed by some critics and
moviegoers as stolid, horse-faced, with an emotional disposition of slight but
disquieting constipation.
However, an aggregation of personal
qualities and external circumstances propelled him to the forefront of the
national consciousness. In 68 films created over a mere 11-year span
(1914-1925), he crafted an authoritative and compelling archetype, and created
a moral/mythic context for film Westerns that still defines the genre today.
Hell’s
Hinges is his most emblematic film, one whose simple power and apposite
impulses transcends its most egregious clichés. It is at once reactionary and
revolutionary, a film in which deeply felt piety gives its bearer license to
unleash Armageddon – an emblematic American gesture that would find its way
into other genres, and even invade the historical realm.
Like many who upheld the mythos of
America’s Old West, Hart was an Easterner. He was born in Newburgh, New York,
in 1864. His father was an itinerant miller, and his impoverished family
traveled widely during his childhood. Some of this time was spent in the West
and Midwest, at the tail end of the frontier
period.
Though it is likely that his contact
with this rapidly vanishing culture was glancing and superficial, the shy,
daydreaming youth later inflated these memories, beefing them up into a
recalled childhood that teemed with intimate contacts with Indians and famous
frontiersmen. Hart would parlay this sense of anointment into a weighty sense
of self-importance and authenticity in his work.
Hart spent nearly 25 years on
American stages, working himself up into the leading ranks of Broadway
performers. Adept at Shakespeare, he eventually made his name as the original, villainous
Messala in the first theatrical version of Ben-Hur.
Then, in 1905, he filled his first Western role – that of the villainous Cash Hawkins
in a stage production of The Squaw Man.
From then on, “audiences … associated him with cowboy characters.”
Alfred Hollingsworth as villain 'Silk' Miller, with Hart as a pre-reformed 'Blaze' Tracy
In 1913, Hart was on tour in
Cleveland, Ohio, when he saw his first Western film. “It was awful! … I was an
actor and I knew the West … The opportunity that I had been waiting for years
to come was knocking at my door.” Within a year, Hart set out for California
and the movie business.
By the time Hell’s Hinges was made, Hart had appeared in 25 films and captured
the audience’s imagination, becoming one of American film’s first genuine
stars. In this, he was fortunate to fall in with pioneer film producer, and
former fellow thespian, Thomas H. Ince, who applied the techniques of Ford’s
assembly line to the nascent movie industry, cranking out a massive amount of
product in an efficient manner – presaging the Hollywood system.
Given creative freedom (and grossly
underpaid) by Ince, Hart brought new qualities to the Western, which previously
had been known best for chases, scenes of gunplay, and the broad emotionalism
of actors such as “Broncho Billy” Anderson (another New Yorker, nee Max
Aronson). Although the theme of the bad man achieving redemption through
sacrifice was not unknown in the Western, Hart’s restrained gravity on screen
gave new weight to as-yet-uncliched figure of the domesticated outlaw.
Hart’s subdued intensity was a
marked change from the over-the-top histrionics of his predecessors. His
practiced skill at manipulating an audience was honed through incessant film
work. Though his hamminess breaks through at times, the essential, “manly”
stillness of his screen persona would be imitated by countless followers – most
notably, John Wayne.
Hart’s performances were also imbued
with the sentiments of the Victorian era – giving a strangely stilted, almost
Puritanical bent to even his most vicious characters. In the Hart universe,
women are either catspaws of evil or vessels of light, to be spurned or
worshipped. Children are devices to rouse pity and inspire sacrifice. In Hell’s Hinges, the simple cowboy film
becomes a vehicle for an epic confrontation between good and evil.
The actions of men, or their tragic
inability to act, dominate here. Hinges
opens with the depiction of an anti-hero in unique garb – that of a minister.
“Bob” Henley (Jack Standing), seen preaching to an assembly of adoring women,
is characterized in the film’s intertitles as a mother-dominated, “weak and
selfish youth.”
His superiors see seem as unable to
stand up to the harsh demands of a city parish, and decide to send him West,
“where the people live simply and close to God.” This is in keeping with the
common cultural assumption of the time that the West was a more “real,”
elemental place, simpler yet more challenging, a place where Darwinian
processes could work themselves out unhindered. (Henley,
told of this decision, fantasizes briefly about ministering to some lovely,
flirtatious senoritas.)
Accompanied by his
not-so-subtly-named sister Faith (Clara Williams), Henley finds himself in, not
Hell, but a remarkable facsimile thereof. (The brother/sister relationship
eerily echoes Hart’s own life. Frequently engaged, briefly married, he spent
most of his life with his sister Mary Ellen, who jealously tended him.) An
introductory gunfight, taken in an overhead long shot, emphasizes the chaotic,
antlike scurrying of the town’s inhabitants.
As was common in the Old West,
Placer Centre – better known as Hell’s Hinges – is dominated by the pleasure
palace of Silk Miller (Alfred Hollingsworth), who is characterized with casual
racism as part Mexican, part snake. As the town’s Mephistopheles, he will bring
all his evil talents to bear on destroying Christianity and its followers.
Hart is Miller’s confederate “Blaze”
Tracy, who is indicated as wicked mainly by smoking, drinking, and grinning.
(He shoots up a tin can that’s been decorated with a caricature of the new
preacher – a nice metaphor for the relative flimsiness of Henley’s
character.)
Tracy’s resolve to run the preacher
out of town is stymied by his instant attraction to Faith. His poleaxed gaze at
her is accompanied by the intertitle: “One who is evil, looking for the first
time on that which is good.” At that point, the film’s double set of parallel
actions kicks into gear. Henley’s fall is
inevitable, as is Tracy’s rise and redemption. Later, in contrast to Henley’s salacious earlier fantasy, Tracy has a vision of
the proverbial old rugged cross.
Like a war campaign, the town’s two
sides invade each other’s territories. Miller’s soused and rowdy patrons swarm
into the barn in which the town’s churchly folk, the “petticoat brigade,” hold
their first service – until Tracy forces them out at gunpoint. Later, when
Henley is seduced by Miller’s prostitute protégé Dolly (Louise Glaum), the
church folk, led by Tracy, march into Miller’s saloon as a body and retrieve
their fallen shepherd. (One of the strongest shots in the picture is an angled
one of Tracy marching down the main street toward the camera with the
unconscious Henley draped over his shoulders.)
The spiritual coterie builds its
church, with Tracy’s help – his conversion process is punctuated by a simple,
affecting scene of him reading the Bible, cigarette in one hand, bottle of
whiskey at his side. Ironically, Henley’s turn
to drink renders him a near-imbecile, and when the town rowdies shout, “To hell
with the church! Let’s burn her down!”, Henley gleefully snatches up a torch
and leads the way.
A pitched battle results in Henley’s
death, the expulsion of the faithful, and the immolation of the church – in one
of the film’s many powerful images, Faith weeps over her brother’s corpse in
the foreground, while behind, smoke boils and hurtles, wind-whipped, from the
isolated figure of the burning house of worship.
“Killin’ mad, and with a gun in each
hand,” Tracy, who’s been conveniently out of town during the battle, hears of
its outcome from a ragged band of refugees (what happens to the expelled
“petticoat brigade”? we are never informed) and returns to settle the score.
His extermination of Miller is
offhand – blink and you’ll miss it. Filled with a new-found, (self) righteous
vengeance, Tracy becomes a bloodthirsty, vindictive embodiment of both the
“social gospel,” a popular 19th-century kind of spiritual Manifest
Destiny, and its coefficient, “muscular Christianity,” which basically gave its
proponents license to whip the tar out of scoffers, nonbelievers, and those of
other faiths.
Rivetingly, Tracy backs the saloon’s
ne’er-do-wells into a corner and shoots down the overhanging oil lamps, turning
the building into an inferno (“Hell needs this town, and it’s goin’ back, and
goin’ damn quick!”) Shooting down those who try to bolt, he holds the men at
gunpoint until the last possible second, then allows them to flee. Remaining
behind, Tracy then seems to break focus, wandering distractedly, the flames
leaping up behind him. Some judicially placed flares of combustible material to
the rear give Hart a hellish nimbus. It’s almost as though his descent into
violence has temporarily transformed him into a demon as well, later echoed in
Eastwood’s similar climax in 1992’s Unforgiven.
An avenging angel
Hart strides out of the building and
into the streets, moving toward the camera robotically, a death-dealing
machine, like some ur-Terminator. Cowpokes and dance-hall girls scatter amid
the swirling smoke, “like vague demons in some primitive hell,” as the entire
town burns to the ground. There is redemption for Hart alone, and it’s savage.
In a peculiar foreshadowing of the Vietnam experience, he destroys the
village in order to save it.
No wonder so many claimed the
director’s credit for the film – although Charles Swickard is officially
credited, it is generally acknowledged that Hart directed at least most of the
film, with the help of long-time assistant Clifford Smith. Ince took credit for
helming the fire scenes, but the extraordinary strength of the film’s
compositions can probably credited to Colorado-born photographer Joe August,
who shot over 40 of Hart’s films and went on to be an Oscar-winning
cinematographer of such Hollywood classics as The Informer, Laughton’s Hunchback
of Notre Dame, and Gunga Din. The
climactic fire sequence was shot “day for night,” although prints without the
colored gels that indicate day and night scenes make this difficult to
remember.
At film’s end, Tracy takes up
Henley’s body, and Faith’s hand, leading her into the distance. Though there is
a conventional happy ending in sight, what’s gone before has tainted it, and
thrown the film’s premise out of joint. Slaughter and wholesale destruction is
sanctified by religion … or is it? In this wildly popular film, the audience
got to have its cake and eat it too – a dangerous addiction that would crop up,
for better or worse, again and again in American cinema.
This piece appeared in its
original form in the July 2005 edition of Senses of Cinema. The NFR Project is
an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in
chronological order. Next time: Intolerance.
The inclusion of this version of Jules Verne’s epic, pioneer
science-fiction novel on the list is due to its technical achievement – the
first successful underwater filming for a feature film.
The most famous adaptation of 20,000 leagues Under the Sea is Richard Fleischer’s 1954
Disney-produced extravaganza. And there were a couple of attempts prior to the
1916 effort, and many since. This particular cinematic reworking was financed
by the budding Universal Studios, which at the time was just coming into its
own and was still known as the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Led by
Carl Laemmle, it was one of the first to break with the Edison-imposed,
patent-based monopoly on film production.
By 1915, Laemmle had constructed his studio, Universal City,
in California, just over the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood. The forward-thinking
Laemmle immediately opened his studio to tourists, charging them five cents a
head, box lunch included – a tradition that continues today, albeit at a higher
price point and without the meal. However, this film was shot on location in
the Bahamas, on and around New Providence Island.
The reason? The location boasted crystal-clear waters at
depth. This was vital to the attempt to film narrative under the surface of the
water for the first time. The technological breakthrough that led to this was
initiated by sea captain Charles Williamson, who invented an accordion-like
apparatus of interlocking, waterproof iron sections that could be supplied with
air and lowered to the depth of 250 feet, for aid in salvage and rescue
operations. His son, journalist John Ernest Williamson, imagined the
possibilities for taking photographs and moving pictures using the device.
The younger Williamson designed and built a spherical
viewing chamber with a built-in, five-foot diameter, 1.5-inch-thick glass port.
With the addition of an underwater lighting rig, he soon found he could capture
usable footage. The gimmick was the linchpin of the production. With his
brother George, John “directed” the effective underwater sequences.
The film itself is a passable adaptation. It combines
Verne’s novel with its sequel, The
Mysterious Island, fudging plotlines and adding a romantic subplot, a
lost-child subplot, a revenge subplot . . . . What was once astonishing to
filmgoers’ eyes is hard to gawp at now – it’s necessary to consciously wind
back our credulity to a state it might have been in 101 years ago. If you can
do that, then the fancifully clad undersea figures regain a bit of their
totemic power.
The NFR Project is an
attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in
chronological order. Next time: Hell’s Hinges.
Dir: Reginald Barker,
Thomas H. Ince, Raymond B. West, Walter Edwards (uncred.), David Hartford
(uncred.), Jay Hunt (uncred.), J. Parker Read Jr. (uncred.)
Prod: Thomas H. Ince,
Al Woods
Scr: C. Gardiner
Sullivan
Phot: Joseph H.
August, Dal Clawson, Clyde De Vinna, Otis M. Gove, Devereaux Jennings, Charles
E. Kaufman, Robert Newhard, Irvin Willat
Premiere: December
31, 1915
86 mins.
What do you do when you want people to hate war? You make a
war film, of course.
Civilization is a
big-budget extravaganza that relates intense pacifist sentiment. It’s an
attempt to reinforce the strong isolationist feelings of much of the American
public before the country joined World War One. Like its parent cause, the film
fails.
Jesus rebukes the warmongering King
The conflict broke out in the summer of 1914, but
then-President Woodrow Wilson successfully led efforts to keep the U.S.
neutral, even after such incidents as the sinking of the British passenger
liner Lusitania in May of 1915 (of
the 1,198 casualties, 128 were American citizens). The bulk of the American
public had no desire to go to war, and those who did were typed as allies of “war
profiteers.” In 1916, Wilson was reelected, using the campaign slogan “He kept
us out of war.”
Screenwriter C. Gardiner Sullivan was inspired to write the
story on Easter, 1915, and pioneer film mogul Thomas Ince thought it was worth
a lavish realization. At a reported cost of $1,000,000 (in reality, more like
$100,000), it was a huge popular success, and may have helped Wilson win the
contest over Charles Evens Hughes, which was decided by the narrowest margin of
victory in a presidential election until 2004.
The film is told in that worst of all narrative forms, the
allegory. The heavy-handed symbolism is inherently condescending, making pacifism
and idealism seem like uncomfortable affectations. An unnamed European power
goes to war. Inventor Count Ferdinand invents a fine new submarine, and
captains it. When faced with torpedoing a Lusitania-like
ocean liner, he balks, destroying his submarine, his crew, and himself.
Then – stay with me – he goes to Purgatory and meets Christ,
who commandeers his body for use in the world above. Restored to life,
Count/Christ comes back to his native land and preaches peace. The King has him
jailed, but a chorus of thousands of anguished women protesters compel him to visit
the Count in prison. There, he finds the Count dead, but Christ (through superimposition) rises out of the
Count’s body and takes the King on a Christmas
Carol-like cautionary tour of the battlefield, showing his first-hand
(spectrally at least) the consequences of warmongering. The King, convinced,
declares peace and the unmurdered portion of the soldiery returns home, to great
rejoicing.
The production is stilted and undynamic, consistent with the
undeveloped film aesthetic of the day. The big battle scenes, captured by
multiple directors and cameramen, are unintentionally the most dynamic part of
the film. The thankless job of playing Jesus was given to George Fisher, who
portrays him woodenly –for how could you invest the Messiah with complexity,
especially in an allegory?
The pretentious sanctimony of this early message picture
became non grata immediately after
Wilson did an abrupt about-face and declared war four months after it opened.
The film was pulled, and was replaced by pro-war films just as subtle, like
D.W. Griffiths’ Hearts of the World, The Beast of Berlin, and To Hell with the Kaiser! Powerful new
techniques of mass persuasion, implemented by government workers drawn from the
advertising industry, emphasized the savagery of the Germans and the righteousness
of taking up arms, typified by recasting the conflict as “The War to End All
Wars.” It was all too easy to turn public opinion from one pole to another.
The NFR Project is an attempt
to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological
order. Next time: the 1916 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Raoul Walsh’s first feature film, Regeneration, is considered the first feature “gangster” film as
well. More importantly, it signals a leap forward. It escapes the clumsy
presentational style of prior film work, getting the camera up and moving, into
the thick of things. Tied to clean, clear editing, Walsh’s work is streamlined
and compelling. For the first time, American film has a great director who abandons
stage-bound consciousness, a filmmaker who thinks filmically.
To be sure, there were hints of the gangster genre to come
in short subjects such as D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) (see this link to my earlier essay, and others below), the real foundation and source of the crime
film is the cinema of social concern, exemplified by earlier films such as The Cry of the Children (1912) andTraffic in Souls (1913). Spurred by the
Progressive moment of the turn of last century, these films illustrated the
plight of the poor, the immigrant, and others members of the disenfranchised.
In these Dickensian “sob stories,” the protagonists are
victims in need of rescue. In Regeneration,
the hero is an anti-hero – a bad guy with a good heart. In this case, his story
is based on Owen Kildaire’s 1903 autobiography, My Mamie Rose, which chronicled the writer’s rise from illiterate,
impoverished orphan to respected author.
A fugitive trapped in the shadows.
The film starts much as any socially conscious film of the
period did. Owen is orphaned at 10, and taken in by the couple across the hall
of his tenement, not so much out of compassion as out of a desire for a free
laborer. Exposed to constant drunkenness and violence, an early shot pushes in
to Owen’s dismayed face as his adoptive parents clash over his head. For once,
there is no magical solution to the child’s problems – he simply stews in the
foul environment of the Bowery (and Walsh shot much of the film on its streets,
hiring local ne’er-do-wells to fill the crowd scenes).
Rockcliffe Fellowes, who plays Owen as an adult, is known
today only for his role as a straight man in the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business, but boasted an
extensive career in silent film. Owen leads a criminal gang. He is hard and
dour, but also wistful. Unlike his compatriots, there is a glimmer of thought
in his eyes. He collides with society girl Mamie (Anna Q. Nilsson, another now-forgotten
silent star) at Grogan’s, a tawdry variety hall where the criminal class goes
for entertainment. (Owen quaffs a beer, and this shot is intercut with a quick
one of Owen-as-child in the same setting, gobbling an ice-cream cone – alcohol as
the poor man’s comfort food.) She is “slumming” with her rich friends, escorted
by the natty district attorney, who has eyes for her. When Owen rescues the
D.A. from harassment in the hall, a spark ignites between the gangster and the
debutante.
Soon Mamie is volunteering at the local settlement house. These
were the settings for the efforts of a kind of urban Peace Corps of the day, a do-gooder
movement that put social-welfare workers in the heart of the slums, living among
the people they were trying to help. Gradually, she earns Owen’s trust and he
begins to show signs of remorse and a longing for a better, more compassionate
life.
Cops and criminals battle it out
The only male missionary in the picture is portrayed as weak
and effeminate, but Owen exemplifies the virtues of muscular Christianity. He
travels with her, and saves boatloads of children, when the excursion steamer
they set out on catches fire – a reference to the General Slocum disaster of 1904, in which more than 1,000 died. He
saves a baby from its drunken father. It’s as if Owen is rewinding his own
history, and amending it for the good as he goes.
Inevitably, Owen has to choose whether or not to keep living
in the gutter (his gang’s H.Q. is literally underground, a filthy cellar sprinkled
with mattresses, filled with his men drinking, smoking, gambling, and plotting
heists). He abandons his former life, and his one-eyed lieutenant Skinny takes
over. When Owen shields him from the authorities after he stabs a cop, Mamie
feels betrayed. She seeks him out in his lair, only to find herself trapped by
Skinny, who has the usual designs on her.
In a dynamic closing sequence, Owen comes to the rescue. A
brawl between cops and criminals fills the screen, and Skinny ends up shooting
Mamie inadvertently. Owen’s quest for revenge is stymied by superimposed visions
of Mamie reminding him that vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.” Skinny’s life
is forfeit, but his death doesn’t lie on Owen’s head. In a bold move, the film
lets the heroine expire, but posits Owen as the torchbearer that will keep her
mission alive.
What makes Walsh’s work special is the fact that he wastes
none of the audience’s time. He has confidence in the ability of the viewer to
follow the story, so he makes his point and moves on quickly, in scene after
scene. Though his in-studio shots are uniformly lit in the manner of the day,
whenever he gets on location Walsh tries and succeeds in making some incredible
and evocative low-light shots that emphasize shadows – an objective correlative
to the movement of Owen, a liminal figure, into and out of the light.
Regeneration doesn’t
peddle any miracles. The characters’ behaviors spring from a naturalistic
source, instead of being imposed from without for the sake of the plot. Owen is
not a victim of fate, but a mature personality who makes choices good and bad,
and who develops in a complex manner. This kind of respect for the dynamics of character
and the unflinching look at contemporary slum life makes Regeneration still watchable. It feels real.
The NFR Project is an
attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological
order. Next time: the anti-war epic ‘Civilization,’ featuring Jesus.
What’s up with the appeal of transgression? The impending
arrival of Darren Aronofsky’s new film mother!
has led to ecstatic reviews – and plenty of warnings about its graphic and
disturbing content, currently unknown to the general public.
That’s part of the sizzle, of course – the lure of the
forbidden. It’s always been a part of show biz, and film’s unique and
overwhelming properties take full advantage of them to transmit transgression.
We see these kind films as if on a dare, whether it comes with aesthetic
credentials or not. (Re: Aronofsky, some are already voicing analogies to Kubrick,
and there is a lot of bloody and pretentious work out there that has been
termed “Kubrickian”). Are you tough enough to sit through the movie? Certain
films are so intense, so visually wrenching, that their memories burn
themselves into our brains, for better and for worse.
There has always been a demand for them, as the long history
of exploitation cinema shows. We are curious. We slow down to peer at
accidents. Death, decay, trauma, crime, pain, loss, all the stuff of horror
fills our news feeds hourly, a chyron of provisional grasp on a reality that
makes sense running perpetually at the bottom of our screens of consciousness. No
wonder we made slasher films the highest-grossing movie subgenre in history. We
seem hypervigilant, always tensed for the next dark thing to spring out at us.
Do we need transgressive films? Strict forms of film
censorship in various periods in various cultures always led to a coded
language, a polite signal system that conveyed forbidden meanings without
stirring the censors’ ire. In the hands of intelligent directors such as
Sturges, Sirk, and Wilder, they proved that more artistry is coaxed from
limitation than license.
At the same time, the collapse of gatekeepers usually
triggers an artistic boom, messy and teeming. The rapid succession of New Waves
in film, reiterating through decades and across different national cinemas,
revealed that it is vital for film to be free to explore every avenue of human
experience and dream.
Now for the bad news. The liberation of cinema was rapidly dragged
down into lowest-common-denominator madness. I can think of many, many, many
transgressive films you do not ever need to see. I just went through a batch of
them in research for a book, in one case returning to a movie I’d walked out of
in fright 44 years earlier. It was not worth it.
Most transgressive films are their own reason for being,
which is not enough. I’m not going to name them. They are something, primarily
residing in the horror genre, that feels unstrung, that caters to the voyeur,
the sadist, a kind of torture porn, dealing in shock as commodity. Boris
Karloff notably remarked, “Horror means something revolting. Anybody can show
you a pail-full of innards. But the object of the roles I played is not to turn
your stomach – but merely to make your hair stand on end. . . . Shocks . . .
should not be forced into a film without excuse.”
So are there fundamentally disturbing films that need to be
seen? Yes. I made a joke about a top-10 list, and came up with more than 40,
listed below. It’s purely subjective – our deepest fears (and retching points) are
Venn diagrams, overlapping here and there but ultimately individual. I am
convinced that the filmmakers involved couldn’t have said what they needed to
in any other way, and do so brilliantly in each case.
WARNING: This list is intended for the use of mature and
thoughtful viewers only. They require a serious attitude, watching during daytime
hours, and may take many breaks to get through (I kept a nice stock of Laurel
& Hardy and the Marx Brothers handy when watching some of these, for
emergency cheer-ups). You are not to watch them with children around – I saw Night and Fog when I was 8, which was
about 40 years too early. I never needed to see The Exorcist. Do YOU need to see any of these? Follow your
instincts – there is no shame in covering your eyes.
Despite the general contempt for “art,” it is powerful –
otherwise why does it cause such an uproar when it proves bothersome and
thought-provoking? In a consensus-driven culture, voices that question are
vital enemies. Night of the Living Dead,
A Clockwork Orange, Life of Brian, and many other films were
denounced when they were released, and now they are classics and not such a big
deal after all. We are weathered from exposure, inured to new levels of
acceptability.
I stuck to one film per director. There are many whose
careers are one long transgressive arc – directors such as Bunuel, Lynch,
Cronenberg, Gilliam, Russell, and Waters. Most of these films were banned at
one time or another, and some are almost impossible to find. I am sure I missed
a few of your “favorites” – but maybe they’re not ones I need to see. Now, if
you’ll excuse me, I need to wash my hands and go watch an old MGM musical or
something.
Freaks
Tod Browning
1932
Browning’s
repellent masterpiece destroyed his career. He made a film about circus freaks
using real circus freaks. On top of that, he makes the argument that society’s
outcasts and mutations are the only true humans. It’s still a subversive idea,
and one accentuated with disturbing details.
Night and Fog
Alain Resnais
1956
The most impactful film about the Holocaust is one of the
earliest ones. Resnais (Last Year at
Marienbad, Hiroshima, Mon Amour)
helms the documentary using a script by Jean Cayrol, who escaped from the
Mauthausen concentration camp. The movie plainly outlines the process by which
millions of people were turned into dead things. With music by the great Hanns
Eisler (perhaps the only composer to be banned by the Nazis and deported by the
United States), it contrasts contemporary footage of the then-abandoned ruins
of camps with excruciating documentary footage of what happened there. You only
need to see it once because you can’t forget what you see.
Fires on the Plain
Kon Ichikawa
1959
A stroll through Hell. Ichikawa is a master, and here he
pitilessly adapts Shoei Oooka’s 1951 novel in harsh Eastman black and white. In
the last days of World War II in the Philippines, outnumbered and starving
Japanese soldiers resort to cannibalism to survive. The limitations imposed by
mankind’s animal nature stands out in sharp relief against a desolate
landscape.
Peeping Tom
Michael Powell
1960
Another
career-destroying film. A photographer gets sexual gratification from killing
women – while he films them watching him do it. Made in the same year as Psycho, deplored and then lost to time
for a few decades. Reappraisal has elevated it to its proper status. The
villain is a pitiable and abused man, with whom we are brought to almost
identify with as the film progresses. What does it mean that we’re peering over
his shoulder? We came to see violence, too. What is the extent and nature of
our complicity with the horror-makers, and, finally, the monsters themselves? A
classic about voyeurism, manipulation and the very meaning of movie-making.
Jigoku aka The Sinners of Hell
Nabuo Nakagawa
1960
In a move away from his long string of successful period
ghost stories (kaidan), Nakagawa
unspools a contemporary horror story that contains the most terrifying vision
of Hell ever put on film. No one escapes the karmic wheel as the hapless
protagonist realizes his own part in the sufferings of humanity.
Viridiana
Luis Bunuel
1961
OK, there was this girl who wanted to be a nun . . . It’s
difficult to pick one Bunuel film, as he is the original, delightful, and
perpetual fountain of filmic perversion. This take-no-prisoners satire of the
Catholic faith (you might have to bone up before you watch in order to catch
all the blasphemies) blends with Bunuel’s first-generation Surrealist
sensibilities to create a cynical masterpiece. A crucifix can hide a
switchblade, people are no damn good, and we wind up with an implied three-way.
What’s not to love?
Lord of the Flies
Peter Brook
1963
Are you kidding me? It’s LORD OF THE FLIES. The source,
William Goulding’s 1954 novel, bane of many high-school literature classes, is
actually good if you can forget the term paper you had to write about it. The setup
is simple – a planeload of boys are stranded on a tropical island, and descend
into savagery in no time at all. Every film the avant-garde theater giant Peter
Brook ever made is amazing, and this is no exception. He went through 3,000
actors to get his cast; he put them on location and improvised with them for 60
hours, cutting the results down to an hour and a half.
The Brig
Jonas Mekas
1964
Julian Beck and Judith Malina founded The Living Theater,
and their avant-garde work blew open the scene with their production of Jack
Gelber’s junkie drama The Connection
in 1959. This, their second production of huge impact, is taken from a play
written by Kenneth H. Brown, a Marine who spent 30 days in military prison for
being AWOL. It’s a meticulous, physically punishing recreation of a day in the
brig – screamed commands and responses, strict rules for moving, standing, and
looking – an illustrated guide to the breakdown of the human soul. Exposing the
absurd mechanisms of the system, Mekas’ camera captures men as machines, acting
with precision out of sheer terror.
Weekend
Jean-Luc Godard
1967
A rotten married couple have their murderous plans
interrupted by – the Apocalypse. In Godard’s nihilistic vision, all Western,
bourgeois values evaporate (or perhaps just reach their logical conclusions)
and everyone starts killing and eating each other. For a start.
The Cremator
Juraj Herz
1969
The employee of a crematorium in 1930s Prague begins to
believe that his services liberate the souls of the dead, and that murder is
the key to the salvation of mankind. He finds his beliefs falling in line with
those brought to power by the looming takeover by the Nazis, as madness and
official policy reinforce each other. Banned upon release, until the fall of
the Iron Curtain 20 years later.
The Devils
Ken Russell
1971
This insanely explicit adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s novel The Devils of Loudon is set in 16th
century France, where a battle for political autonomy results in a rebellious
priest (Oliver Reed) being framed for witchcraft, then tortured and executed. A
horror movie in which society is the monster, it took nearly 50 years for it to
be made available to the public.
Johnny Got His Gun
Dalton Trumbo
1971
No one would film Trumbo’ famous anti-war novel, so he did
it himself. A wounded soldier with no eyes, ears, teeth, tongue, or limbs roams
through his consciousness while lying helpless in a military hospital. With
Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ.
The Ruling Class
Peter Medak
1972
Speaking of the Messiah, Jack, the Earl of Guerney (Peter
O’Toole) thinks he is Jesus Christ, and he has the crucifix to prove it. “I
found that when I was praying, I was talking to Myself,” he explains. His
family’s attempt to control him or commit him makes for a powerful statement
about the inability to live according to just about any principles. Jack becomes
“sane” in the worst possible way.
Pink Flamingos
John Waters
1972
Another artist whose catalog is transgression. This is the
first and most aggressively awful of Waters’ “Trash Trilogy,” starring drag
queen Divine as Babs Johnson, “the filthiest person alive.” Her claim to fame
is challenged by the evil Raymond and Connie Marble, and the result is an epic
battle of perversion. The casual fun Waters has turning reality inside-out
transcends his $10,000 budget.
Who Can Kill a Child?
Narciso Ibanez Serrador
1976
A brilliant premise brilliantly executed. The children of
the world are fed up with the actions of adults, and so decide to exterminate
them. The mental leap required to seeing sweet-faced toddlers as death-wielding
menaces is almost impossible to make.
Jeanne Dielman,
23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Ackerman
1975
A single mother cares for her son, keeps up the house, makes
meals, and has sex for money. Not much happens, in bland, excruciating detail,
for more than three hours. Then something happens that makes the whole film
come together and blow the viewer away. The agonizingly slow setup leads to a
payoff that makes you question notions of identity and human relations.
Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese
1976
“You talkin’ to me?” The modern American good guy is a
misanthropic, homicidal maniac in Scorsese’s signature film. Steeped in the
cesspool of mid-‘70s Manhattan, cab driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) sinks
into madness and violence . . . or is it heroism?
Eraserhead
David Lynch
1977
A grisly nightmare, Lynch’s initial film contains most of
the imagery and themes he would spend the next 40 years exploring. The rich,
dark black-and-white cinematography makes the horrifying dream realer than
real, based in a kind of revulsion at the prospect of physical existence.
Forbidden Zone
Richard Elfman
1980
The Elfman brothers, Richard and Danny, formed the Mystic
Knights of the Oingo Boingo in 1972, a multipiece, costumed orchestra that
performed Jazz Age music and Danny’s original compositions in the context of an
absurd live show. Forbidden Zone is a
modified record of it, reading much like a Fleischer Brothers cartoon on acid.
Possession
Andrzej Zulawski
1981
Worst break-up ever. Isabelle Adjani doesn’t love Sam Neill
any longer, so she creates a strange, octopus-like doppelganger out of the
pieces of her murder victims. A fragmented, repetitive narrative is emotionally
agonizing and visually disturbing. One of the few films to be both honored at
Cannes and banned in Britain.
Videodrome
David Cronenberg
1983
The
director’s examination of the links between entertainment, violence,
conformity, repression, and voyeurism rapidly takes flight into surreal fantasy
as protagonist, TV exec Max (James Woods) finds out he is a foot soldier in the
struggle of two factions for control of consensual reality. Disturbing,
transgressive, and still ahead of its time.
Come and See
Elem Klimov
1985
The title is taken from the Book of Revelations. This saga of one Soviet boy’s buffeting by the storm winds
of World War II is the most realistic portrayal of combat ever filmed.
Ostensibly an anti-fascist film, it’s so uncompromising about the physical,
mental, and emotional devastation of war that vicarious exhaustion saps the
viewer.
Grave of the Fireflies
Isao Takahata
1988
An anime about a brother and sister dying of starvation in
Japan at the end of World Wat II. Yep.
Society
Brian Yuzna
1989
An extremely pointed satire of rich and poor. As in John
Carpenter’s They Live, Society’s rich prey on the lower classes
– but here they literally feed on them, melding their bodies with their victims
and devouring their substance in an obscene parody of a cocktail party crossed
with an orgy. The practical effects by Screaming Mad George (aka Joji Tani) are
incomparably disturbing.
Jacob’s Ladder
Adrian Lyne
1990
An amazing journey that takes decades and a moment at the
same time, it features Tim Robbins in his first starring role, as a Vietnam-Era
soldier trying to understand the hallucinations that begin to affect him and
those around him. A seemingly impossible weld of spiritual and political
content, the film was originally 20 minutes longer but it made audiences too
upset so Lyne cut them.
The Rapture
Michael Tolkin
1991
What if evangelical Christian theology is the literal truth?
Michael Tolkin, who also wrought the screenplay for The Player and the criminally under-regarded The New Age, gives us a sincere convert who undergoes a crisis of faith
when the End Times turn out to be real. It’s not a movie that makes fun of
religion in any way, but it asks brain-shattering questions about the nature of
God, faith, reality, heaven, hell, and all the rest – and provides zero answers
and no closure whatsoever.
In the Mouth of
Madness
John Carpenter
1994
Carpenter’s
ultimate horror statement invents a horror novel that manifests a terrifying
universe that grows stronger every time a person reads it, driving them mad.
Insurance investigator Sam Neill seeks the elusive author, driving into the
landscape of the writer’s dark imagination and watching his world fly to pieces
and double back on itself. Carpenter shows how thin the membrane between sanity
and chaos can be.
Funny Games
Michael Haneke
1997
Two nice young men knock on the door a rich family at their
summer home. Can they borrow some eggs? What follows is a bold indictment of
the horror audience’s expectations. The two casually and leisurely torture and
kill the family, all the while breaking the fourth wall, cracking jokes, and
even replaying a scene if it doesn’t work out to their liking. The victims are
doomed, and we are forced to ask what our part in this is.
Cure
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
1997
A
brilliant film that asks if evil is communicable. Normal people kill randomly,
united only by their contact with an amnesiac who may be a master hypnotist.
Koji Yakusho is fascinating to watch as the determined detective with secrets
of his own, who unravels as forces he doesn’t understand begin to control him.
Kurosawa’s subtle and deliberately paced direction ratchets up the tension to
unbearable levels.
Battle Royale
Kinji Fukasaku
2000
This impactful horror film came from old avant-garde
filmmaker Fukasaku in 1999 – Battle
Royale, his last completed film, adapted from Koushun Takami’s novel. In
it, a group of school-age teens are forced to fight to the death in a televised
national entertainment. Sound familiar, Hunger
Games fans? Its tone is vastly more savage and cynical than its imitators’.
Bamboozled
Spike Lee
2000
Spike Lee’s most offensive film is the Producers-esque comic saga of a black TV producer who crafts the
most racist program he can think of in order to get out of his contract. The
result, The New Millennium Minstrel Show,
is of course an enormous hit, crammed with blackface, watermelon, and all the
other trappings of racist imagery. It tells you everything you need to know
about how American culture works.
Requiem for a Dream
Darren Aronofsky
2000
Of course, I had to include Aronofsky, the inspiration for
this story. Requiem for a Dream is
the best anti-drug film ever made, chronicling the downfall of four individuals
in what is surely the most depressing film ever made, making Leaving Las Vegas seem like Singin’ in the Rain by comparison.
The Cell
Tarsem Singh
2000
The
most visually sumptuous horror film ever made. A psychologist (Jennifer Lopez)
must invade the mind of a schizophrenic, comatose killer in order to save the
life of his latest victim. The representation of the psychic contents of an
evil person have never been delineated as vividly as this. Singh’s dazzling style
is unmatched, and the casting is perfect.
May
Lucky McKee
2002
“If you can’t find a friend, make one!” This horror movie about
a murderously insane but pitiable protagonist is unexpectedly moving, with the
most riveting closing moment of any film I’ve ever seen.
Tideland
Terry Gilliam
2005
Alice in Wonderland
crossed with Cronenberg. Gilliam’s freakish imagination gives life and heart to
this dark fairy tale of a young girl trapped on the Texas prairie with her
father’s preserved corpse, exposed only to a couple of local eccentrics.
The Last King of
Scotland
Kevin Macdonald
2006
How do you portray a mass murderer? Forest Whitaker won the
Oscar for his performance as Uganda dictator Idi Amin.
Hunger
Steve McQueen
2008
McQueen’s debut feature is ruthless. A depiction of the
Irish republican hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison in 2008.
Whether the viewer is an adherent of the republican cause or not, the
illumination of the brutality within the system is unforgettable. In the end,
the hunger strikers chose to refuse the cooperation of the only thing under
their control – their own bodies.
Fish Tank
Andrea Arnold
2009
The best film ever made about being 15. Unfortunately, the
15-year-old in question is a girl trapped in poverty with an alcoholic mother,
whose boyfriend wants her as well. The depiction of underage sex is enough to
set off alarms, but the real tragedy is the depiction of a world in which
people are only worth what can be gotten out of them.
Escape from Tomorrow
Randy Moore
2013
Filmed surreptitiously in Disney World, this surreal horror
film enters on a typical dad who finds out that the Happiest Place on Earth is
a corporate laboratory, and he’s an experiment.
