Not Coming to a Theater Near You
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
2004 saw the release of two important early Dreyer films on DVD: Masters of Cinema/Eureka’s release of Michael and Image’s somewhat less heralded release of The Parson’s Widow. As far as the films go, I prefer the latter - a bawdy, bucolic sex farce about redemption - over the more arty and melodramatic Michael. The Parson’s Widow shows Dreyer’s style at its leanest and most agile, and its sumptuous exteriors tie the director to a sort of pastoral tradition in early Scandinavian cinema, shades of which can be seen in his later Day of Wrath.
The film follows the plight of a young parson who, forced to marry the previous parson’s widow (by order of some improbable local tradition), attempts to bump off the old bag with a series of underhanded gags, while trying to have it off with his girlfriend on the side. But trust Mr. Dreyer to take a naughty slapstick comedy and inject it with salvation, spiritual awakening, and the transformative powers of love and death. The film’s final act is an astonishing 180º, a maneuver so bold and unexpected that it is a wonder it is so moving.
The Parson’s Widow
Image Entertainment
If Aristotle’s claim that “all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind” is true, it is no wonder that art so frequently portrays the pathetic and degraded figure of the office-worker. From Kafka’s Josef K to Ricky Gervais’ David Brent, the pencil-pushing bureaucrat provides neat shorthand for the absorbing dehumanization of the modern age. Akira Kurosawa’s film, Ikiru, is perhaps the sub-genre’s most empathetic entry, depicting its protagonist’s slow climb from administrative doldrums to an affirmation of life’s worth and possibilities.
Takashi Shimura, the Gene Hackman of Kurosawa’s troupe of actors, provides the crumpled and sunken face of Watanabe, the aging administrator whose cancer diagnosis prompts panic, regret, and ultimately a search for deeper meaning. Kurosawa’s matter-of-fact narration and almost geometrical structuring of the story keep the film’s humanism from devolving into maudlin sentimentality. Its subtle use of multiple perspectives on Watanabe’s life and character create a Citizen Kane of more humble and down-to-earth ambitions. As a result, the film’s final pay-off is a deeply felt geyser of a tear-jerker, melancholy and affirmative where another film might simply be bathetic or cheesy.
Ikiru
The Criterion Collection
In his seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin notes that the process of mechanically reproducing an object, of translating it into a series of copies and facsimiles, strips that object of its fixed, singular place in time and space, its unique, authoritative status as an “original.” The authenticity and authority of the object - its “aura” in Benjamin’s terminology - is lost with the process of mechanical reproduction.
Bill Morrison’s film, Decasia, is a kind of reification of the aura in film, treating the film-strip itself as a unique, material object in which time has inscribed itself. Morrison’s film, a collaboration with composer Michael Gordon, assembles warped, bubbling, and disintegrating archival film-stock into a collage of strange, hypnotic power. Its mysterious and diverse images - orientalist travelogues, fragments of forgotten narratives, glimpses of actualities and filmed attractions - evoke remote times and places, while the palimpsest of scratches, rot, and distortion manifests our physical and temporal distance from the original films’ subjects. Decasia is a hallucinatory materialization of time and of the ghostly presence of the cinema itself.
Decasia: The State of Decay
Plexifilm
