LOUISIANA STORY (Robert J. Flaherty, 1948)

The encounter of unspoilt Nature and industrial technology: this is the theme of Louisiana Story, the final work by Robert J. Flaherty, the brilliant American director of Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), Industrial Britain (1931), Man of Aran (1934) and The Land (1942).

In this extraordinary film, underwritten by Standard Oil, the “father of the documentary” employs a slight plot enacted by nonprofessionals in the setting they are native to. (It’s a move in the direction of the kind of hybrid of documentary and fiction that Claude Chabrol in France would become a master at.) The protagonist is one Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Letour, a thirteen-year-old Cajun boy whom we watch passing the summer frolicking with his “pet” raccoon, canoeing, fishing and hunting in Petit Ansse Bayou in the Mississippi delta—for us, a lyrical dream of suspended childhood. Rather than the shoreline house he shares at night with his parents, the vast swamp is Alexander’s truest home: the teeming cypresses cloak him; the sun crowns him; the subtropical waterways are his dominion. Thus Flaherty (as he did Nanook) introduces Alexander in long shot, enmeshed in the environment he in fact is a part of. Alexander, like any other child, must “conquer” his surroundings by coming to terms with it. As it happens, his first two names, Alexander Napoleon, are the names of historic conquerors, while his third name, Ulysses, recalls the most celebrated mythical journeyer. Like any other child, this boy, without knowing it, is journeying to the end of childhood. But all life is a journey, a trip, a transport—a fact certified by the boy’s family name, Letour. To the extent that we all retain wisps of our childhoods, Alexander becomes our surrogate in a world of our own past—a past at once visionary and real.

It is a kind of world that Flaherty loves to evoke. For him, its anthropological correlative are communities that allow more technologically advanced outsiders to dream of the possibility of earthly paradises while noting, if one is honest, as he is, that such places are dangerous and demanding for those who, rather than visiting with a pack of mythmaking tendencies, live there. These “paradises” are beseiged from within—the “snake in the garden” may be harsh climate or terrain or, as here, “Nature red in tooth and claw”—and beseiged from without: the “outside world” intent on barging in and taking over. Thus Flaherty’s cinema captures places like Alexander’s domain refracted through the clear, cutting irony that film technology, while perpetuating their mythic pull, is part of the modernity that implies their compromise and imminent demise. In Louisiana Story, the filmmaker and his crew intrude, but they are adjuncts to the dominant imperialism of a daunting, surpassing technology at the command of, and sometimes commanding, the oil drillers with whom Alexander interacts. In the mesmerizing landscape that Flaherty presents, the derrick that the oblivious visitors have constructed looms as a tower of aspiration—the visionary component of commercial enterprise. The cohabitation of the fantastic swamp (Nature) and the equally fantastic tower (industry) elaborates a modern ideal which only recently has begun to be a casualty to environmental concern. Anticipating the need to defend itself, Standard Oil has therefore affixed to Flaherty’s film a written prologue designed to condition the viewer from the outset to interpret the upcoming images according to the company’s own “spin.” No matter. Flaherty, qualmless about whacking the hand that pays him, prevails. His vision prevails because of the power of the images that Standard Oil is so hell-bent on neutering and reversing to the service of their own publicity.

The commercial technology that Flaherty shows competes with the natural environment in order to subdue it—Standard Oil’s idea of “harmony.” There is no getting away from the fascination of this technology. Indeed, Louisiana Story is as engrossed with complicated apparatus as are Sergei M. Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (1929) and Dziga Vertov’s metallic, gear-grinding Enthusiasm (1931)—two works that illustrate the mythopolitical Soviet equation of technological progress and human fulfillment. This is not Flaherty’s attitude, however. Consider the horrifying shot of birds suddenly flooding the sky in flight—it’s apocalyptic—at the exploratory explosion which itself chokes air with dark gas, dirt and debris, the effect of which no number of company prologues would ever succeed in neutralizing. In Flaherty’s film, the machinery itself is represented in unsettling terms: it’s agitated, smoke-belching, and busily overloaded with lines and chain belts that seem almost capable of attacking. (Compare the sanctified treatment of the cream separator as a huge, shining object of awe in The Old and the New.) But Flaherty and his spouse, Frances, who co-authored the story, go further yet: the machinery fails. Oil is not released; instead, a blowout makes necessary the capping of the well. The drillers are thus portrayed as hapless and impotent, as pure spoilers for all their advanced gadgetry.

What then turns this “failure” into the “success” that Standard Oil surely demanded from the script? Alexander’s intercession is what makes the oil materialize; for Alexander is the child of Nature who, enthralled by the machinery of industry, adapts to it and liberates it. But what can a child like him do? Into the black hole he sends salt—alligator repellent—and some of the spit with which he is accustomed to anointing fishing hooks. For yet more luck, he strokes the friendly frog that he keeps like a second heart under his loose shirt. The ritual works. The well is brought in; black gold surges. Amiably, the boy credits the lead driller, but Flaherty winks long enough for us to infer the redemptive magic of childhood faith and innocence.

As a growing child, Alexander must adapt to his changing environment and become a productive part of it. But far from conferring a superior status to those from Standard Oil who are changing this environment, Alexander’s delightful use of “magic” suggests that the influence and impact that the intruders intend, in order to rise to a level of responsibility and beneficence, must be informed, modified and enriched by the boy’s persistent humanity. For us the viewer, this is dramatic irony; the drillers themselves are unaware of Alexander’s “magical” intervention and in fact have tolerantly chuckled at his superstitious ways, patronizing him at every turn without any attempt even to take his feelings into account. Flaherty thus deftly exposes them as amnesiac with regard to their own childhoods. Their assault on a pristine environment, therefore, doubles (unconsciously) as a symbolical assault on childhood itself, their one-dimensionality partly the result of their singular though dubious accomplishment of excluding themselves from their own childhood memories and sympathies. To Flaherty, Alexander is a primal journeyer navigating his way from an innocent world of enchantment to his own world, and our world, and the drillers’—a flat, shallow world of progress that Alexander’s developing humanity may yet manage to moderate and redeem. Given the power arrayed against him that Standard Oil represents, Alexander represents Flaherty’s hope for the future.

Central to Flaherty’s immense vision is the quarrel within Nature, which the alligator’s pursuit of the raccoon demonstrates. By thus positing competitiveness as the basis of existence (Flaherty could not have been more Victorian), this quarrel leaves sorely ironic the vulnerability of Nature to human exploitation. It isn’t that humans have disregarded what Nature teaches; rather, humans—also “red in tooth and claw”—have learned too well Nature’s lessons. In the film, after all, it is Alexander himself who triggers the violence. Now beginning to separate himself from his enchanted world, he invades the alligator’s den and cradles in his hand a hatching egg, only to be frightened off by the parent animal’s ferocious hiss. Thus this Wordsworthian transgression against Nature by a child of Nature (elsewhere known as puberty), juxtaposed with the oil people’s intrusion into the area, implies the inevitability of human presumption in the service of some dreams—progress; development—and at the expense of other dreams—a radiant view of Nature; childhood itself. Represented by the egg, the new life that the boy had held and has fearfully let go of refers to a world about to be lost—to the boy (as a necessary part of growing up), to his family and community, to us all.

Flaherty’s filmmaking is wondrous. The opening watery journey, lyrical and enthralling, employs an amazing variety of shots edited, in the manner of Joris Ivens and Mannus Frånken’s masterpiece, Regen (1929), to compose a single coherent movement and event. A cut from Alexander as he gaily canoes—the surroundings whiz by—to a flat, static shot of drillers at work contrasts, in addition to bright youth and dull youthlessness, the boy’s aimlessness—his pure being—and the purposefulness of the workaday grown-ups. The result is emotionally complex. But Flaherty’s greatest visual coup is still to come. Steady closeups scaling the derrick recall the ever upward shot of the boy climbing a coconut tree in Moana (1926). Upwardly tracking along the height of the derrick in Louisiana Story, though, Flaherty cuts abortively to a long shot of the derrick, thus devising purely visual means for transforming the act of achieving, which the upward tracking suggests, into the thing achieved, and thereby making of the haze-shrouded derrick a problematic symbol of one kind of human accomplishment.

Flaherty’s last film is not without its flaws. Some—for instance, the occasional obvious postdubbing—are no more than glitches. Others are serious. While the boy’s father is a substantial character (especially when, disappointed by the initial failure of the drilling, he chorically berates his son), the mother remains a negligible presence—a fate that befalls all the boys’ mothers in Flaherty’s films. Worse yet is the vulgar optimism that has the raccoon painlessly reappearing after by all odds it should have been killed by the alligator. Still, the film’s shortcomings are far outweighed by its virtues, among which are its moral complexity, masterful form, Richard Leacock’s apt black-and-white cinematography (liquidly smooth in the lyrical “Nature” passages, gritty and grainy amidst the machinery), Virgil Thomson’s celebrated music (the first film score to win a Pulitzer Prize), and Joseph Boudreaux’s appealing enactment of the role of Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Letour.

FRENZY (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)

An airborne camera swoops down along the Thames River, creating an impression of grandeur and pristine beauty. It is the Thames Alfred Hitchcock fondly remembers. The closer the camera comes, though, the more reality overtakes memory. The Thames is polluted. Bank side, an official explains to a gathered crowd that industrial discharge is the cause; he promises a cleanup. Suddenly someone shrieks at the discovery of another kind of pollution surfacing in the river: the strangled naked corpse of a woman. The Necktie Murderer has struck again.
     Frenzy provides a variation on Hitchcock’s theme of the “wrong man.” Circumstantial evidence convinces Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Oxford that Richard Blaney is the Necktie Murderer. Blaney’s ex-wife and current girlfriend are among the victims. However, someone else is the real killer.
     Oxford represents the myopia of the British establishment. He says the case against Blaney is “uncomplicated” by the existence of any other suspect. Rather than pursue the possibility of other suspects, then, Oxford fits pieces of evidence into his preordained jigsaw puzzle assigning guilt to Blaney—apparently, normal police procedure. The film implies it’s amazing that the police ever get the right man.
     Oxford dismisses his wife’s gourmet dinners (which express her frustrated creativity) with the same breathless arrogance with which he dismisses the possibility of Blaney’s innocence. But Blaney’s conviction, based on the case Oxford built against him, turns this innocent man into someone who escapes from prison to kill the person he realizes is the real killer. By the end of the film, his transformation into a murderer (morally, though, not literally) is complete. The law has had its day, reminding us that “civilization” provides a thin veneer to cover the ancient scapegoating process that modern criminal investigation and prosecution essentially remain.
     Frenzy, beautifully acted by Vivien Merchant as Oxford’s wife, is Hitchcock’s last great work.

THE MARQUISE OF O . . . (Eric Rohmer, 1976)

Eric Rohmer ventured outside France but for a single film: the West German The Marquise of O . . ., from Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 novella. It is a civilized, exquisitely ironical comedy about a woman’s rape, a meditation on the limits society imposes on a woman’s right to self-determination.
     During the Franco-Prussian War, Julietta, who has been faithful to her deceased husband’s memory, is saved from rape by a Russian officer, a Count, who, unbeknownst to her, takes advantage of her himself when she is asleep. Once she is pregnant with her third child and can offer no explanation, her parents dismiss the Marquise’s claims of abiding virtue and toss her out.
     Structured as a flashback, the film opens with men in a tavern discussing the Marquise’s newspaper advertisement soliciting her unborn child’s father to come forward and marry her, to undo some portion of her estrangement from family and her family’s shame. The Count, who has already guiltily pressed his marriage proposal several times, shows up to confess his crime and claim his bride.
     Given this conclusion, how do we know that Rohmer appreciates the horror of rape? The shot of Julietta, passed out on her bed, as the Count enters her boudoir to violate her derives from the most horrific fantastic painting of sexual assault imaginable: Henry Fuseli’s 1781 The Nightmare. (A shot of the nape of Julietta’s neck, projecting both sensuality and vulnerability, derives from Fuseli’s 1800 Nude Woman Listening to a Girl Playing upon the Spinet.)
     Edith Clever and Peter Lühr, as daughter and father, are brilliant. Those who cherish the paintings of Caspar Friedrich, moreover, prepare yourselves for a visual feast, courtesy of Rohmer and his color cinematographer, Nestor Almendros.

WAR AND PEACE (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1967)

Factoring in inflation, Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic, from Tolstoi, today would cost over a billion dollars. To say the least, Voyna i mir is grand in scope; it encompasses balls and battles, romance, old age and youth, philosophy, spirituality, and all things Russian. It was an official production into which the Soviet Union poured its resources as a matter of national pride: one more indication that Krushschev’s successor, Brezhnev, was more like Stalin than like his mentor. Some heralded the result as the greatest movie ever made.
     It’s not that. Too much of the 6½ hours that I have seen—the complete version, which is unavailable in the U.S., is two hours longer—is tame, with a good deal of old-fashioned pageantry. However, few films provide a better sense of three things: nineteenth-century combat; a feeling of national destiny; the outrage of having one’s land invaded, in this case, by Napoleon’s forces in 1812. Indeed, it is the second half of the film, which addresses Russia’s patriotic war against these invaders, that accounts for most of the film’s modest merit.
     One applies to this War and Peace for its swirling canvas of war (some of it recorded in extended low aerial shots) and beauteous inserts of Nature whose transcendental treatment seems to blend time and timelessness, earth and eternity. There is much plot in this film, but the best passages, departures from this, take flight.
     Yes, the film is better with War than with Peace. This, though, is fitting, because the war shown here took hold of the Russian imagination. Subsequent invasions and attempted invasions helped crystallize the conviction that Russia needed protection. After the Second World War, the nations that the Soviet Union converted into satellites were meant to erect a barrier against Western European mischief and ambition.

SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE . . . (Géza Radványi, 1947)

The first postwar Hungarian film, Somewhere in Europe . . . (Valahol Európában . . .), set in the mid-1940s, is about children who, orphaned or otherwise dispossessed or discarded by the war, band together and hunt for food in order to survive. This requires vandalizing and theft. A remote ruined castle, the adopted domain of a distinguished musician whose career the war has put on hold, becomes their hiding place as the composer and conductor reeducates them, introducing them to socialistic ideas and classical music, and reversing what seemed their inevitable slide into Lord of the Flies. Locals have been instructed to shoot to kill roaming looters, and suspicious authorities raid the castle, killing one of the boys as the others defend their fortress with cascades of boulders and rocks down the hillside—a possible allusion to Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944). Without doubt, however, scenarists Béla Balázs and (also director) Géza Radványi have another film in mind, for which theirs provides a fitting variant: Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (Putyovka v zhizn, 1931), a similar piece of Communist propaganda, this one about the reeducation of wild Russian boys.

The first part of the film shows the boys and two girls coming together into a more or less cohesive group headed by the older Péter Hosszú (Miklós Gábor, charismatic, sensitive), who has been tossed out of reform school. Early on, there are numerous striking images, including angled ones underscoring the children’s uprooted lives in a war-unbalanced world, and ones leaning on symbols of shattered innocence. In both composition and editing, these recall Soviet cinema, both silent and early sound. There is a grotesque sequence showing a child fixed in terror as he witnesses wax figures melting amidst flames, including one of Adolf Hitler. This passage harkens back to the expressionism of silent German cinema. A later flashback, while out of sequence, also belongs to this part of the film. A girl recounts her rape by a German officer, after which, from her apartment’s upstairs window, she sees her entire family being carted away. She returns to the bedroom, and shoots and kills the officer with his own pistol. During the rape, the officer appears as a monstrous shadow; when he is killed, it is again his shadow that we see—and in a scene of death that recalls the death of the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Here again Radványi proves himself a student of silent German expressionism.

The second part of the film, with its interaction between the children and the old man, Péter Simon, is enormously effective as a tearjerker, culminating in the death of little Kuksi, who has learned to play “La Marseillaise” on his harmonica. Simon has taught the children “La Marseillaise” as an expression of freedom—what, Simon tells them, they must strive for and fight for. A good deal of this part of the film is reminiscent of Hollywood’s Boys Town (Norman Taurog, 1938).

Both Georges Sadoul and the critical team of Garbicz and Klinowski find the first part of the film excellent and the second part unrealistic and glib. I disagree. I find both parts equally flawed. The first misappropriates German expressionism; the second indulges in Hollywood sentimentality. However, the film’s strongest aspect occurs in the second part, and this is its propaganda. When young Hosszú disparages “freedom” based on his experience of struggling to survive on the open road, Simon convincingly notes that that wasn’t freedom at all. “Poverty,” he tells the youth, “is the worst form of captivity”—not only a message in favor of the current new order (at the time of the film rather than at the time in which the action is set), but a sharp rebuke of capitalism, which generates poverty as a matter of course while touting freedom. That there would be little or no freedom in the new Hungary for those disputing the Party line is conveniently excluded by the fact that Simon is scarcely a prophet.

This film is primarily recommended for those who love movies with adorable children who suffer and (except for Kuksi) triumph over adversity—those who delight in having their emotions manipulated and in crying a lot. Very good black-and-white cinematography (by Barnabás Hegyi) also commends Somewhere in Europe . . . .

Balázs and Radványi seem to believe that “La Marseillaise” is humanity’s highest popular expression of the idea of freedom, and doubtless they are correct in this. But like much else in the film, they overplay their hand. Whether gang whistled or played on piano or harmonica, the tune is heard way too many times throughout. By contrast, its single appearance is tremendous in Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937).