YANCO (Servando González, 1961)

A stunning assault on Roman Catholicism, which Spain imposed on Mexican natives during the three centuries it colonized Mexico beginning in the 1500s, Yanco comes from Mexico. Servando González has wrought a deeply affecting, lyrical, highly symbolical work whose protagonist, Juanito, lives with his mother, María, in a small village. The time is the present, but the form of a parable imbues everything with a spirit of timelessness. A near absence of dialogue focuses our attention instead on work sounds and sounds of Nature.
     Like Roderick Usher, the young native boy is hypersensitive to noise. An elderly hermit teaches him to play the violin. (The film’s title refers to the old man’s violin.) After the man dies, Juanito nightly borrows the violin from the shop/bar where it hangs for sale from a hook and, blanketed by Nature, plays the instrument, adding beauty to the night. During a festival honoring the boy’s mother’s namesake, the villagers, armed with torches (the scene is out of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein), pursue the sound’s source, as much offended by this melodiousness as the boy has been daily tortured by everyday noise. Their intent is to kill. We see an expressionistic projection of this: Juanito’s being sucked down into a black maelstrom in the sea.
     González thus takes aim at irrational hatred bred by religion. Of course, the Indians’ native religion is no less grounded in superstition, and González also shows this, particularly in the backward rituals on which some poor villagers rely in lieu of modern medicine. However, he also shows, with connecting camera movements, the natural basis for native religion as distinct from the “new” forced faith, which owes nothing to the regional water, weather, flora and fauna—the round of life to which Juanito himself belongs.
     Now, eternally.

MAIDSTONE (Norman Mailer, 1970)

Probably I was in the movies.
     That might have been a lovely way to open—or to close—Maidstone, which Norman Mailer, America’s greatest post-World War II author (both fiction and non-), wrote, directed, starred in, and co-edited, drawing apparent inspiration from Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes. Mailer plays Norman Kingsley, U.S. presidential aspirant, like himself, who currently, like himself, is directing an independent film that tends toward pornography—like Maidstone, which, after all, houses the film-within-the-film. A black man and a white woman are necessarily having sex in both films, and J. Edgar Hoover is likely seeing red. In any case, a bunch of suits are comparing notes about Kingsley to determine how dangerous he is so they can decide whether they will have him assassinated. The film alternates between Kingsley and this Nazi-like group before it swerves into a coda in which Mailer, back to being Mailer, discusses the film with cast and crew. Behind the organization of a presidential campaign, he notes, lies the candidate’s chaos of contradictions. An unscripted something then ensues in which the actor who had been playing Kingsley’s half-brother, Rip Torn (insane, but the film’s most compelling presence), clobbers Mailer on the noggin with a hammer in order to render Maidstone “complete.”* (Mailer’s wife at the time, Beverly Bentley, screams like a harpy at Torn, inviting possible nasty retribution from Gerry Page.) One cannot help but notice that Mailer has kept this unkempt material in the film.
     A dazzlingly brilliant American movie en route to being a masterpiece sadly disintegrates before our eyes. Probably Kingsley was assassinated, but he nonetheless reappears (I think) alive, chapeaued like the Mad Hatter, at a Grand Assassination Ball. This joke tastelessly refers to the sixties, the decade of U.S. political assassinations.

* Well, this film certainly is on a bender. I have decided to assume that everyone is correct—because, believe me, I looked this up—that the Torn assault was unscripted. I remain not entirely convinced because one would think that if this were the case Mailer would have excluded the material from the film—and how did the cameraman know in advance to film Rip taking up that convenient hammer? This is all too much for my little head. Until I learn otherwise I’m siding with the crowd. (I’m still not certain whether the “interviews” in Bergman’s Passion are scripted or real.)

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (Ingmar Bergman, 1961)

Please see paragraph 4 of my essay on Bergman’s 1963 The Silence, which you will find categorized under “film reviews.” There I discuss Through a Glass Darkly.