DIVIDED HEAVEN (Konrad Wolf, 1964)

Along tracks in a train car factory in Halle, East Germany, Rita Seidel collapses; youth hasn’t protected her from nervous exhaustion. The image of her in a hospital bed launches flashbacks; are they hers, or do they appear without her intervention or participation, as though she is divided from her own experience? (Discontinuous, the voiceover is certainly “divided” from itself.) We learn that Rita is divided from her lover, a chemist, who fled to West Germany after a professional stymieing, and from her own former idealistic outlook, which had been willing to give Communism a go. (Manfred is nearly a decade older than Rita.) And the Berlin Wall has since gone up, dividing Germany itself. The action of Der geteilte Himmel, which Christa Wolf, the author of the novel, helped adapt and Konrad Wolf (no relation) directed, takes place at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties. (East Germany built the Wall in 1961.) It is an accomplished, politically dense film that is, ultimately, schematic and, by design, enormously depressing.
     The film is in black and white that emphasizes the part of the spectrum covering light gray to white. Normally, color films are much harder on the eyes than black-and-white ones; but the filmmaker and Werner Bergmann, his cinematographer, have collaborated on a kind of optical torture of their own. Almost everything, and certainly everything outdoors, is rendered artfully indistinct, as though we are viewing it through a veil of silt. The German Democratic Republic is visually cast as a dry and arid place.
      Renate Blume plays Rita with sufficient appeal to attract sympathy; her attempting suicide, as she does in the book, would have resulted in a heaviness that the film, which is mostly delicate, could ill support. A good deal of care has gone into the film’s mood and design; but, for me, this is one film of Konrad Wolf’s that only rarely comes to any sort of life.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

THE SONG OF SONGS (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)

Somewhere along the yellow-brick blog I noted that Marlene Dietrich, one of my favorite actresses, was never at her most convincing playing a virgin, but now I must eat those words, having just seen for the first time her performance as Lily Czepanek, a country girl who, upon being orphaned by the death of her father, is sent to Berlin to live with her aunt, in Rouben Mamoulian’s The Song of Songs. Lily is now as devoted to the memory of her father, who was devout, as she was to the living soul. The one thing she has brought with her, apart from some clothes, is the Bible from which she read to him each night, especially the 117 verses of The Song of Songs of Solomon. Lily’s father, then, was a religious man whose sensibility tread a tender and erotic line—one that possibly recalled his deceased wife, Lily’s mother, and required the suppression of his most problematic feelings for his daughter. Lily’s innocence coincides with her ignorance of all of this. Lily simply knew that the father she adored loved biblical poetry. Dietrich, along with Garbo the most knowing of actresses, is poignant as innocent Lily. Moreover, Lily’s falling in love, her first love affair, and her rotten marriage to another man all draw superlative acting from Dietrich—humane, ferocious, magical.
     The man with whom she falls in love is Richard Waldow (Brian Aherne, charming), a dedicated sculptor who sculpts her in marble while she is posing nude. They become lovers; but Lily’s mere mention of fidelity, marriage and—egads!—children frightens off the footloose hand-chiseler, who hands off Lily to rich Baron von Merzbach (Lionel Atwill, magnetically repellent—you sort out the oxymoron), who is old enough to be Lily’s father. Once her aunt kicks her out for immorality, but really because the Baron has generously bribed Auntie to do so, and to spite Richard, Lily marries the Baron, her flesh cringing at his touch. Like so much in this compressed and elliptical film based on Hermann Sudermann’s 1908 novel Das hohe Lied, the crucial drama, because it is purely interior, occurs off-screen: the Baron’s lecherousness retroactively sheds new dark on her image of her father, robbing Lily of her last vestige of residual innocence. Convinced that the Baron will kill her for infidelity, Lily flees his palatial domain for the gutter, rising to become a Sternbergian chanteuse in a hot spot, where Richard, who has been searching for her, eventually finds her. He takes her back to his studio/apartment, where she takes an ax to his statue of her, decapitating it and lopping off a hand—a stunning scene that whacks some of the bloom off of subsequent movie scenes, in Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964), that borrow from it. This assault on Richard’s idealization exhausts the real woman, leaving Lily on the floor. Richard stoops to take her up in his arms. The sculpture is shattered; the woman herself might yet mend.
     Some object to what they consider an impossibly happy ending to material destined for tragedy. But it all works beautifully, thanks to Mamoulian’s liveliest filmmaking ever, Victor Milner’s black-and-white cinematography and, above all, Dietrich’s clear, unerring charting of an innocent’s coming-of-age.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

ANOTHER YEAR (Mike Leigh, 2010)

Another Year is one of writer-director Mike Leigh’s fullest, richest, most beautiful works. A finely etched tangle of family- and extended family-relations, it is also overflowing with life even as it leans in on death, the omnipresent sterility toward which life heads. Here is a film without creatures of any kind other than human beings.
     Tom and Gerri are a seemingly comfortable long-married couple, although Gerri, a health center counselor and an unremitting moral monitor and demi-snot, shoots disapproving looks at Tom, an engineering geologist. What he does is serious work: analyzing ground to determine what should or shouldn’t be constructed where. By contrast, from what we see, Gerri’s work is bullshit; but Gerri, in front of guests, with Tom in attendance, dismisses what Tom does for a living. (Her silent rationalization: I want to give my son’s girlfriend the chance to talk about herself.) “He digs holes,” is how Gerri characterizes her husband’s work. Ironically, this is what she does; she “digs holes” in people’s egos. Her marriage is a “happy” one because Tom, who is self-absorbed anyhow, pays no mind to Gerri’s unkindness. One must also note the couple’s disparity in intelligence: Tom is smart; Gerri, not.
     Leigh’s film, which is seasonally chaptered as it proceeds through “another year,” is well acted (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play Tom and Gerri), with one exception: Lesley Manville is marvelous as Mary, the receptionist at the health center, who over decades has deluded herself into believing a number of things, for instance, that Gerri, much the same age, is her true friend and Joe, Tom and Gerri’s 30-year-old son, is somehow a romantic possibility for her. Life has passed Mary by, and she is self-centered, presumptuous, irritating, apologetic-by-rote, and an alcoholic—the kind of pain that only an actress at the top of her game could make work as a compelling character. No wonder Manville was named best actress by the London critics and, in the U.S., the National Board of Review.
     However, Mary isn’t the only “loser” suffering through “another year.” Overweight, alcoholic Ken pines for Mary, who treats him shabbily; Tom’s older brother and nephew, who treats his father (and everyone else) shabbily, both are at raw, loose ends. Tom and Gerri are, after all, far less happy than they seem, and Joe and Katie may in time follow suit. Leigh’s small group of characters projects a vision of a disenchanted England, an unsatisfying term of life.
     Leigh dedicated Another Year to Simon Channing Williams, his producing partner in Thin Man Films, who died of cancer in 2009.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

STORM CENTER (Daniel Taradash, 1956)

Well, belatedly I’ve seen it: the first Hollywood film to address openly and directly McCarthyism and the postwar reactionary atmosphere engendering hysteria and fear in the U.S.; (as far as I know) the first Hollywood film to use the term “civil liberties”; the first Hollywood film to ask the pertinent question, “What would Thomas Jefferson say?” Low-budget, unadorned, but acute, Ibsenian and possessed of the power of a sledgehammer, Storm Center is an important American film. It is a frightening portrait of American conformity and parochialism—and one, I might add, that makes its case without resorting to cardboard villainous caricatures. The members of the pictured small town’s city council merely wish to be re-elected. Alicia Hull (Bette Davis, brave where Mary Pickford, originally announced for the role, chickened out) is the librarian who will not take off the shelf a (fictitious) controversial book, The Communist Dream, and is fired and vilified for it, whipping up the townsfolk against her for being an outed “Red.” Her position: We should not be afraid of freedom of speech; the book’s sickening propaganda is self-exposing; would a book promoting U.S. freedom and democracy be allowed on a Soviet library shelf? Based on Ruth Brown, a Bartlesville, Oklahoma, librarian who, suspected of being a Communist, lost her job in 1950 after thirty years of service, Hull is a trusted member of the community until the winds of reaction turn against her. For me, a remarkable moment arrives at the city council meeting when she is confronted with her (cancelled) membership in Communist front-organizations. Politically ambitious Paul (“Dick Nixon”) Duncan says to her, “You must have believed in some of their ideas”—to which Hull instantly responds, “No! They believed in some of mine.”
     The Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency waged a campaign against this essential film, and its first-time director, Daniel Taradash, never made another one.
     The script, by Elick Moll and Taradash, soars in spots and is stilted in several others. Hull’s close relationship with a 9-year-old avid reader, who becomes unhinged by her pariah-status and turns against her, never convinced me; but the fire he starts, which razes the library, results in a visually stunning, breath-stopping passage, an evocation of Nazi book-burning where we see volumes by Shakespeare, Voltaire and others consumed by flames. It’s a fucking shame that Taradash did not make—probably could not make—another film.
     Bette Davis convinces as a woman ten to fifteen years her senior, but her acting is mannered and grows monotonous. (Vocally, she reminded me of her schoolmarm in The Corn Is Green, Irving Rapper, 1945.) Also, Davis fails to embody one key element of Hull’s history: the loss of her spouse, who was killed in World War I. (Ruth Brown, I believe, was a spinster, and Davis’s Hull seems that way to me.) Paul Kelly and Kim Hunter, as Hull’s longtime friend, a judge, and her assistant librarian, on the other hand, are complex and electric.
     Whatever its flaws, this is one not to miss.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

THE TILLMAN STORY (Amir Bar-Lev, 2010)

The Tillman Story, which won the documentary prize of the San Francisco critics, is another sharp, powerful work by U.S. documentarian Amir Bar-Lev. While it refers specifically to official lies regarding the death of a soldier, a high-profile celebrity, in Afghanistan, and the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration’s and the U.S. military’s subsequent exploitation of his memory to recruit for their Iraq War, Bar-Lev aims more widely at the nature of corrupt power, deceit, self-deceit. “[My film is] about the lies we tell ourselves to make war palatable,” Bar-Lev has stated. “And it’s from the Greek times—heroes, hero-worship, valorizing war and telling lies about it.”
     Patrick Daniel Tillman Jr. was a college and, later, professional football player who, affected by the attacks of 9/11, rejected a lucrative contract in favor of enlisting with his brother Kevin in the U.S. Army. His death two years later by “friendly fire,” at age 27, was initially reported to have been by the Taliban, and he was nonsensically accorded a Silver Star for combat bravery as part of a cover-up. This also involved destroying his personal diary, which presumably gave voice to Tillman’s disillusionment over U.S. incursions in Afghanistan and especially Iraq, where he had also been deployed, so that his memory could be used for the purpose of military recruitment to help sustain Bush’s wars. Tillman’s divorced parents each began an officially stonewalled probe of the truth of their son’s death and the other lies that were being attached to Pat and his memory. The film contains interviews of each parent and of Pat’s comrades-in-arms and others. Pat’s mother, “Dannie,” concludes: “It’s not about our family. Our family will never be satisfied. We’ll never have Pat back. . . . This is about what they did to a nation.”
     One riveting film.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19