DEAD MAN (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

There is a shot, one of the most brilliant ones of fifties cinema, when subjectivity slides into objectivity before our astonished eyes. The shot belongs to Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, a great artist whom too few people have even heard about. It occurs in his Ajaantrik (1958). It gives us the point of view of Raggadal, a forty-year-old Chevrolet jalopy, and its taxi cab driver, Bimal, as they proceed along a winding stretch of mountainous road. Without a cut—in other words, in the same shot—Raggadal, with Bimal behind the wheel, ends up coming toward the camera: a shattering glimpse of Bimal’s dissociation. Raggadal ends up as scrap; Bimal has no future in India, and the times are already passing him by.

I have no idea whether Jim Jarmusch had seen this film, which is also known by the titles Pathetic Fallacy and The Unmechanical, but a two-shot sequence in his Dead Man always reminds me of Ghatak’s shot. In post-Civil War America, a train is traveling westward. The shot is a train’s-eye view as the train enters the total darkness of a tunnel. When the train emerges, we and the camera are observing it from a pitched-high view. The vantage that the camera represents indeed alternates between the subjective and the objective throughout Jarmusch’s Western. The point of view that the subjective shots disclose always belongs to the film’s young protagonist, William Blake, except for the one I just described—and in that instance, Blake is a passenger on that train.

A pre-credit sequence begins with an angled closeup of the speeding wheels of the train and thereafter, for the most part, revolves among recurrences of that shot, closeups of Blake in the train’s interior, his observations of fellow passengers, and his observations of the landscape outside his window. Blake, from Cleveland, Ohio, is headed to a Western town called Machine, where a job as accountant presumably awaits him at Dickinson Metal Works. But all is not right on that train ride of his. Each time he dozes off and awakens, a different set of other-passengers fills his sight. He is peculiarly dressed for the West (or for anyplace else). A soot-faced train laborer sits down and talks with the boy and is most discouraging when Blake tells him about his end-of-the-line destination and job. The boy shows the job offer he received through the post, to which the stranger replies, “I wouldn’t trust words on a piece of paper.” (Perhaps an allusion to U.S. governmental treaties with native populations?) We wonder at this man’s oddly located break; shouldn’t he get back to work to help keep the train going?

Despite their strangeness some things are real: Blake’s glimpse of three wigwams outside, and the sudden shooting of buffalo by armed passengers—behavior sanctioned by the U.S. government seeking the completion of its genocide of native populations by attacking their food supply.

And, of course, there is the boy’s name, which is familiar to us: William Blake.

What is this mystery train anyhow? We learn that the boy’s parents have just died, orphaning him. Did he also die but remains trapped in some limbo-existence? In any case, the stoker proves prophetic; Dickinson Metal Works hired another accountant a month earlier. John Dickinson addresses Blake indirectly—Dickinson (Robert Mitchum, hilarious) faces instead his upright stuffed bear—and aims a shotgun at Blake, who flees as other workers laugh and laugh: a Kafkaesque passage. The factory floor is a scene of grinding machinery and agonized labor. The boy is now on his own, all his money, except for a few coins, exhausted by his fruitless uprooting and trip. But he does a Western thing: He spends his last money on whisky. While somehow retaining his shy innocence, the peaceable boy will become a cold-blooded killer; in other words, he will regionally assimilate. The die is cast, and one accepts Blake’s transformation in large measure because of the casting: Johnny Depp, who also professes a variant of shy innocence while infusing his “space” with a cold-bloodedness that some mistake for “cool.” Depp is superficial though engaging, giving one of his very rare competent performances, for which Jarmusch merits at least 98% of the credit.

In Machine, as the player-piano inside the saloon plays

Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy,
Where have you been, charming Billy? . . .

on the street our own charming Billy Boy rescues a flower girl out of Chaplin’s City Lights (1930), except that her flowers are synthetic, made of paper. Thel Russell—this film is packed with allusions to the poetry of William Blake—is the name of the girl whose dream underscores the artificiality of the location, the very direction that America has taken; one day, Thel hopes, she will have the means to make her artificial flowers out of silk, to each of which she will add a drop of perfume. Blake shares her hotel room bed for the night. “Why do you have this?” Charming Billy asks Thel, referring to the gun that she keeps nearby. “Because this is America.”

We are about to get a practical demonstration of just what Thel means. The couple are interrupted by Thel’s boyfriend, Charlie, who shoots, I believe, at Blake, with Thel leaning across him and taking the bullet. It kills her, but the bullet penetrates her and hits Blake as well. Using Thel’s gun, Blake shoots Charlie dead, succeeding on the third try—an indication that he has never fired a gun before in his life. Thus “charming Billy” has become a killer through the backdoor, so to speak. He clumsily drops through the hotel room window, falls to the ground (from which, earlier, he had picked Thel up after a man had roughed her up) and takes a convenient pinto for his getaway. The midwestern boy is fast losing the “mid.”

Blake’s troubles are just beginning, for who should Charlie turn out to be but Dickinson’s son? (Charlie Dickinson sufficiently resembles Charles Dickens to explain the bloodline-coincidence.) Perhaps worse, the horse that Blake stole also belonged to Dickinson—on the theory, I guess, that what he had given to his son reverts to his ownership upon the death of his son. Dickinson therefore hires the three reputedly best killers to track down Blake. However, each of these men—actually, one is a 14-year-old boy, a sufficiently light-skinned “little black boy” to have our minds wander to the sexual practices of Southern plantation owners)—has never before worked other than alone. Dickinson gives the trio an exclusive contract reminiscent of the job offer he had sent to William Blake; he renegs on this agreement as well, offering rewards to the general population through advertisements and getting the law also involved. “Wanted” posters of Blake come to populate the countryside. Their unsociability as a group—Jarmusch’s metaphor for America?—whittles the three killers down to one (an obvious allusion to Walt Whitman).

Blake is close to death—except that we know he is already dead and is experiencing an elaborate expiration or delirium fantasy. (A dusting of anachronistic details suggests that Blake’s actual “time” is our own and Jarmusch’s present.) But if Blake is dead, what is the point of the rest of his journey? Two things: acceptance of the fact of his death, which at the present Blake openly denies; the transportation of his spirit to the regions where our spirits congregate and from which, perhaps, they return, reborn in new bodies.

Blake’s agent in this regard is a mixed-tribe native, hence an outcast among Native Americans, whose name means in English “He Who Talks Loud and Says Nothing.” “He Who Talks Loud and Says Nothing” prefers to be called Nobody, with its glint of the status of Indians in white America. Blake wakes up to find this stranger trying to remove the bullet from him. Nobody cannot do this, explaining that the required cutting would kill Blake. He refers to the bullet as “white man’s metal”; his favorite epithet for white folk is “stupid fucking white man.” “Did you kill the white man who killed you?” Nobody asks. “But I’m not dead,” the boy densely counters. Upon learning he is tending to William Blake, Nobody adds, “Then you really are a dead man!” and with great excitement quotes from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence: “Some are born to sweet delight,/ Some are born to endless night.” (William Blake died in 1827.) Thereafter, Nobody presumes that Depp’s William Blake is the William Blake. Jarmusch may be winkingly suggesting that the English visionary poet and painter would likely have turned out a cut-and-dried accountant in America. Worse: he would have lived and died in Cleveland, Ohio.

Led by Nobody, Blake passes through bewitching landscapes in the direction of the snow-dappled terrain of the Pacific Northwest. The low-hung, upwardly tilted camera, the slow pace of the two travelers by horseback, and the stark black-and-white cinematography by Robby Müller (which will become shimmeringly lyrical later on) generate a dreamlike spectacle. In a sense, it all is a dream, although religionists tend to be literal about this sort of thing, perhaps because they are pitifully bereft of visionary imagination. (As a Christian, the real William Blake was fired by his commitment to free latter-day Christianity from its dogmatic, moralistic, hypocritical straightjacket.)

“You are being followed,” Nobody tells William Blake. “How do you know?” Blake asks—ultimately of himself (since Nobody is nobody, which is to say, nonexistent, the result of the federal government’s campaign of genocide against the native populations which stand between small white hopes and God-ordained manifest destiny). Nobody: “Often the evil stench of white men precedes them”—the equivocation (Often) perhaps kicking in when Jarmusch recalls that he also is a white man. (Although all white folk are “stupid fucking,” or fucking stupid, some aren’t half-bad.)

Blake’s first encounter with one of the “Wanted” posters bearing his mug irks him; the law believes that he murdered Thel. Meanwhile, Nobody starves Blake, believing him already dead and preparing Blake for his journey “across the mirror of water.” He confiscates Blake’s eyeglasses. “I can’t see without my glasses,” the boy protests. Nobody replies, “Perhaps you will see more clearly.” Blake must learn to “see” with his spirit rather than through his physical sense of sight. Blake must get on with the death-task at hand, and so Nobody abandons him, blessing Blake before he leaves, “May the Great Spirit watch over you, William Blake.” Will this stupid white boy grasp a bit who the real William Blake is and who therefore he himself is? “What’s in a name?” Here, everything. On his own and squinting a lot, Blake turns out to be a killer just to keep from being killed even though he is already a dead man. Jarmusch’s metaphor for American murder disturbs, distresses and absolutely blows away one’s peyoted brain. Blake’s gun becomes his “poetry.” “Are you William Blake?” one of his stalkers asks. “Yes, I am,” Blake boldly replies. “Do you know my poetry?” The boy has become a bigger, deadlier boy.

This is Blake’s confrontation with identical twin U.S. marshals out to take the wind out of his sail. Blake dispatches the law to kingdom come. “Looks like a damn religious icon,” remarks one of the hired killers when, trailing Blake, he comes across Blake’s handiwork on the ground: in this instance, the head of one of the brothers sideways against a disengaged wagon wheel. Religious icon? From this angle, the dead U.S. marshal is a ringer for Lenin. The killer pops the dead man’s head with his boot; interior matter gushes. Meanwhile, Blake, perhaps recalling Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), comes across a far lovelier but no less mortal transmutation of the image of Lenin lying in profile on the ground: a fawn. By this point Blake’s face is already painted; he adds a smear of the dead animal’s blood to the sacred decoration. Blake lies down with the fawn and sleeps with the dead. (I was reminded of the overhead shot of Marianne and Ferdinand sleeping in the wilds in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, 1965.) By degrees Blake has embraced his bloody nature as a white man in America. By degrees he has embraced his status as a dead man.

Nobody returns, which is easy enough to do when you don’t really exist. Blake is about to give up the ghost—an expression whose meaning this film goes a long way toward clarifying in the extreme. But a couple of adventures still await the pair. The two enter a general store. A running gag is about to come to violent fruition. Throughout, there has been a running gag of Blake’s being asked for tobacco. He never has any because he is, he has shyly explained, a nonsmoker. At least twice Nobody has asked Blake for tobacco and now Nobody plans on getting his own. But the store owner says he is out of the stuff. Translation: He won’t sell to an Indian. When Blake asks to buy tobacco, right in front of Nobody the owner suddenly has tobacco to sell. Two big bunches now lie on the counter. The owner recognizes Blake from the “Wanted” posters. He whips one out for the celebrity’s signature. Blake commits a moving gesture. With the pen he stabs—crucifies—the fine white Christian gentleman who owns the store, nailing his hand to the counter. Nobody grabs the tobacco. What Blake doesn’t know yet is that one of those bunches is for him—for his journey from “the place where the sea meets the sky” “across the mirror of water.” Blake’s mysterious sendoff is mystical and sublimely beautiful. Is it possible that Jarmusch knows Dovzhenko (Ivan, 1932)?

As the boy in his canoe leaves shore, facing it, he sees at a distance Nobody and the last hired killer take down one another with “white man’s metal.” But he is no longer concerned with the world that he is leaving.

Besides, America will replace this “metal” with atomic bombs—and, after inflicting this madness, will terrorize the world with its potential use of hydrogen bombs. And so on, until this very day when nuclear proliferation is such that almost anyone can act like America. We are all becoming “white” now.

This isn’t a great film. (The only Jarmusch film that comes close to being that is Stranger Than Paradise, 1984.) But a good deal commends it. I am not quite convinced, however, that Neil Young’s improvised score, mostly on electric guitar, is among the film’s virtues. I do like the film, though, for its eclectic mix of literary allusions and styles. A film that embraces both Melville and absurdist theater begs to be seen.

NOSFERATU (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1921)

In the context of silent German cinema, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu looms, perhaps, a bit larger than is fitting. The film cannot compare to Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Destiny the same year, or the two parts of Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), or to G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925). Even Murnau, most agree, is better represented by The Last Laugh (The Last Man, 1924). But we tend to place Nosferatu into a smaller category where its renown is entirely appropriate: the horror film; more specifically, the vampire film; more specifically yet, films based on Bram Stoker’s nineteenth-century novel Dracula. In this last subcategory, only one other film may have a greater claim to brilliance: from West Germany, Jonathan (1973), by Hans W. Geissendörffer, lensed in delirious, dark colors by Robby Müller.

Hardly anyone is unaware of the premise of the plot. A vampire-lord sucks the blood of the living in order to maintain its own posthumous existence—an eerie, decadent variant of the ancient figure of the Wanderer (Cain being an example), in which human life is indefinitely extended, along with, ironically and tragically, both human fear of and sorrow over death. But Stoker departed from the religious significance, usually attached to this figure, that identifies it with the redemptive capacity of human suffering. Instead, Stoker courted sensationalism by relating his nocturnal fiend to the sexual anxiety and repression of its victims—a slant that Murnau will have nothing to do with. Nor, to tell the truth, is he all that interested in the story per se, which the scenarist, Henrik Galeen, has reduced to its bare bones. Rather, Murnau gives his material a fresh and captivating theme: a woman’s torment in an unfulfilling marriage.

The woman, Nina, is deeply in love with Hutter, her spouse. Knock, the real estate agent for whom Hutter works as a clerk, has the boy travel from Bremen to the Carpathians and the castle of Count Orlock. The count—in reality, the vampire Nosferatu—is a client; Hutter’s mission is to convince him to purchase a home whose location, oddly, is exactly opposite his and Nina’s own residence. The young clerk succeeds, but at an unexpected forfeit when his strange host drinks his blood, enfeebling him, and locks him up—a parody of the employer Knock’s tyrannical treatment of the boy. Hutter escapes, finally; back home, meanwhile, mystical nightmares visit Nina, impressing on her a widening danger. Nosferatu takes up its new residence. Through the window it stares at Nina, who, guided by her love for her husband, knows she must decisively act. In order to save her husband, and to free Bremen from the pestilence Nosferatu has brought with it, she avails herself of the one proven way to destroy a vampire; thus she submits to its loathsome advances in its bed chamber, detaining the thing until the crowing of the cock, whereupon Nosferatu dissolves into nothingness, like a nightmare, at the dawn’s light. For Nina, the necessary forfeit is her own life.

Murnau does not dwell on the momentousness of this strong woman’s heroic sacrifice; he is, however, moved by it, and so are we. Murnau’s primary interest lies instead in rigorously analyzing this material in order to show that Nina can more easily embrace a course leading to her own death for the release it provides from a perpetually frustrating marriage. As part of his analysis, Murnau establishes a series of fascinating correspondences. For example, the lowly clerk’s blood enters the lordly Nosferatu; the puncture left on the boy’s neck, from the bite, is a grotesque parody of a signature on a contract, in this case certifying the “business transaction” between the clerk and Nosferatu. In Bremen, there are the face-to-face living quarters and the “wife”—legal, for one; symbolic, for the other—that they share. Cumulatively, this mirror-imaging links the two “male” characters Hutter and Nosferatu.

On the surface, perhaps, this linkage is perplexing. But its basis is given early on, prior to Hutter’s trip, before we have even set eyes on Nosferatu. In an “idyllic” passage outdoors, we are able to glimpse the character of Hutter and Nina’s marriage. The boy acts most lovingly; he is kind, affectionate, doting. However, Hutter’s frolicsome behavior, especially when contrasted with Nina’s graver, more mature demeanor, suggests a life-partner less than it does a playful child. Hutter, then, seems “outside” his own marriage, much as Nosferatu is outside of life. He brings Nina wildflowers, which he has (absurdly) rompingly gathered; she responds, tellingly, by longingly caressing the bouquet as though it were a baby—the child, the image implies, that marriage to Hutter hasn’t given her. Blissfully unaware, Hutter fails to respond to Nina’s heartache. Acting more like a toy husband than a real one, inattentive to how unfulfilled the person he most loves is, Hutter is draining Nina’s lifeblood. He is an “innocent” version of Nosferatu.

So disconsolate is Nina in her stunted marriage that she desires Nosferatu, which is to say, death, as much as it desires her. Murnau makes this plain when the two neighbors stare at one another across the square. For Nina, Nosferatu is a husband-substitute. But to submit to Nosferatu, even to save Hutter from also becoming the living dead, is to betray her marriage. In effect, this would mean admitting to herself the pointlessness of her marriage. Nina’s death, then, releases her from a loving though disastrous union. As it happens, it is the very end that her nightmares foretold.

Murnau’s film achieves a captivating form in the phantomlike effects he conjures; he locates, in imaginative space, a twilit blending of fantasy and reality, shadow and substance, death and life, and, following Kierkegaard, the twin components of dread, attraction and repulsion, revulsion and desire. In the same vein, Nosferatu’s sea journey to Bremen impresses as a journey of the mind—Nina’s shrouded, twisted, storm-tossed unconscious to which the failure of her marriage has given birth. Finally, there is the frightening image of Nosferatu itself, evoking indefinable horror. A critical contributor to the effectiveness of this image is the silence of the silent film itself; it is as if sound had been suspended, as in a dream. Above all, in a masterpiece of makeup, the actor playing Nosferatu, Max Schreck, brilliant here, is at once so hideous and yet so bodily insubstantial that the thing’s final disappearance seems as natural as a dream’s passing.

Spare, chaste, analytical, Murnau’s Nosferatu is the stylistic opposite of Werner Herzog’s sweeping Romantic remake (1978), where the wife’s submission and sacrifice yield no benefit in order to accommodate a pessimistic view, of the continual rebirth and rejuvenation of evil, that looks back to Lang’s fine, silent Mabuse films (1922), and dismally ahead to the misogynistic Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), a vampire film in disguise. The genre’s masterpiece remains, of course, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931), which immerses us the viewer in a shifting dream of mortal anxiety; it and Lang’s Destiny are the two most darkly magical films in creation. And there is the haunting, intensely violent Jonathan (1970), where Geissendörffer relates his Dracula material to Germany’s Nazi past, creating a vision of evil so somber, so sorrowful and full of pain that it suggests our inhumanity as it weighs upon a loving God.

MAN ON THE TRACKS (Andrzej Munk, 1956)

Very nearly forty, Andrzej Munk died in a road accident in 1961, ending the career of the Polish filmmaker whom Roman Polanski considered his mentor. Munk’s Man on the Tracks, Eroica (1957), Cross-Eyed Luck (1959) and Passenger (1961) constitute a sterling body of work. Indeed, the last, completed by Witold Lesiewicz, using stills, and released in 1963, is a masterpiece, the single finest fictional film ever made on the subject of the Holocaust. (Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage and Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak—both also Polish—are the runners-up, although the former, which Jakubowska based on her own term at Auschwitz, must be accounted semi-documentary. The finest film ever about the Holocaust? Dariusz Jablonski’s documentary Photographer—again, Polish.) The passing of Munk hasn’t achieved, worldwide, the resonance of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s passing, also in a road accident, in 1931 at age 42. At least Munk, though, died in his Poland, not in Hollywood, where—Santa Barbara: close enough—Murnau, one of Germany’s premier filmmakers (Nosferatu, 1922; The Last Laugh, 1924), died, riding his motorcycle. Munk did not, like Murnau, end in a wreck of compromise.

Man on the Tracks—Czlowiek na torze—is a bold film, of a kind that Josef Stalin’s recent death, and the resultant loosened Soviet grip on the Polish film industry, facilitated. It’s a work about current laborers in Poland, and about the social atmosphere in which they work. It’s the work of a committed Communist, but an observant and inquiring one who finds he has more uncertainties and questions to probe than answers he can pull out of an ideological bag. It’s the sort of film that could not have been made in Hollywood at the same time, so vastly more oppressive was the political atmosphere in the U.S. in the 1950s.

Man on the Tracks begins famously with a man’s death. The man is Orzechowski, a former railway conductor—an older man, who haunts the local station post. He is run down on the tracks by the very train he used to engineer, which his replacement, recognizing him, brings to a screeching halt. How did this happen? Two possibilities are suicide and sabotage. Only one of two green lights showed, indicating safe passage for the train when in fact the situation on the tracks was the opposite of this. Did Orzechowski remove one of the lights himself?; is that what he was doing when the accident killing him occurred? And, if so, what was his motive? Was it political since he was a member of the old guard? Was he nursing a grudge for having been discharged after decades of service? Certainly Tuszka, the station master with whom Orzechowski continually butted heads, thinks it was a case of attempted sabotage. A board of inquiry will determine the truth.

Two motives of cinema intersect here: a character study; a search for truth. The intersection is this: the inquiry will eventually reveal the true nature of Orzechowski’s character. The revelation is logical; much of what we see, in flashbacks corresponding to the testimony of witnesses, predicts it, and yet it comes as something of a shock, given the distortions that these subjective accounts display. The structure of the film is often compared to that of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), with their multiple perspectives on identical events. As a post-mortem, however, Man on the Tracks is at least as much like Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Ikiru (1952). There, at Kenji Watanabe’s funeral, his co-workers, fellow civil servants, piece together truths about the man. Officials interviewing Orzechowski’s co-workers attempt to do the same in Man on the Tracks.

It’s a daunting enterprise, given the atmosphere of suspicion that envelops workers in 1950 Poland. A new program of railway efficiency has train engineers and crews competing to use as little coal as possible; the nation’s progress, the Party assures them, depends on this. At the same time, there are older workers, themselves resisting the redefinition of their homeland as communistic, who must function under the deepest cloud of suspicion. At heart, they do not equate the progress of Polish Communism with Poland’s progress. Orzechowski is such an individual. He burns coal generously, explaining that he does things as he was taught to do them and as he has always done them. The English subtitle beautifully expresses his crime in Tuszka’s eyes: Orzechowski “lags behind in saving coal.” The implication is that Orzechowski is dragging Poland back rather than moving it ahead. Therefore, his older age isn’t alone his liability that attracts the suspicious concern of others; it’s the different way of political life in Poland that Orzechowski can recall by dint of his old age. For the younger workers, the new order in Poland replaces German occupation; but Orzechowski has vivid social and political memories that go farther back. He is an odd man out because of both his age and the sense of Poland that goes along with his age. “Times have changed,” the stationmaster tells him, saying in effect, “You must get with the program.” But Tuszka really is trying to provoke Orzechowski’s retirement, toward which end he replaces Orzechowski’s assistant with someone who is loyal instead to him. Tuszka is also nursing a grudge. Years ago, Orzechowski reprimanded Tuszka for shoddy work.

It won’t be easy to get at the truth about Orzechowski, in particular because the cloud of suspicion he was under made him very private, guarded, quite rigid. Thus the film begins in pitch darkness as the train inexorably proceeds until the brakes are applied. The black-and-white cinematography by Romuald Kropat and Jerzy Wójcik conjures a blackness of night blacker than any I’ve seen in any other film. This darkness is, of course, correlative to the depth of mystery surrounding Orzechowski and his motives; the gleam of the train, perhaps, indicates the possibility that some clarity can emerge from the darkness. The voluminous smoke from the train suggests the murky, self-serving testimony, given at the inquiry, that, for those directing the inquiry, will have to negotiate a path—a track, if you will—between darkness and clarity.

We come to see, in effect, two Orzechowskis. One is the tight, demanding, formal figure who doesn’t suffer fools and who feels oppressed by the surveillance he is under. The other is a more relaxed Orzechowski, who socializes with same-age friends, for example. Each exists, if you will, on a separate track, but the tracks cross one another in (until the end) the film’s most exquisitely moving moment. It’s Saturday morning in the park. Orzechowski’s new assistant is there to meet his girlfriend, who awaits him on a park bench. She is in sight when Orzechowski comes strolling with his wife. The assistant tries to hide, to avoid a confrontation with his cantankerous boss, but Orzechowski spots him and is immediately suspicious that the young man is there to spy on him. However, when it becomes obvious that the man is there to meet his girl, Orzechowski breaks into a warm smile, and the couples make gracious introductions. Boss, assistant; non-Communist, Communist; old, young: for an instant none of the divisions matter. For an instant, we see four Poles interacting. Orzechowski even asks the young couple to join him and his wife, but the assistant and his girl leave to go (the assistant says) to the movies. The good moment is gone.

The inquiry finds its way back to the Orzechowski we glimpsed in the park. For all the suspicion of sabotage that had been leveled at the dead man by Tuszka, the Communist board of inquiry, acting intelligently and humanely, arrives at the truth. I will not disclose the particulars about the damaged signal, for this revelation involves a visual moment that’s a surprise and a cheat—a glorious cheat! In one of the flashbacks, we observe something that the witness to whose testimony the flashback corresponds could not and did not; and what we observe exonerates Orzechowski of any charge of sabotage against fellow Polish workers and fellow Polish citizens. Luckily, the head of the board of inquiry, without benefit of what Munk shows us, is able to figure out what happened. Orzechowski was on the tracks on that fateful night to attempt to correct the problem of the missing signal that would have properly halted the train, averting disaster. He dies in the attempt, for it is he, ultimately, who halts the train at the forfeit of his life. Orzechowski was a Pole and a working-class hero; how can we not have seen that? Thus Munk strikes down the equation (embodied by Tuszka) of Communism and the righteous element of the working class. Munk stresses instead Polish identity under the political skin. The humanity of this resolution is overwhelming.

The boldness of the film is a little jaw-dropping. While in the United States, in its grip, McCarthyism generated films either in support of it or, otherwise, so riddled with allegory and indirection that audiences had to ferret out subterranean gleams of dissent, at the same time Communist Poland kept the green light glowing for this bluntly, highly critical film of a deleterious atmosphere of suspicion amongst Polish workers. Man on the Tracks assails Polish McCarthyism, where the bedeviling accusation is not that one is a Communist but that one is not. The wisdom of the board of inquiry doubtless smoothed the edge of the film’s scalpel, rendering the film more acceptable to Polish authorities. And no one doubts that the film couldn’t have been made had Stalin been alive in the Soviet Union. Still, the jaw drops.

The acting in this film is competent except for the lead. Kazimierz Opalinski is superb as Orzechowski.

The excellent script is by Munk and Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, whose story the pair adapted. Their next collaboration would be Eroica (Heroism), a biting, sardonic satire about Polish wartime heroism.

With Munk about, shooting film, the shibboleths do not stand.

WINGED MIGRATION (Jacques Perrin, 2001)

A bird-loving friend of mine is an especial fan of the Oscar-winning novelty film Bill and Coo (Dean Reisner, 1948), in which the citizens of Chirpendale are “enacted” by trained birds. I love birds as well (they were the principal pets I grew up with), but I have never seen the film. Still, I thought of its reputed charm as I suffered through Winged Migration (Le peuple migrateur—literally, The Migratory Nation). It takes a certain kind of grim determination to make one’s way through such twaddle as this documentary proffers, and while I gamely took a shot at mustering it for part of the flight, I ran afoul of too many flaps and eventually gave up in defeat. I’ve been crapped on before.

Technically, the film is accomplished, a feat of editing, given the incredible amount of footage involved of dozens of species in forty countries worldwide—birds in all kinds of situations, both routine and extraordinary, in flight and on the ground. We watch birds eat; we watch an injured one, on a beach, savagely attacked by crabs; and, of course, we watch birds in flight, both at a distance and from within their formations—birds that have been raised to be accustomed to airplanes, helicopters, hot-air balloons, cameras, and all the noises involved, precisely so that they might participate in this film. There are ample editing tricks, and while the film opens with a disclaimer that no special effects were used, someone named Manfred Büttner is listed in the credits as the film’s producer of visual effects. Golly, he must have been paid to do something.

But the degree to which the film may be false is, finally, irrelevant to its shortcomings. The dreadful music and the sparse, slightly pompous commentary (read by the filmmaker): these factors, while certainly damaging, also aren’t the main source of the problem. Rather, the film is a mess because of the tangle of its cross-purposes. The filmmaker and his editing staff never found a way of reconciling Winged Migration’s subjective and objective elements. For here is a film that tries to do many things without figuring out how they all might contribute to the same vision, a single coherent perspective. This film is all over the sky and the earth.

One of the motives behind the film’s record of bird-flights is to suggest, here, the exhilaration of such flight and, there, also the ordeal of flight over long distances and into the wind. The former, of course, is primarily subjective, and for us; vicariously, it is we who are intended to feel our spirits lifted to the heavens by the identification with the birds’ flying that the camera imposes when it’s right there among the flying birds. But the ordeal of flight isn’t something we are asked to feel; this projection of the birds’ subjectivity—how we presume they must feel—we are meant to take in objectively. I am sure that these different motives might reasonably coexist in a film, but only if a vision is created that is sufficiently flexible, elastic even, to accommodate them. Alas, no such vision informs any part of Winged Migration; no vision, that is, preexists the film, structuring and defining it, and informing every bit of it. Rather, the filmmakers naively hope that some sort of vision will magically accumulate from the pieced-together thing they have wrought. This is filmmaking by hocus pocus, and it leaves the two motives that I have described dangling and twisting in the winds. They never come together. It never seems to occur to the ones helming the project that these different motives should come together.

Another motive of the film is one that the original French title better indicates than does the meaningless one substituted for it in the States. (Why do American distributors constantly change titles? A title ought to be helpful.) The film seeks to give a sense of the strength of community among groups—“nations”—of birds within the world’s total bird population. This may be coaxing further identification among us, for we humans also are social creatures; or (who knows?) it may be wryly chiding us for thus projecting onto the birds our own nationalistic propensities and biases. Whichever the case may be (and on this score the film’s tone is unhelpfully indistinct), this aspect must somehow be reconciled with another, and by far the most signature aspect of the film: the theme of the birds’ vulnerability. I have already noted the attack of the crab monsters: Nature, red in tooth and claw. (Of course, the bird we watch swallow whole a fish equally fits poet Alfred Tennyson’s famous description of Nature’s Darwinian mechanism.) But the film also stresses the environmentalist concern of humanity’s selfish and, at times, vicious impingement on the capacity of birds to survive. A bird is stuck in an oil slick; hunters shoot ducks out of the sky. Even if the latter occurrence more closely matched in power the hunt in Jean Renoir’s phenomenal Rules of the Game (1939), it still would be the case that the filmmakers, again, create no especial vision that might reconcile the vulnerability of the birds with either their strength of community or, to move back a paragraph, the exhilaration (for us) of their flight. Objectivity and subjectivity are once again carelessly thrown together, for we never feel vulnerable to anything while watching the film. Our identification with the birds, then, is far from complete, while at the same time these points of identification undercut the objective view of the birds that the film also hopes to provide. I can’t recall when I’ve seen a film that’s more mixed-up.

The director is Jacques Perrin. Yes, that Jacques Perrin, who many of us have admired, and some of us have adored, for more than forty years. One of the most prolific actors on earth, he is good enough to have won the best actor prize at Venice for both Vittorio De Seta’s Un uomo a metà (Almost a Man, 1965) and Angelino Fons’s La busca (Quest, 1967). (My favorite performance of his is as the younger, dying brother in Valerio Zurlini’s heartrending Family Diary, 1962.) Perrin also produced or co-produced Constantin Costa-Gavros’s Z (1969), in which he also acts magnificently, and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Black and White in Color (1977)—both Oscar winners in the foreign-language division. (He also has acted in another Oscar-winner, Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1989 Cinema Paradiso.) More recently he has produced or co-produced Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe (1996), which does for bugs what Winged Migration tries to do for birds, and Eric Valli’s Himalaya (2000)—both immense (though not artistic) successes. It hasn’t taken long for his bird film to fly into our midst, and we have also seen the omnibus September 11 film (2002) that claims Perrin as an associate producer: a work consisting of short films by eleven different filmmakers in response to the September 11 bombings, one of which, by Shohei Imamura, is surpassingly brilliant. Because some of the segments of the 9/11 film are critical of the United States, we got the documentary that’s for the birds right away but had to wait a while for the 9/11 film.

A film-loving friend assures me—I haven’t seen it—that Christophe Gans’s Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf) is the worst French film ever made. Having seen Winged Migration, I say: Not so fast!

HEAD AGAINST THE WALLS (Georges Franju, 1958)

There is certainly this much agreement: Georges Franju, who along with Henri Langlois founded La Cinémathèque française, is one of the essential artists of world cinema. After a string of highly regarded documentaries, Franju made his first feature, La tête contre les murs, from the novel by Jean-Pierre Hervé-Bazin. The script was by the film’s star, Jean-Pierre Mocky, who was himself barely in his twenties when he played François Gérane, who is supposed to be 25 but acts like the teenager that James Dean played in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), which Mocky has declared his principal inspiration. Franju, twenty years senior, and Mocky locked horns continually during the shoot, with Mocky always prevailing. Actors who are shits always think it’s permissible to behave in such a fashion; Franju felt demoralized. Many times throughout the years Franju disparaged the film, even repudiated it. This added credibility to the stance of reviewers who themselves dismissed La tête contre les murs as preliminary to Franju’s worthwhile feature-length films. Franju, for whom objectivity in this matter was impossible, can be forgiven; but Head Against the Walls, Franju’s fourteenth, is a magnificent film.

At the opening of the film François, son of a rich Paris lawyer, solitudinously rides his motorcycle down a steep ravine, around, and back up again, one part of this pointless “journey” visually canceling or undoing—if you will, burying—the other. Plainly this “lone wolf” is going nowhere; he has time on his hands in the country, and he fills it with empty gestures. In between the Indochina and Algerian Wars, even his nation has no use to which to put him. Meanwhile, François needs money. When he cannot get anyone else to lend him any, he decides to ask his father, from whom he has been more or less estranged following the mysterious death of his mother, possibly a suicide. We are given to understand that this recent traumatizing death has made François feel like an orphan. When he rides up to his father’s mansion, we hear the sound of a dog barking. It sounds forbidding, even dangerous; but as he walks up to the mansion, the family dog greets François warmly. It is the only warmth he will receive. A child’s song fills the soundtrack, a heart-piercing projection of the mother’s tenderness that François misses and of the father’s coldness, insensitivity, even cruelty against which (like a head against a wall) François perpetually feels like a helpless, powerless child. Part of his pedestrian approach to his father’s house appears in extreme long-shot, making a moving dot of him, and even a closer shot of him, as he approaches the front door, emphasizes by his hesitant, unself-confident gait François’s feeling, at least at this moment, of being small and feeble. (This contrasts with his earlier, arrogant behavior among his peers.) Once François is inside the darkened place, the child’s music box tune entrancingly continues, and we think, “He is in his mother’s house as well.”

The elder Gérane is hideous, almost Nazi-like. In a more conventional Oedipal mode, having stolen his way into his father’s house, François rifles his father’s desk, stealing money. In the process he discovers on top of the desk a legal brief, some of whose supportive documents he burns in a symbolical assault on his father. It is as if François, mesmerized, were under the spell of the childhood tune that we hear and is therefore unable to do other than what he is doing. It is almost as if his mother’s spirit were directing him. It is at just this moment that his father enters the room and the music stops. It is as though the father has killed the music, at least chilled it out of memory, breath and existence. He assails his son with a monstrous remark: “I had hoped you would take after me, but you have turned out like your mother.” François slaps his father across the face, and no slap in cinema is more richly deserved. When the father reaches for his gun in his desk drawer, without a hint of fear François reminds him of the issue of bourgeois propriety that will prevent him from killing his son. Bull’s-eye: the boy is confronting his father with the man’s unnaturalness. Nowhere in the film is the father given a first name because he is a stand-in for all those who represent petty oppression.

The French are very good at flipping over the Freudian assumption of the Oedipal complex. In The 400 Blows (1959) François Truffaut, instead of showing an adolescent boy hankering for his mother, shows the woman harboring sexual feelings for her son (I am referring to the scene in which she dries Antoine after he has taken a bath)—this, in the context of her unrewarding marriage to the boy’s stepfather. In Head Against the Walls, Franju unmistakably shows François’s contempt for his father, which his mother’s death has clarified; but it also shows, in their chilly confrontation, the degree to which the father hates the son, perceiving in him a threat to himself, if only the threat of youth. To this soul François seems to epitomize a rejection of his authority and work ethic. Here, Franju anticipates key issues a decade in advance, especially when in their context the romance with his motorcycle encapsulates his hankering for freedom. Franju doesn’t sentimentalize this or fetishize the bike (the extreme long-shot at the beginning, where boy-on-bike is a dot moving across terrain, certifies his resistance to doing this), but he plainly opposes the authoritarianism that François’s nasty father exudes.

François’s father arranges to have his son’s freedom taken away from him. He has François imprisoned in an insane asylum. Some may argue that this happens all too easily, but they would have to be incredibly naïve to pose such an argument. Today, fifty years later, power and influence remain all that is necessary to have someone difficult to deal with, like a pesky son, committed to a psychiatric hospital. The cruelty of the father’s action is handled by Franju swiftly, brilliantly. In their scene of confrontation by the father’s desk, the father phones the police, there is a cut to an automobile ride in the dark, during which the boy, obviously drugged, is flanked by men in white coats, there is the arrival at the secure facility, and the boy wakes up to the harshly lit, oppressively white and sterile waking nightmare that will characterize (except for a brief escape) what little remains of the boy’s life. The father has set in motion a course of events that culminates in his son’s finish.

Along the way there is a debate between doctors (one of whom is excellently played by Pierre Brasseur) on the way best to treat mental patients; but this parody of discussions about different forms of Christianity in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1954) isn’t germane to the film’s essential tragedy. Rather, it gives those viewers who are wedded to a bogus humanism something to hold onto; by doing this, Franju exposes the self-important nonsense and meaninglessness with which the psychiatric establishment (like the legal establishment) concerns itself. Critic Roy Armes bemoans the following: “[N]o answer is given to the vital question of whether [François] is really insane, or whether he is a sane man institutionalised by his father out of spite.” This criticism is ridiculous on two different fronts. Spite and viciousness motivate the father regardless of the state of François’s mental health. One thing has nothing to do with the other. However, it is totally irrelevant “whether [François] is really insane,” and this is why it would have made for a poorer film if Franju had conveniently resolved the matter in order to placate anticipated quarrels with his obligation as artist to develop his material thematically rather than according to narrative convention. What is relevant is that the confiscation of a human being’s freedom cannot assist in an insane person’s recovery, and can only damage or altogether destroy either someone who is or isn’t insane.

One may disagree with Franju’s position (I do not), but this film is Franju’s, not anyone else’s.