LE GAI SAVOIR (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968)

Over three years, partially lit by the interior flame of their radicalism, two young militants, Émile Rousseau, a descendant of Jean-Jacques, and Patricia Lumumba, Patrice’s “daughter,” meet after-hours on a bare stage in an otherwise pitch-dark television studio and discuss politics and filmmaking. As witnesses, we receive from this discussion, and from accompanying recent and contemporary images and sounds, an enlightened education. The young pair teach themselves and one another, and we are collateral beneficiaries—along with writer-director Jean-Luc Godard, whose ambivalence over violent revolution is given a projective debate. The film’s title translates as Joyful Wisdom.
     Godard set this film aside in 1967 but picked it up in 1968, after the May student uprising and strikes. Initially caught up in the Leftist waves of La Chinoise (Godard, 1967), Le gai savoir emotionally expanded to include a sense of Leftist turmoil, disarray. We hear a rewinding tape recorder and recorded moments from 1968 street rallies. A substantial part of this film shows a kaleidoscopic collision of images and sounds outside the studio, testing their relationship, how they are politically manipulated, when they are “false” or “true.” Brechtian distancing devices compound Brechtian distancing devices, threatening to lose all sense of argument or coherence in a barrage of sights and sounds. But this never happens, primarily because of the actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Julie Berto. Léaud in particular gives an astonishing performance, which includes a simulated tightrope walk, under a clear plastic umbrella, while singing (beautifully!).
     Richard Brody is plain wrong that the “images” of them “matter little.” One of Godard’s themes is the relationship between sex and politics, and the intimacy between Patricia and Émile, with their various close arrangements vis-à-vis the camera and the lustrous brown of their heads of hair, speak to this.

THE FIRE WITHIN (Louis Malle, 1963)

Maurice Ronet brings electrifying depth and restraint to his brilliant, moving performance as an alcoholic writer who, despite the attention of sympathetic friends in Paris, can find no reason not to “leave.” Louis Malle’s humane, engrossing film ends with Alain Leroy’s suicide. “Poor Alain” (as he is repeatedly referred to), many commentators feel, spends his last day searching for some reason to live; but I see it as his veiled preparation for death—a motive Alain hides even from himself.
     Writer-director Malle’s Le feu follet updates future suicide Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel about another actual suicide: poet Jacques Rigaut’s, in 1929. It is steeped in the ill humors of a dead-ended life. Feeling unloved, Leroy at least found a modicum of order in the Versailles asylum at which his estranged wife, who lives in New York, paid to have him “cured” of his drinking habit; now the private hospital has set him loose. Leroy starts drinking again; someone at a party informs him that his wife plans on divorcing him. We do not know whether the comment is accurate; but either way, in tandem with other receptions, it impresses on Leroy his vast vulnerability.
     Quick shots of Alain from alternate perspectives suggest in one scene his interior commotion and his being at odds with himself. In one amazing passage in a public washroom, Alain weighs a homoerotic encounter as a possible way out of his dilemma.
     Le feu follet is full of exceptionally fine feeling—although emotional illiterates who come armed with smug quips (“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem”) had best stay away—from this film, from all people except their own limited kind.
     One of Alain’s former lovers (Jeanne Moreau, wonderful): “I should never have let him go.”

HUMANITY AND PAPER BALLOONS (Sadao Yamanaka, 1937)

Sadao Yamanaka’s slight, rainsoaked tragicomedy set in an eighteenth-century slum in Edo (Tokyo), Ninjo kami fusen so questioned myths of Japanese heroism and tradition that the government punished Yamanaka by sending him into war in China, where he became ill and died in his twenties.
     In a cramped lane of connected tenement shacks, poverty, misery and the landlord Mori’s venality rule. The third suicide in recent memory has occurred: a ronin, that is, a masterless samurai reduced to a common existence, has hanged himself, having already pawned his sword in order to eat, thus depriving him of the noble end of harakiri prescribed in the bushido code. The deceased’s neighbors get drunk at a wake ostensibly in his honor; but there is no honor attached to his memory, In any case, hilariously, they already do not remember him. The wake’s comical burst of intricately choreographed activity suggests the influence of Clair and Capra; throughout the film, the crisscrossing of depressed lives suggests Gorky’s play The Lower Depths, which Jean Renoir had filmed the previous year.
     I have great difficulty following much of the plot as it pertains to Shinza, the barber, but the circumstance of Unno, a married ronin, is clear and compelling. Unno approaches Mori with a letter of introduction written by his now deceased father, who had helped Mori attain prominence and power. Mori strings Unno along, then has him beaten in the street, and finally rebuffs him even more directly without even reading the letter. Mori will do nothing to raise Unno’s circumstance. Unno’s humility masks humiliation.
     Poetic inserts anticipate Yamanaka’s friend Yasujiro Ozu’s clusters of brief establishing shots. Yamanaka’s closing shot, which is touching, lends credence to an alternative translation of the film’s title: Humanity as a Paper Balloon.

PEOPLE OF THE PO VALLEY (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1943)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Released in 1947, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Gente del Po is a documentary, some of whose material involving a woman’s care of her sick young daughter feels scripted, possibly “reconstructed.” Luchino Visconti’s documentary-like, also nonprofessionally cast La terra treme (1948), about struggling Sicilian fishermen, surely was influenced by Gente del Po, which with its lyrical river barges itself looks back to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), and ahead to Antonioni’s fictional Il grido (1957), also set amidst melancholy gray landscapes in the Po Valley.
     Numerous shots divide the frame, such as the overhead one of a barge, center-left, proceeding forward, displacing water while still untouched water appears ahead. Humanity, even when invisible, is the key; we are conscious of the human activity involved in the barge’s motion and use. In another “divided shot,” a barge proceeds screen-right, with water below and land, including houses, above: a summation of the environment in which people, also excluded here, live and work.
     Human figures appear in both long-shot and closeup, communally and as individuals. In an extreme long-shot from the vantage of the river, a solitary galloping horse projects an otherwise unavailable freedom and possibly reflects on the German occupation. In a bravura shot the camera moves leftward like a barge, but on land, as women rake the ground under large white hats. Down below on the barge “Milano,” the mother feeds her child medicine as an identical hat hangs on the wall.
     The tremendous final movement depicts a gathering storm, with its dire potential for flood. People now move quickly to their homes, disrupting the rhythms to which the film has accustomed us. The storm subsides, but the impression of human vulnerability lingers. This conclusion owes something to the snowstorm in Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922).

I’M NOT THERE (Todd Haynes, 2007)

I have been all over the map in my responses to Todd Haynes’s movies, admiring some (Safe, Far from Heaven) and not admiring others (Poison, Velvet Goldmine). But I’ve never loved anything by Haynes until now. I’m Not There, his bold, brilliant biography of the American troubadour who claims the greatest American songbook of the twentieth century and after, is a cornucopia of Americana shining in all colors and black and white through the prism of America’s thrilling possibility for self-reinventions, that is to say, Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. I cannot imagine anyone who is so small of spirit that he or she might be able to resist this heart-piercing canvas in which Woody Guthrie appears as a guitar-toting 14-year-old black child riding the rails during the Great Depression. “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Well, this movie kills fascists!
     Minnesota’s Robert Zimmerman’s gut-renching bluesy harmonica bridges the gaps among his various incarnations as Bob Dylan: protestor, gracious commentator; Jew, Christian; folk, rock; acoustic, electric. I never took in the full irony until Haynes’s film: “Everybody must get stoned”—and Dylan was stoned, in effect, by audiences that felt betrayed because they couldn’t keep up with him.
     Before Dylan himself monumentally appears, facets of him and influences on him are played by different actors, including, most memorably, Marcus Carl Franklin (Woody is smiling!), Richard Gere (the outlaw Billy the Kid), Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett. I worried that each of these actors would have his or her own segment. Not to worry. This movie is the kaleidoscope it needs to be to project formally the fractured nature of America that Dylan still reflects.
     There’s scarcely anything that doesn’t “get” me, including the sign “Direction” pointing home: Nowhere. Here is one of the movies of my dreams.