Worth Remembering?

There are some films that come and go. You know the ones the pictures you have to keep a journal of just to remember you even saw them. There are other films that your recollection is reduced to a thumbs up or thumbs down review. In other words all you can remember from a film is whether or not you liked it. Even films we may love we forget the majority of. I've often noticed I have an extremely hard time remembering the characters from any movie I've seen. Take today for example. I watched Edgar G. Ulmer's 1944 film Bluebeard. I can't recall the name of the female lead and only faintly remember the name of John Carradine's character. Later I watched Rex Ingram's often overlooked 1926 film The Magician, which I had previously fallen asleep to. So even though I'd seen part of the film before, even with a fresh viewing I can't recall the name of any of the characters, including Paul Wegener's constipated looking mad scientist.

Of course a few quick clicks and I can recall these names instantaneously. In fact both of the aforementioned films are still on my DVR so I can even watch the films again to hope they stick in my mind earlier, but the point remains these films don't have the type of characters that are unforgettable. In fact the cartoonish grimace on Wegener's face is probably the image I'll remember most from Ingram's film. Although there are sequences in the end that predate James Whale's Frankenstein by about five years. His obsession with creating life is not so much to advance science, but to be generally creepy. If you put a gun to my head I couldn't tell you what Virginia Kelly's character was named, or her rather pedestrian love interest/hero. The film itself is more a curiosity and a minor footnote for people studying the silent evolution of the horror film, particularly the American one. Like many early American horror films this is definitely indebted to the Germans, in this case it's lead villain was a very well known German filmmaker/actor who made his own contribution to the Expressionist Horror film with The Golem in 1920. Even though you can debate how many "horror" elements are in Wegener's adaptation of a famous legend, it does have a monster and at least one scene that was repeated almost exactly in Frankenstein.

However I'm not here to mention how forgettable films are, because well those often aren't worth remembering. What I'm talking about are the films that you can't stop thinking about. The ones that stay with you when you're trying to sleep like Tetris combinations after playing that game for several hours. Many of us have walked out of a David Lynch film unable to form even the most basic description of the film's plot, but damn if we can't stop thinking about those giant rabbits in business suits or Robert Blake calling himself at a party. It's a testament to Lynch that he can get in our brain so much. I was told once by someone who went to a screening of Lost Highway that one of the reels was played backwards and out of focus, and the audience simply accepted it as Lynch being a weirdo and thought it was genius rather than a projectionist falling asleep at the wheel. Imagine something like that happening in a Transformers movie.

Some films stick with us simply because they're singular and unique in the world of film. Sure every film is like a snow flake, but lets be honest nearly every one of us has said "you've seen one you've seen 'em all" to describe some film or type of films. However in most cases we have a point of reference. Sure there isn't another film out there that can visually compare to Avatar, but you can judge the film based on it's director's previous work, and the story is a familiar one, albeit with some details greatly altered. It's plot has been compared to both Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves, but you got to love the happy ending that didn't come the way of the natives here in the US, btw sorry if I spoiled anything for the 20 people out there who haven't seen Avatar. Although some critics didn't know how to classify Avatar. Roger Ebert gave it a "special jury prize" in his best of the year list. It is a singular achievement, and the type of thing that would have gotten a special Oscar in years past.

Now if you're wondering what the image up above is from, I'll get to that. It's from a film by Alain Robbe-Grillet called L'Eden et Après (or Eden and After for those of us who don't speak French). It was screened at Doc Films tonight as the first in their series of post new wave French films. The schedule had Marguerite Duras' Nathalie Granger following it, but for reasons I won't get into that was pushed back a few days. Perhaps if I had another film to divert my attention right after it would have reduced the impact of Grillet's film. As it is I had a nice hour plus drive home with no music to think about it even more. If Robbe-Grillet's name is familiar it's because he was previously a novelist and screenwriter and wrote Alain Resnais' cult masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad. That in mind, it could help decipher the mystery of this film. Resnais' film baffled me when I saw it. I neither liked it nor disliked it, I just had no idea what to make of it, much like this film. A few years later I watched it again and began to understand some of it's mysteries, but I'm not sure my mind was still adapted to it. There is a whole subculture of film enthusiasts who live and breathe with Marienbad and spend most of their free time obsessing over it's details, I thankfully have not joined that club just yet.

This film was a mixed bag at times for me. It's credit sequence alone was unlike anything I'd seen before. Everything was out of order, random words were being shouted, credits were spoken on top of each other, some printed, and all the abstract shots made little sense (at the time). It set up some of the puzzle like structure of the film, which essentially has three less than equal length acts. Eden is more or less a cafe where bored college students give themselves scenarios to improvise. Their various exercises seem like they'd be right at home in a Rivette film, but you may watch it and say "what pretentiousness". That "p" word is hard to avoid throughout this film. The audacity of Marienbad made several people accuse it's director and screenwriter of the same misstep. However every time I wanted to shake my head and say "what balderdash" there was some intriguing aspect that made it elevate above spoiled bored college kids and a pretentious filmmaker being difficult for no reason other than his own boredom with conventional cinema. It perhaps should be noted that this film was made in 1970, when the new wave had all but faded from memory and was already watered down and bastardized for American consumption. Whenever dealing with adventurous narrative structures there is a tendency to try and surpass your predecessors and before too long you miss the mark and are just being weird for the sake of being weird. Godard pushed his films further and further until venturing into nearly complete abstract terms, which is probably the best explanation why very few of his numerous 70's films are on DVD, yet almost all of his 60's work has gotten the Criterion treatment by now.

One of the things that may have endeared me to the film was a script I started writing sometime at the age of 16-17. It made no sense, intentionally so, and refused to have any sort of plot. During the first act of the film centered around the cafe I thought someone was up to my idea. I wondered if I had been that pretentious with my own incoherent ramblings, and thought probably, after all I was a very, very pretentious teenager. However, seeing a film that touched on some of my ideas that I thought were so radical, that was made nearly 30 years before I wrote the first words of that script made me think in glib post modern terms, simply put everything has been done before. Now the rest of the film helped to move further away from my ideas and into more or less narrative cohesion. The second act, the shortest by my estimate, takes place in a new factory along the waterfront at night. Violette (Catherine Jourdan) is supposed to meet the stranger Duchemin (Pierre Zimmer) there, and well she somehow gets spooked, hides in the closed factory where she runs into her partners from the cafe who have their own strange game going on that is never really explained. The next morning, they even deny being their, but that's not terribly important right now.

The third act takes place in Tunisia and involves a plot described earlier about trying to get a small painting Violette's uncle left her. Earlier one of the group suggests selling it and going away somewhere. In the third act they are away, but the search is on for the picture which turns up missing from Violette's room after the night at the factory. There things get strange and clear at the same time. Earlier flashes of hallucinations from a "fear powder" she takes start to look more like premonitions (or flashbacks depending on how you look at it) and we see more fleshed out versions of these earlier glimpses, including one particularly unsettling scene with some scorpions. Now trying to figure this film out is not something I can adequately do, especially after just one viewing. I believe the film is available online, but is not on DVD, certainly not region 1. However thinking of it's puzzles are intriguing and the type of stuff that may lead to a slight case of insomnia this evening when I try to sleep. Violette is "attacked" in all three acts. She is the victim of a type of gang rape scenario that opens the film, she is pursued in the factory, and kept blindfolded and chained in Tunisia. The film can be some sort of allegory for her particularly feminine attitudes towards fear of the opposite sex or a feeling of being used by her peers. I'm not sure of the psychology of it, did she make it up, is it all some sort of bizarre pretentious game to mess with our heads? Was this movie conceived with the help of drugs and only with those hallucinogens could it make sense? Or is there a real riddle or puzzle that can be solved and might be deceptively simple? These are the questions that aren't necessarily posed by the best films, but are certainly brought up by the most interesting. After all if the film was outright bad I wouldn't even care to figure out the mysteries. Many questions were left unanswered by Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, but I simply didn't care to figure any of them out.

The strange and surreal appeal to a lot of film lovers. Rarely do I have anyone ask me about what Humphrey Bogart film to watch (although I once got into a heated debate about Cary Grant's films) instead people want to know what I can recommend from the odd side of things. People who recently get into David Lynch and want to know what else is like that (the answer is nothing people). However when you see countless films that follow an ABC format, it is so welcoming to see one that messes with things a bit. These films were much, much more common in the late sixties and early seventies and don't seem to have much national preference. They came from everywhere, Italians, French, Hungarians, Ukrainians, the Swedish, and well the list goes on. I even got to see an interesting comedy from Taiwan called The Bride and I that fits this surreal mold. Clearly there was something in the water, and who knows it may have been LSD. My best bet for someone looking for something a little on the weird side is to look for the years 1966-1972 or so, and chances are there's at least one psychedelic freakout in there somewhere. Perhaps it can make you a little nostalgic. After all no one really seems to be doing much of that these days, but then you put on your post modern thinking cap and realize that David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, and Guy Maddin among others are certainly in their own little surreal worlds. Perhaps when I decipher more of the mysteries of this film I'll clue you in . . .