Dumber Than The Crudest Fiction

Melodrama relies heavily on archetype and hyperbole, and when it’s done right, when it’s pushed to the limit, it almost resembles Noh theatre:  human existence as highly stylized ritual; pain, suffering and loss all boiled down into a series of tableaux so rigid that they almost become hieratic. It’s a thoroughly unironic and direct means of getting at the truth, and that lack of irony is probably why it’s fallen out of fashion. Done wrong, it’s unpalatable kitsch. Done right it’s high art. Few people understand how far to push it. Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk both did.

And so did John M. Stahl.

Unfortunately, Stahl is rarely mentioned alongside those other two stalwarts. In fact, the IMDb bio on the once eminent director treats him like a hack, an unfortunate buffoon who drove Tiffany Productions into the ground and had to resort to producing talking chimpanzee movies in order to survive.

But to hell with IMDb anyway…

It’s no wonder that Sirk remade three of Stahl’s masterpieces: Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession, and When Tomorrow Comes. But where Sirk serves up subversion via camera angles, lighting, and a painterly control of Technicolor, Stahl comes right at you with static shots, costuming, big chunks of dialogue. A lot of my filmgeeky friends wince when I tell them that Stahl’s Imitation of Life is even better than Sirk’s, but it is.

Stahl’s 1934 version is as ostensibly political as any Hollywood film I have ever seen, dealing with issues of class and race and gender as directly as someone like Chantal Ackerman, only in the framework of mainstream cinema, which makes it all the more subversive. The fact that it was made pre-code probably has something to do with it, but still, this film pulls no punches. Imagine Marx and Freud filtered through a lens at a back lot in Burbank.

Based on a Fannie Hurst novel, this story follows Claudette Colbert’s character, Beatrice Pullman (there is more than one reference to Dante throughout the film), who gets rich by boxing and mass-producing her African-American maid Delilah’s pancake batter. In fact, you should see it for Louise Beavers’ performance alone. 

For publicity’s sake, Delilah is turned into a racist and literally two-demsional Aunt Jemimah-esque cliché, and later she’s abandoned by her light-skinned daughter, who wants nothing more than to pass in the white world. In turn, Beatrice’s life is complicated when her own daughter, Jessie, decides she wants to screw mommy’s new beau, famed ichthyologist Stephen Archer. Ultimately, the film ends with a grim closing shot suggesting that in a male-dominated world, female subjectivity, even for someone as insanely successful as Beatrice, is defined by a woman’s ability to fill the gaping hole inside her with male adoration.

Again, in the hands of most directors, this would be pablum, camp, kitsch. In the hands of John M. Stahl, it’s as real as it gets.

The Century of the Self, originally released in 2002, is a BBC documentary. The filmmaker, Adam Curtis, is a bit of a lightning rod for controversy and says he refuses to label himself despite occasionally voicing support for left-libertarianism. In any case, the film proved to be among the most powerful political documentaries I have ever seen, and I believe that the time is right to revisit it and face the fact that Curtis was spot-on about one very important thing: the ruling class has been wildly successful stripping away what they saw as the excessive dictates of the New Deal.

In this film, Curtis explains the reasons behind this shift and also offers a vehement critique of the counter-revolutionary class of scoundrels, oligarchs, and warmongers responsible for it.

It’s hard to look at the last twenty-four years and not come to the conclusion that average Americans have lost their battle with Wall Street and the corrupt duopoly in DC that does its bidding. We have a plutocratic class of warmongers backing a genocidal war criminal. Biden has crippled the First Amendment and instituted a massive and far-reaching censorship apparatus that will now curb what we can say online. Through it all, the creeps in Washington and on Wall Street want us to be busy fighting about gender pronouns and 2nd Amendment rights while they dismantle the Constitution and ensure that there will never be a re-emergence of a welfare state in America.

It’s a downward spiral that’s transforming the United States into a quasi-banana republic, a regime run by puppets for a class of Empire-hungry oligarchs in a country where censorship is legal and the truth a fading memory. Modern America is the bastard child of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which is not as absurd as it sounds. The global neoliberal finance capitalism they love so dearly is protected by neocon ghouls via imperial warfare and a network of vassal states. At home, it’s protected by union busting, censorship, gutting welfare, and stripping us of our constitutional rights. Victoria Nuland and Joe Biden, Bill O’Reilley and Rachel Maddow — they’re all buddies now. The Democrats have even embraced Dick Cheney, and war criminals and torture apologists abound, with both parties working together, ready to take their marching orders.

As Curtis’ film points out, these are Smedley Butler’s gangsters for capitalism, and they’re still here. These days, they might not be approaching high-ranking military officers like Butler and attempting to persuade them to violently oust a democratically elected president and found a fascist state run by industrialists. That’s essentially what happened to Germany when the left was crushed by Hitler: capital sided with the Nazi Party. Plus, German capitalists helped the National Socialists identify and purge Jews from the business world.

And liberals are the same: they will suck it up and endure Trump as long as the gravy train keeps chuggin' along. They have no problem scuttling real socialism, for example, universal health care. That's because they fear socialism more than they fear Trump or the Republican Party.

Think about it: What sort of country runs a bloviating racist celebrity like Trump against a genocidal nitwit like Harris? The sort whose ruling class knows it owns you: your heart, your soul, your bank account, your information, and your lives are their property. They will give you rubbish because they consider you to be rubbish. They will empower sociopathic congressional representatives, the vast majority of whom are on the take, because these politicians don’t care for you any more than the billionaire class cares about starving kids or the Pentagon cares about mass slaughter.

If we haven’t lost, if we haven’t been cowed and manipulated, then why did 150 million people vote for Harris and Trump, for Genocide and Racism? Consider that before you tell me I’m wrong. I don’t think Americans are more racist or genocidal than any other group of people, so how was this achieved?

Answer: Through PR, propaganda, and narrative control. When that stops working, they’ll turn the tanks loose on us.

I’m not going to get into Curtis’ past squabbles and controversies, but rather focus on the content of the documentary. It’s important to note that while Curtis cites Max Weber as being a principal influence, he’s mainly interested in the failings of the left, especially the incompetence of orthodox Marxists. He believes the left has failed to create a viable alternative and deal with what the film addresses, namely the way the ruling class, along with the government and other social institutions, have used the ideas of Freud as a tool of marketing and propaganda to control large masses of people. The documentary, which you can easily stream for free on YouTube, focuses on Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, and how he became a masterful propagandist and the inventor of modern public relations.

The Century of the Self offers real-life examples of how Bernays achieved his massive success. One of his earliest PR stunts was a campaign in which he convinced women to start smoking. Bernays had consulted with some Freudians who told him the cigarette was a phallic symbol and by starting to smoke, women were asserting themselves and confronting male power.

Were these women really challenging power? No, but they believed so, on some level. Plus, the campaign sparked the interest among progressive-minded men of the era who espoused equal rights for women. They jumped on board and supported the suffragettes who were “lighting up in protest.” This is key: getting people to take action based on an appeal to the irrational unconscious. The men supporting these suffragettes were not doing anything to help women. In fact, in the long run, it was a complete disaster for women that led to massive addiction, illness, and premature death. But capital and political propaganda are two sides of the same coin, and Bernays realized this and found that the knowledge gleaned from psychoanalysis could help governments control large masses of people.

Later, marketers would continue to use similar techniques to appeal to emotions rather than logic. For instance, the film illustrates how when cake mix was first boxed, women refused to buy it. Then someone came up with the idea of having housewives add milk and an egg instead of putting them into the mix in powder form. That way, women felt less guilty, believing they were behaving more authentically as wives when some work was involved.

Both campaigns were wildly successful.

This is the power of appealing to the unconscious and the irrational. It creates in us unreasonable and harebrained ideas, and it can conquer the minds of even our brightest thinkers, making cogent discourse and the reasonable exchange of ideas an impossibility. I know as I’ve lost several important friends over nothing more than telling the truth. But Americans are like the adult children of alcoholics: they don’t get angry at the real problem, namely the bad news you relayed. No, they get mad at you for showing it to them.

When you voted for Kamala Harris, were you voting to safeguard democracy from Trump? No. You were voting for a war criminal, someone who didn’t win a single primary, whose genocidal boss just destroyed the 1st Amendment. But you were convinced it was the right thing to do, just like many other Americans, including those who believed that someone who crushed a nationwide rail strike was “pro-labor.”

Like those convinced that the Russians blew up their own pipeline.

Not just lies, but preposterous lies. Russiagate? Everyone who reported on that should lose their journalistic credentials.

Capitalism demands unfettered, continuous growth. That’s a matter of mathematical fact, not conjecture. Some people think that with a robust network of laws and regulations, capitalism would flourish. Well, just like the 20th century taught us that Marxist-Leninist style revolution — the kind that seizes the state apparatus and creates a vanguard class to rule by fiat — is most likely doomed to failure, it has also proven that capitalism is a dynamic and ever-evolving beast that cannot be constrained through legislation.

If we want economies like those of Norway and the rest of Western Europe, it means that US corporations would have to accept measures similar to those of the Europeans, which would involve accepting at least a mixed economy, a modern welfare state that allows for private businesses but demands that they be taxed in a way that ensures a better standard of living for all; a nation-state in which essential services, like food, shelter, a living wage, and healthcare, are guaranteed by the government regardless of one’s economic conditions.

The last hundred years have been a testament to the fact that this is the very thing the Democrats, the Republicans, the oligarchs, and weapons dealers want to stop at all costs.

Achieving economic justice demands that we conceive of a different revolutionary path forward, that we learn from the past and move ahead with anti-capitalist principles that work in a contemporary, post-capitalist world. It’s a world that’s veering towards an international rentier economy, as Michael Hudson predicts, or perhaps global techno-feudalism run by platform overlords, which Yanis Varoufikas says has already begun.

The minute corporate America saw the New Deal, they began planning their counter-attack. Today, this class is as devoted as ever to their cause, as genocide, censorship, and the scrapping of all social services clearly illustrate. Assange, universal healthcare, Iraq, Gaza, COVID, the CARES Act — You’ve been lied to and swindled on an epic scale, yet few Americans will stand up and do anything about it.

Part of fighting back would mean addressing this massive machine that controls the political narrative and fills the minds of Americans with nonsense: irrational notions are established and perpetuated by speaking to people’s unconscious and irrational selves. This is what Bernays took from Freud. In fact, his greatest insight, one which political writers like me need to grapple with continually, is that people aren’t moved or persuaded through logical reasoning and factual documentation. People are persuaded when politicians and corporations appeal to their unconscious desires and fears in order to control them and sell them a narrative that benefits only the elite, a narrative that ensures a future of misery for American workers and for those resisting Empire and oppression in the global south and Middle East. This is why the PMC has to be confronted: for its complicity and smugness in all of this, for its faithfulness to an evil, right-wing, anti-working-class, warmongering party like the Democrats. Kamala Harris was the fresh egg in their batter, a woman and a person of color. Just like the housewife will buy pancake mix if she gets to crack an egg, a university professor or a doctor will vote for Genocide if it allows them to virtue single about tolerance and assuage irrational fears about Trump. They believe themselves to be part of a righteous movement standing up for democracy…

… even though Harris was appointed undemocratically after the Dems scrapped the primaries…

…even though their president is a mad warmonger and influence peddler with as much blood on his hands as Henry Kissinger.

Why would Democrats who are successful professionals — doctors, professors, writers, artists — criticize Biden or Harris when it may mean anything from not getting invited to cocktail parties to being shunned at conferences or getting denied tenure? They would never do this because propagandists speak to fear and irrational desires, namely the irrational fear of Trump. It’s wholly concocted and pushed by our corporate media 24/7.

It’s also very effective, having turned some of the sharpest people I know into fretful little obedient citizens believing in the most ridiculous gobbledygook ever to be conjured up.

These are important lessons for the left, and they also pose some serious ethical questions. Should the left feel fine about appealing to the fear of and irrationality of the US citizenry, just like our right-wing Democratic and Republican parties do? Just like our war machine does? Just like Wall Street does?

I mean, looking at this century, I am sometimes tempted to say “Anything goes!” but I personally draw the line when it comes to lying people, even in the service of good, no matter what the cause. To me, there is a clear difference been persuasion and a hustle.

Dishonesty is never acceptable, and not even necessary for successful propaganda.

Still, we have to take into account, very soberly, the success our enemies have had and consider how to take control of the story and provide a counter-hegemonic narrative.

Unfortunately, Bernays’ methods are as effective today as they ever were, even more so. If you’ve all read my accounts of dealing with liberals who’ve gone completely off the rails, you understand that we are witnessing something unique in terms of denial and cognitive dissonance.

As Curtis moves forward, he gets into the 1960s. This is the meatiest portion of the film for me. The director takes the time to explain exactly how the youth of the 1960s were discouraged from pursuing any class-centered critique of America or criticism of capital in connection to oppression, racism, or the Vietnam War. After the assassination of the real revolutionaries — people like Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King — Americans were subjected to scientifically precise and extremely persuasive marketing and advertising. TV shows and magazine covers, sporting events, movies, and newspapers all pushed this new pop psychology about “going inside” and “reaching your personal goals of self-realization.” Community involvement became seen as a waste of time, engagement futile. It was all about “improving oneself.” Americans were sold on the idea that personal transformation would lead to political change, that in fact it was a necessary first step.

It didn’t, and it wasn’t

In the end, the film shows how marketers, intelligence agencies, researchers, and think tanks found that it’s possible to persuade Americans that what they purchase is a reflection of their self, their agency, their autonomy, and their taste. To ensure unrestricted growth, Americans have been steered away from social engagement and political action — especially anti-capitalist activism — in order to concentrate on their purchasing power, all of them chasing that elusive object of desire until they expire from overwork and exhaustion. Guaranteed, neverending commodity fetishism and frivolous consumption.

A dead end.

But we bought into it, and we also bought into a bogus epistemology that perpetuates this horror and teaches people all the wrong things: new ageism, self-help books, and a whole bunch of shallow psycho-babble. A series of doctrines telling you nothing is wrong with the world. Rather, “It’s your shitty attitude Betsy, so get your ass back to your cubicle.”

As I said before, western propaganda is a science and an art: seamless, authoritative, and born from an anonymous source of enunciation. It presents as common sense, and it encourages isolation and ostracization of those who are thinking clearly. This is why I have intelligent and compassionate friends who have disowned me for refusing to vote for a war criminal. Friends who believed every unhinged lie that came down the pike, from prostitutes and pee-pee stories to Biden’s lies about beheaded babies.

As the film progresses, we are reminded of Clinton’s dismantling of financial regulations after the party decided to follow “the third way.” In other words, they abandoned the working class and helped put the country on a path toward pernicious austerity politics and neoliberal rehauls of the welfare state.

Now, post 9/11, we find ourselves in a country very closely resembling a martial state. Pervasive censorship and propaganda control a populace that is forced into supporting genocide and voting against its own interests. We know how this was achieved, and by understanding how the narrative is controlled, we can take Gramsci’s advice and develop a solid and workable counter-hegemony, a new narrative that Americans can believe in.

I haven’t posted a review in a while because I haven’t seen anything worth writing about, but this little 1969 masterpiece from Ottavio Alessi, TOP SENSATION, sure pulled me out my torpor. Maud de Bellroche, looking like a butch dominatrix on the run from Nazi hunters, plays Mudy, an oil Baroness who has taken her demented pyromaniac son out for a pleasure cruise with a couple of swingers and their prostitute girlfriend, the impossibly beautiful Edwige Fenech. They toss sticks of dynamite into the ocean and drop acid and drink whiskey and screw each other, all in the hopes of creating an ambience that will get Tony, the Baroness’s weirdo son, to pop his cherry. Eventually they run into a sandbar and explore an isolated island where Tony falls for a virginal and equally impossibly beautiful goatheardress – a Fellinesque cliché of feminine purity that contrasts sharply with the frivolousness of mom and her crew of gold digging pals. Meanwhile Rosalba Neri, the other sexpot from the ship, wanders up into the hills to blow the brains out of the peasants’ goats...

Of course, things go terribly wrong.

Beba the goat girl and her oafish brute of a husband meet their proletariat demise aboard the ship, and later Tony strangles mother dearest: the girl he really wants to fuck. In the end, the boat sails off into the sunset with Mommy’s Little Madman at the helm. Capital has remained in the hands of the decadent ruling class, and Tony steers his crew of hustlers and murderers towards their next plunder-rich target. Sounds like Antonioni a bit, or even Lina Wertmuller, just a lot more entertaining. In fact, being a filthy, elitist libertine never looked like so much fun.

I would have real trouble working for Wes Anderson, too. I get it, Gene. I liked Bottle Rocket, and I liked Rushmore. Quite a bit. But everything he's done since is a remake of Rushmore, and completely formulaic: some quirky character -- generally male and generally smart enough to know that he ain't that smart -- falls into some vague state of alienation; he's got a pre-pubescent, oddball sister that happens to be the leading North America authority on the I-Ching and lives like a hermit in the attic, doing nothing but listening to the live reportage of the Hinderberg disaster over and over; they have a Tibetan monk residing with them who's vowed to stay in America until he wins a local karaoke contest with his bossa nova version of "Tangerine"; the main character longs for love but there's always a hitch; he meets a girl, but she insists on carrying an umbrella with her, everywhere, even inside, even when they kiss. Plus, she speaks only in alliterative non-sequiturs... There you go -- that's a film.

Cuteness ad infinitum.

Ulrike Ottinger’s films are so expensive to buy and so difficult to stream that I actually broke down and purchased a trial subscription to the Criterion Channel when I saw that they were offering up a beautiful HD version of Ticket Of No Return. Even though I had viewed almost everything available on the channel’s streaming platform, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to finally rewatch one of a handful of films that had really spun my noodle around when it came to what I thought I knew about cinema. I needed to know if I would find it as uncompromising and fearless as when I first watched it four decades ago.

Ticket of No Return is essentially non-narrative, or perhaps I should say “anti-narrative” insofar as it obliterates the main character’s past. If the viewers are to understand the protagonist’s obstinate, drunken safari, they must decipher a parade of images so stunningly realized and meticulously composed that they risk getting lost in the film’s surface pleasure alone. Still, there is nothing gratuitous about what we are viewing: each and every frame is pregnant with meaning, a profound meditation on female subjectivity and the way ideology perpetuates itself, fencing in everyone, regardless of gender, age, or social status. And despite how hilarious and superficially appealing it may be, it’s a movie that demands visual literacy and scrutiny, which is probably why, after the first time I saw it four decades ago, ninety percent of the audience had walked out by the time the lights went up.

The film follows the nameless main character, played with smashmouth bravado by Tabea Blumenschein, on her shitfaced blitzkrieg through Berlin circa 1979. Always attired in the most preposterous haute couture, she moves through the city like a bulldozer, picking up an inebriated homeless woman along the way who serves as a sort of alter ego and reminder of the dangerous undertaking she has embarked on. She stumbles down filthy city streets with a champagne bottle in her hand, staggers into gay bars and performance art venues, continually hurling her brandy snifters against any and all reflective surfaces she encounters. Along the way, she runs into a virtual supergroup of European art-house stars and musicians, including Eddie Constantine, Nina Hagen, and even the great Volker Spengler, tarted up in drag in a nod to his stunning performance as an abused transgendered woman in Fassbinder’s In a year of 13 Moons.

Except for a moment when she tells Eddie Constantine that she speaks English, Tabea’s character remains mute throughout the film, insolently channeling Harpo Marx as she defies authority and convention at all cost. She’s followed through the city by a trio of female intellectuals all wearing, significantly, black and white houndstooth overcoats: a sort of Greek chorus as well as a reminder of the ubiquitous, institutionalized power of ideology. As Tabea’s exploits become more and more reckless -- she performs a high wire act with circus performers, drives a car through a flaming brick wall -- the chorus is always there, like a nagging authoritarian gatekeeper reminding her of where pathology originates and highlighting the fatal implications involved in Tabea’s mad quest to lay claim to her own agency.

Ticket of No Return starts and ends with a pair of matching shots. In the opening scene, we see Tabea from behind, in stylish high heels, walking away from the camera and over the reflective surface of a marble floor. At the end of the film, the shot repeats, but Tabea is now in a hall of mirrors, and as she moves away from the spectator, the sharp points of her newly weaponized high heels dig into the mirrored surface of the floor, crushing it into tiny shards. Tabea is destroying the way her reflection is used, mediated, interpreted. This final act of defiance reminds us that she is now in charge of her own identity, that intoxication and madness are sometimes the only ways to break the chains that ideology imposes on us, to step beyond that which is limiting us so that we may see clearly, just like Tabea, who’s never afraid to look into the mirror and laugh.

Forty years later and the second viewing of this film has moved me even more than the first. If you have to, watch it for nothing more than its gorgeous visual style and gut-busting, surreal humor. And don’t listen to the Richard Linklater intro. Waste of time.

Lilico is a bad seed, a sadistic supermodel and the darling of all Japan who has turned herself into, as another character from the movie puts it, “a machine for the processing of desire…” Problem is that all her plastic surgery is slowly necrotizing her flesh, and as she slides down the bat pole into oblivion she drags everyone with her, including her female assistant (whom she sexually assaults) and the foot soldiers she dispatches to throw acid in the faces of other models.

In the hands of Sion Sono or David Cronenberg, this material would have been rich and nuanced. What begs to be explored is that central notion of the desire machine. Lilico’s primary dilemma is everybody’s – how do we constitute ourselves as subjects in this period of late-stage, global capitalism, where we exist in a state of constant flux between two poles: self-commodification and compulsive consumerism? The problem is hinted at, but never fleshed out: the human body is no longer a space in which people realize themselves politically, creatively, erotically, or spiritually; rather, the body has become ancillary to the functioning of a global market economy, a thing that is used by and subservient to ideology.

In the end, Helter Skelter is a pretty-looking mess, which isn’t surprising because that’s often the result when fashion photographers, in this case Mika Ninagawa, take a stab at directing feature films.  Ambitious, but a mess.

How this film flew under my radar for all these years is a mystery to me, especially since I am very familiar with the work of both Bertolt Brecht and Hertha Thiele.  Kuhle Wampe was made in 1932 by Slatan Dudow, a Bulgarian director who had spent time in the Soviet Union and soaked up all the Eisenstein he could, but the influence of Brecht, who co-wrote the screenplay and directed the final scene, is unmistakable. The film is overtly political and radical in both form and content, and it begs the question: why do people no longer make cinema like this?

The story is essentially melodrama. A young woman named Anni, trying to survive in a Weimar Republic crippled by unemployment and corruption, gets knocked-up by her boyfriend and doesn’t know what to do.  But unlike a lot of melodramatic agitprop (think Xie-Jin’s incredible film version of Red Detachment of Women), the film moves far beyond the kind of stereotype and exaggeration that fuel the hypebolic nature of those sorts of narratives. There is stunning location footage of Berlin shot in natural light and it’s cut together in a fashion that recalls not only Eisenstein but also Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera. One of the most inventive formal components involves the way Brecht and Dudow create remarkable counterpoint between sound and image, a sort of dialectical loop illustrated perfectly by the scene where Anni’s father reads a salacious description of a nightclub performance by Mata Hari while we view images of produce and skyrocketing food prices. It’s the kind of stuff we won’t see again until Varda, Godard, Straub-Huillet, and it’s even more powerful slapped right into the middle of a film shot in 1932.

And then there’s Hertha Thiele – luminous, sensual, independent, and radical in every sense of the word. Hertha had caused a scandal a year earlier when she starred in Leontine’s Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform, an early (the earliest?) example of queer cinema which deals with lesbianism in a girls’ boarding school. She made both Mädchen and Kuhle Wampe on the eve of Germany’s descent into fascism and she would eventually have to leave the country altogether after more or less telling Goebbels to fuck off in 1936. What she reminds me of most, and what Kuhle Wampe’s final scene reminds me of as well, is how close Germany was to moving hard left, towards a real workers’ state, before things went horribly awry. It reminds me of where we are now, and it demands that we ask ourselves if there isn’t a place for filmmaking of this kind in a world that is so eerily similar.

Ulrike Ottinger sees things the way nobody else does, and that isn’t even her greatest gift. Her greatest gift is her ability to make the spectator see what she sees. It’s not like like you, as a viewer, are seeing something you’ve never seen before, but rather that for the first time you’re really paying attention, considering it in a way that you had never previously considered it. I remember watching Ottinger’s Aller Jamais Retour for the first time about thirty-five years ago in a symposium on avant-garde feminist film. I can still hear Tabea Blumenschein’s red heels clicking across the floor of the airport terminal, see her walking away from the camera instead of toward it, stopping to buy a one-way ticket to Berlin for a booze-fueled blitzkrieg through the city with the likes of Nina Hagen and a homeless woman she picks up along the way. 

Still one of the greatest films, feminist or otherwise, that I have ever seen.  

This is why I was so thrilled when I stumbled across a streamable version of Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia yesterday on Youtube. Ottinger’s work is almost impossible to view and her DVDs equally impossible to find for purchase, so I was really looking forward to this film. 

It didn’t disappoint.    

The story begins among a group of cosmopolitan Europeans on a trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The ensemble includes a couple of Russian military officers, female ethnologist Lady Windermere, played by Delphine Seyrig (in what turned out to be her final film role), an uptight German school teacher (Irm Hermann), a young female backpacker, and a Broadway musical star who calls herself Fanny Ziegfeld. There’s also a rich young Jewish bon-vivant and Yiddish theater star who gets up to sing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie!” with a trio of female Russian chanteuses, the Kalinka Sisters. The whole thing evokes films like Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, which is clearly its intention, but all of the characters, especially the women, are much more than a compendium of stereotypical clichés from movie history. Ottinger caresses these stereotypes, deconstructs them, and in doing so she reveals the complex human beings that reside beneath them.    

The western narrative is hijacked – in every sense of the term – when a Mongolian bandit princess and her tribe stop the train and steal away with the female passengers for an extended trip into the exotic landscape of untamed Mongolia. Any notion of a traditional western storytelling is halted as we get lost in this new world, where dialogue gives way to the power of the image. Lady Windermere, both polymath and polyglot who is fluent in Mongolian, convinces the ladies to surrender to the beauty of this singular experience. Essentially, the Mongolians want nothing more than to share their culture with these fellow women, and this is where the full scope of Ottinger’s genius is on display. What ensues is a sort of postmodern/feminist take on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters in which the women come to realize that to understand themselves, they must understand the other. This is a world where money has no value other than decorative, where broken down motorcycles are pulled through the Taiga by camels, where shamans replace intellectuals and scholars, and where life is every bit as meaningful and rich as it is in the modern and technological world of late-stage capitalism. 

It’s impossible not to notice how different a story can be when told by female filmmaker intent on not simply repeating the narrative tropes of her male counterparts. The women taken off the train never feel as if they have been “abducted.” They do not try to conquer the Mongolian tribe nor do they attempt to escape, which I am sure would be the trajectory of most films centered around a group of captive males. The women see this as an opportunity for growth, for adventure, for compassion and understanding. 

The film’s ending achieves a sort of beautiful and cosmic equilibrium when another train is stopped by the Mongolian bandits so that the European women can return to their lives in the West. Only this time, there’s a new passenger. When I watch the bandit princess, now decked out in haute couture on board the Trans-Siberian, seated in an elegant compartment next to Delphine Seyrig, I can’t help but think of Lawrence of Arabia turned inside-out. 

In any case, see it before it disappears, because it is a masterwork. 

At my age, I should know better than to look forward to something with so much stupid adolescent anticipation. I let a bootleg version of this vapid mess have its way with my laptop last night and all I can say is that I am glad I didn’t slap down 25 bucks for it when it was still available on DVD. Don’t get me wrong – there’s plenty of great footage here. But Mark Reeder just won’t stop blabbing, and he doesn’t have much of anything to say. He and the filmmakers should have given more space to more interesting talking heads, like the ladies from Mania D. or Blixa, especially. There is no attempt at understanding the city and its culture from a political, artistic, or even historical point of view. Its three directors – Hoppe, Maeck, and Lange – can’t rein in their glib impresario and hence fail at contextualizing what happened in the city, or even conveying why Berlin was what it was at that point in time. Instead we get a frantically edited 1990s -style MTV music documentary for bored college kids, which is a pity considering the richness of the source material. Keep waiting for the definitive Berlin in the 80s doc.

Osamu Tezuka was the creator of Astro Man, Japan’s Godfather of Manga. He is revered there the way Walt Disney is in America, but I doubt that Walt would have ever made a soft-core pinky violence cartoon about space voyagers who travel back to the time of Cleopatra. It was apparently marketed in the West as a sort of Japanese version of Fritz the Cat, but it is much, much more than that. The scene of Caesar’s death staged as Noh theater is itself worth the price of admission. Experimental, anachronistic, absurd, frivolous, brilliant.

Enzo G. Castellari’s STREET LAW is prime slab of 1970s poliziotteschi – speedy, flashy, glossy, and pretty in a way that only the Italians can pull off. So taut and so crammed with beauty and sleaze and insane action sequences (at one point Franco Nero takes on a muscle car armed with nothing but a shovel…) Castellari’s film is, but for the dubbing, every bit as good and gritty as the best American crime films from the 70s. Think Mr. Majestyk, Dirty Harry, The Seven-Ups. In a way it’s more complex and troubling than any of the above-mentioned American flicks because of Franco Nero’s performance. Unlike Bronson or Eastwood, Nero doesn’t strut through each frame with a huge erection, unfazed by the danger and panic and manic energy involved in the dirty business of exacting revenge. He has to force himself to squeeze every last bit of courage out of his lily-white liver, and in doing so he almost loses his bearings. To watch him navigate his way through crisis after crisis like a man who’s half a Xanax away from a straitjacket is, in my opinion, a much more realistic portrayal of what happens when Johnny Lunchbucket decides to dance with the Devil. As hard-boiled as anything you’ve ever watched.

You don’t have to go back to the Greeks to have your heart ripped clean out by a moral fable as grim and as black as anything penned by Sophocles. In THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK, French ex-pat and Hollywood’s B-movie Michelangelo, Robert Florey, turns the American immigrant story on its head with this anti-Horatio Alger tale of despair and desire. Peter Lorre is brilliant (is he ever anything but?) as Janos Szabo, a Hungarian master watchmaker and aviator, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to take a juicy bite out of the Big Apple. Regrettably, his face gets burned off in a hotel fire and he’s transformed into a hideous ghoul that no one can look at. 

Tough break. 

He is now nothing but a Medusa with a bad Hungarian accent and soon has no other choice but to use his skills as a clocksmith to become a safe-cracker and criminal mastermind for a group of derelict thugs.

Problem is, Janos is a man with a moral compass. He’s only become a gangster so that he can pay for plastic surgery and one day, hopefully, stop wearing the mask that permits him to move in normal society. And yes, it is every bit as freakishly compelling as you might think to see Peter Lorre slip into a Peter Lorre mask.

Of course, his plans are thwarted: his burns are too extensive, so instead – and in a devastatingly dark metaphor for marriage – he finds a blind woman who accepts him as he is.

But remember, this is tragedy, and his dreams of idyllic, Capraesque, suburban bliss are dashed when his criminal pals plant a bomb in his car, killing his wife. In a poetic act of revenge, Janos disguises himself as a pilot and flies them all out to the middle of the desert, where he and his partners in crime all die of exposure. It is every bit as bleak and beautiful as Le jour se lève or La salaire de la peur, and all in barely 69 minutes. Unfortunately, Florey is rarely mentioned along with fellow Frenchies Carné and Clouzot.

Terrific giallo/ozploitation from director  Flavio Mogherini, The Pyjama Girl Case (aka La ragazza dal pigiama giallo) gets rockin’ when the body of a mutilated young woman is found by some kids in an abandoned car at the seashore. Who ya gonna call? Well, of course, crack detective Ray Milland, an 80-year-old, retired, wash-out of a cop who looks as if he’s been living on Dilaudid cough syrup and Gibley’s gin for the past two decades. He’s also dubbed his own lines, so his speech is as slurred as his wobbly gait.

The film moves back and forth between Milland’s obstinate quest for truth and the past life of Glenda Blythe - the stunning Uma Thurma look-alike Dalila Di Lazzaro. These flashbacks are really nothing more than an excuse for Mogherini to show us his victim getting fudded silly by a trio of sleazy men and one anonymous woman – tossed in, undoubtedly, to amp up the whole lascivious, lesbian vibe. At one point, Glenda even takes it on the lam, and for apparently no reason decides to have a gang-bang with three weirdo misfits in an out of the way truck-stop. Guess she had some time to kill…

Just as Glenda’s past is mere pretext for on-screen screwing, Milland’s investigation is nothing more than a means of introducing us to a bevy of suspicious misfits. But don’t get me wrong - this is not a negative review. Not by a long shot. This is lawless cinema, probably funded by mafiosos and crooked businessmen who had no desire to hang around the set and queer the director’s hustle. Such being the case, what seems to be pure titillation on the surface really turns out to be a pretty clever critique of sexism and exploitation and patriarchy and xenophobia. Was it intentional? Who cares? Plus, it’s got style to burn.

A toy airplane streaks through a blood-red sky. Inside are three beautiful women and a gaggle of ego-driven men engaged in one long, protracted, pissing contest. A professional assassin in mascara and an all white 60s-era Elvis suit busts into the cabin and forces the pilots to fly to Okinawa, but before they can change course, a bright orange UFO forces them to crash land. Afterwards, the dandy assassin wanders over to the spaceship, where an amorphous blob of metallic goo creeps into his forehead, transforming him into an evil, vampyric minion bent on sucking dry all the inhabitants of the downed aircraft, who for some reason are incapable of leaving the wreckage even though it turns out that they are just minutes away from a major thoroughfare.

One might at first be tempted to compare Hajime Sato’s slab of J-horror movie cheeze to Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, and the similarities are striking. But what it really is – and this is true for so much of Showa-era pulp film in Japan – is a scathing and thinly veiled attack on American imperial power. Of course the spaceship represents US military might and of course it’s threatening global annihilation and of course there’s a sexy blonde on board headed to pick up the remains of her dear departed GI boyfriend who croaked it in Vietnam. And of course it’s all a total blast, especially the brilliant Hideo Ko. Just imagine Liberace as a hijacker…

Just when I think I have scraped the bottom of the Japanese exploitation film slag heap, I dig up yet another treasure. There’s really no point in reviewing this because the IMDb site has a list of descriptor words that do a better job than I ever could: 

suicide rape machine gun massacre nudity knife fight karate gunfight avenger cliff 

You could also toss in chicks with dicks and harakiri (I don’t know why they failed to make the list). In any case, Rika Aoki alone, who’s either singing in a groovy nightclub or beating the shit out of everyone with a Y chromosome, is well worth the price of admission. This thing moves faster than a barrel full of monkeys passing around a meth pipe.