MASTER Z
Pavoncello, 1967
Started Third Part of the Night and thought, damn, he's fully formed here, lemme go back some more, do some excavation. I found a perverse mind in thrall to wo-man from the jump, but somewhat rigid in the mise-en-scène, not ready to pry a camera free from sticks yet, and nothing that wide either, but plenty of movement nonetheless, mostly laterally. There is one handheld shot, looking up our crush object's nose as she twirls above us.
Story of Triumphant Love, 1969
Wherein the triumphant love is in fact defeated by petty cowardice, only to be reversed again, a series of turnarounds, all zooms and dollies. Can't kill the dead. Or can you? "Those who love... can do unusual things." Privacy upended becomes privacy pierced becomes privacy re-asserted. Gotta love a Pole in brown face playing a "Malaysian Man" in a story about rotten privileges. I do wonder what the short story puts first and ends with, if it's as closed a circuit as this little film, but I'll never read it. The name Mucjusz looks and soundsΒ funny.
The Third Part of the Night, 1971
Brutal from the jump and Spicy Z is almost fully formed already. A zoom on a dolly in most scenes, a lot of long lens effects, shooting through windows and doorways, unsynced time and meaning, a memory becomes flesh, maybe time is always out of joint or always joined in our heads in odd ways, the paroxysm of fighting fate on the floor, spiritual not religious, but frames itself with the Bible. The edit can be a mirror, an equation solved in real time. Shadows become people, perspectives shift out to a true third person, and nobody can win freedom? Theatricality starts with language here. Feeding lice your own blood to get better food is hardly a leg up, but it keeps you "safe" from the faceless Germans hovering on the periphery with machine guns. About two thirds of the way into the picture, there's an oasis of humanity in a bed by a window. ItΒ breaks.
Diabel, 1972
Wretched and bedraggled by blood, a pirouette in the round like a spiral down a drain, but full of long lateral moves, however augmented by a swiveling eye, often dull, it finds, after chaos, that the future is a woman. I would have ended it at its final blackout because I thought I knew how it would end. I was wrong. Fire isn't just an element, or an association with the eponym here, it's a pattern to signal seasonsβbut then time is unstuck like elastic. Snap. The cut is paramount despite the long takes; the realism extends offscreen. And yet it's surreal at its picaresque narrative level because Spicy Z likes combat at a cellular (celluloid?) level; here is a logos structuring serial encounters with pain. You've never heard a history picture scored like this, all that electric guitar, way funkier than Neil Young'sΒ Dead ManΒ solos. Late it's posited that "What's not written does not exist." I wonder if the Polish is as eloquent or if the subtitler was just feeling himself but either way I almost agree with this position. Who's signing that history lesson is always at question. Whose blood painted the path to now? Who's in charge here? Apocalyptic then, now, whenever. There's only one world of hurt. The other world is yellow, notΒ red.
Lβimportant cβest dβaimer, 1975
A world of images for sure, who doesnβt like corpses and bedraggled faces, but donβt tell me Fabio Testi ever took a photo in his life before picking up a camera and a light meter for this movie. Jacques Dutronc is really annoying, like all third wheels, until heβs a poignant vector of hurt. Karl-Heinz Zimmer is a great name for Klaus Kinski but it isnβt Klaus Kinski; he yells a lot, cries. Believe that Romy Schneider is marvelous. Full stop. Lotta hard cuts around these blocks of space-time. A score that inches forward in time with the camera.Β Et puis, merde.Β Lifeβs not only about money. Less chaos thanΒ The Devil, maybe more dolly tracks, a really great semi-circle thatβs shot clockwise and counter and cut judiciously, the violence happens out of nowhere, as does the handheld navigation of corridors, a lot of ideas about ensembles and duets, and βbeing togetherβ failing. By the end you understand the physical cost the body endures. RealΒ existentialism.
Possession, 1981
The mother of all breakups, ditched for cosmic reasons, left in a dizzying wake swirling around the second door on the right into another room, everything moving always. Ramp up the intensity levels on banal and out comes a monster, an unknowable other, a dank god-disease. Sex isn't everything but it's a big deal I guessβeverybody wants some, we know. Isabelle Adjani is braver than Andrzej Ε»uΕawski but you gotta respect the fact that the process, as I understand it, got her *there* in the end. And somebody had to dream this wacky shit up to begin with ofΒ course.
+
Perfect Halloween movie! βI have become wise.β The best camera. By golly Iβll get a real dolly some day. (But itβs the handheld, too.) That electric blue Ford is such a punctuation for the eye. For such a grey movie itβs got poppin hues. That green bed in the creatureβs flat behind a green wall, her blue dresses, the orange phone, the red red blood and the yellow both around poor blonde Bob and on the evil placeβs walls, Heinrichβs white clothes bled on like his red bike, and the black wall of the toilet. Sam Neilβs enlightened smile planning to torch the place kinda hints at his professional skill set. Way more interested in God than I always remember it, the devil (I guess) is the one fucking Mark over, but I see this is a feature of the Spicy Z multiverse now. After all, itβs always life or death with him. It cracks me up. And it hurts. βDonβt open!β is the ending of everything. Itβs a few feelings and ideas at once.Β Marvelous.
La femme publique, 1984
A seesaw, the camera sliding and hovering, one scream competition at a time. Nobody makes movies like this. Itβs exhausting frankly but never dull, always alive, some laugh out loud gags, never just one thing, always cutting on action with a sound cue, a catalog of movements physical and metaphysical. The real is filmed. Even fakery. They steal a car and the movie goes into the action genre for five minutes, only to swing back to its grotesquerie smorgasbord monologue mode.Β La vie irregulaireΒ indeed, one hundred percent, being anΒ artist. No idea who has that much energy on a good day. For a fuck filled film it sure is the opposite of sexy. And it sure doesnβt make filmmaking look like any fun for any actress employed by Spicy Z, even as heβs trying to deflate that myth and even as he gets a guy to toast all actresses he reinforces this received wisdom that heβs a brutal dude. You never know when youβll suddenly be above somebody but youβre bound to be underneath them soon. But sheΒ wins.
Lβamour braque, 1985Β
My translation of the title is βLove Peaksβ but Iβm not a translator, just halfway there as a reader. Because the thing is a constant EKG, highs keep hitting, briefest of lows. Reprieves barely exist. I donβt know another film to feature this consistent assault, cartoon-style, as a baroque, say, slide-show of a fallen world ruled by violence. Thereβs never relief. Itβs astounding how insane it is. Nobody wants to elevate the language the way Spicy Z doesβto match the pitch of the images up down all around a go-nowhere plot about what? βJust the humiliated.β Perhaps his ugliest movie all around and yet its singularity is such that I wanna say thatβs ok, thatβs the point, thereβs no way out of your nature, circumstance, whatever. But itβs a movie. And in movies you can blend realities like the 1920s Paris cafes dreamt up but rarely saw enacted like this onscreen. Andrzejβs key skill, I guess Iβll diagnose, is getting beyond the apparatus as distancing effect; and to pull everything to its limit. It doesnβt matter whether it succeeds as an adaptation (it does, it does so by violence) because this is him, his spin on Fyodor D., not trying to pay homage like a bad hermeneut, preaching fidelity above what else: innocence, guilt, performance, death, polyphony, dollies without tracks, squibs, what some might call βloose endsβ left dangling, poetic expression of a private angst, colored contacts, spit, shit, food on everything, explosions, drama queens and silk dandies, sex, fluids of all kinds, literally a stage and a test thereupon. I feel like such anΒ amateur.
On the Silver Globe, 1977/1988
Broken realities, a bricolage spun into fevered movements, the "story" flashes past, so many extras and so much choreography, as free a camera as ever I've seen, stoner gibberish masquerading as profound, powers that be weigh crowns, imagines body cams a few decades early, worth watching twice I'm sure, Andrzej Jaroszewicz a god camera operator, and I thought "Where's the crew?" fewer times than one would expect. Maybe doesn't "hang together" but could it ever be "tidy"? Would you want it to be cleaner? It cakes on mud, it bullies, it pictures humans as an infection, a pandemic, as fraught an invasion as any colonialism. Direct address sewn into the first act's fabric of fraying time becomes a roving, a flying omnipotence. I couldn't tell you what any of the soliloquies said. Something about mirrors, something about ethics. It even ends on a reflection of our auteur, as he looks back at what was aborted, before he runs out ofΒ frame.
Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours, 1989
Couplets and coupling, a game of language, private vs public, saying "computer" instead of "ordinateur" most of the time, interior decorating is my passion, money is there for the taking, everybody gets laid, apparently it's an adaptation, the drunks beating each other early proffer love as a compulsion aided by circumstance, Paris MatchΒ wouldΒ love a psychic in a red dress, Sophie Marceau is perfect looking and game, nobody loves you when you're down, the world is using your language but you play at your own word salad tossed by whims, waves wash and pound and don't stop, even as the sun sets on a life. As light as Z has ever gotten, everything's playful, the camera moves past bodies and then collects faces, a perverse game of hide and seek, the whole thing an x-ray vision of organizing thoughts. Fun to listen to and translate in tandem with the subtitles, seeing how languages work in real time, why those things rhyme and othersΒ don't.
Boris Godounov, 1989
Visual ideas on ten, spectacle of spectacles, post-modern incorporation of the apparatus, and I couldnβt give a shit because I thinkβjust a guessβthat I hate opera and medieval shit. Oh youβre a sad tsar? Big deal. Sorry I failed you, Z, but I cannot wrap my head around what the fucking point of it is...for me. The only one that felt like a chore, and only because of my idiotic prejudice I cannot shake off like the zombie it is. Maybe that's it: what's the point of opera in 2021? I stopped watching a record seven times, hilarious, but I did finish it in the end. Out of respect. Wish I could make something so po-mo someday.
The Blue Note, 1991
Slips around pulling back from subjects as often as squaring them up, nearly nonstop music, a musical chairs kind of pageant, the dramatis personae constantly re-arranging itself one room at a time, nothing but a series of fraught dynamics upended by sex or its absence, Frederic the cougher, blood on the keys, as stop-start as Godard but more, shall we say, interested in hyperbole and the abstract and, well, theater. Spicy Z says, "I'll see your costume drama and raise you the sublime of ghost choreography." Cinema synthesizes so many art forms for him, here dramatized by the milieu on display, pinballing these clowns against the walls. Everybody holds the key to their characters before they start picking up Maurice's puppets. Color coding as much as color punctuating. "Lie" George implores the novelist. But the weight of fiction's mask lays heavy on her face as she says "I don't love you" in differentΒ words.
Szamanka, 1996
Every so often you come across films from other countries where you think, "That's so adult." As I get older, this is what I'm after: films where the script disappears despite tying conceptual play to dramaturgy, films you can't "predict" (even though I'm against people playing detective in lieu of _experiencing_ a film) because they keep changing, films about the metaphysical realm while grounded in "reality" (such that "the world" is established by the film early on). I'm also a sucker for hermeneutics gone awry, epistemology as a scaffold, sex scenes that don't try to titillate but confuse expectations, and steadicams. I don't know enough about Poland to comment on Spicy Z's assertion that this is his "mask off" movie but I do know it rejects genre and easy categorization despite the conventional wisdom our Italian is some manic pixie. She's bigger than that, and I can't imagine anybody falling in love with her. Hell, she's told, "Fuck off, you moron!" pretty earlyΒ on.
La fidΓ©litΓ©, 2000
βThis lunar beauty Has no history Is complete and early, If beauty later Bear any feature It had a lover And is another.Β
This like a dream Keeps other time And daytime is The loss of this,Β For time is inches And the heart's changesΒ Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.
But this was never A ghost's endeavor Nor finished this, Was ghost at ease, And till it pass Love shall not near The sweetness here Nor sorrow take His endless look.β
ββThis Lunar Beauty,β WH Auden
The third stanza doesnβt make the film but itβs easy to see it in the script, after all: ClΓ¨ve in a tux, the sound of a Triumph. Sophie Marceauβs ClΓ©lia doesnβt want the hand sheβs been dealt but she makes do, says her piece. Cameras are natural invasions, made literal in the tabloid setting, the French press makes no sense, what sells what holds, you donβt have to be a slave to focus, try shooting a different way, but Z is making moving images not stills, we get to see the completion of gestures start to finish, trains to nowhere special, everybody loves to ham for the camera, a way to stave off immortality. About the title: itβs agreed upon in a moment of vulnerability, but like all of Zβs men ClΓ¨ve canβt accept his good fortune or his wife at her word. Heβs doomed of course. But so is she. Transcendence isnβt actually available in Zβs world, but nobody winds up where they think they are heading.
Cosmos, 2015
Finally finished, after many pauses and sleeps, and I can say, yep, didn't go out on his highest note but it's not without merits. I enjoyed it more thanΒ Boris, after all, butΒ BorisΒ is arguably a masterpiece and I'm just an idiot against an old artformβand easily enthralled by gothic surrealism. See this has got style and intrigue for sure but it's probably very easily his weakest feature, catalyst hanging bird image and his generally expert/adroit kino-eye aside, for the simple fact that it's beyond self-parody, much like that movie his son made from a languishing script: it goes on too cute, despite the ugly mugging to behold. A paradox! Like many Continental Minds (of which this is a cheeky history in asides). Like, AzΓ©ma "goes statue" multiple times and it's just odd not funny; not that he was ever about verisimilitude, but it all smacks of pastiche here. A weirdly dull put on, a "predictable" faΓ§ade-charade. Witold even does a Donald Duck when he's not not studying or writing his Bad Romantic Novel out loud; then Lucien reads comics; Fuchs is a James Dean devoutee and some kind of fashionistimposteur; Lena can't settle on any one coquettish look to affect so she tries them all on (well, Z does, or: he makes her play dress up) until the lipstick sticks; the hairlip on the cutesy-named Catherette is, well, obvious. Jean-FranΓ§ois Balmer's LΓ©on is the star, anyways, not the kids. Basically we get it: the house is rotten, rotting, the proscenium's a sham, authorship is always a collaboration with the audience, youth is wasted, etc. Last: what's with the shutter angle all over the place? This dude shotΒ Mysteries of Lisbon. What gives? Is it Z being lax or yet another layer of weird he wants to pile on? He doesn't normally call attention to the apparatus of the camera except as a physical being in space, another actor to direct, making the audience his toy. Maybe the design hangs together like a constellation after all. "I'm alone tonight...with my dreams..."
Obligatory, pointless ranking:
Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours, 1989
Szamanka, 1996
Lβamour braque, 1985
Possession, 1981
La note bleue, 1991
La fidΓ©litΓ©, 2000
On The Silver Globe, 1977/1988
La femme publique, 1984
Lβimportant cβest dβaimer, 1975
The Third Part of The Night, 1971
Diabel, 1972
Boris Godounov, 1989
Cosmos, 2016
Pavoncello, 1967
Story of Triumphant Love, 1968
