Body and Soul

Body and Soul
directed by Oscar Micheaux

Overall: Ugh... let me try to break this down into parts

oh and spoiler warning for the movie Brazil, not gonna rot13 because I'm too pissed off..

TW: rape, abuse by an authority figure, some talk of race.

THE GOOD:

• This movie is one of Oscar Micheaux's "race movies." Movies that were directed usually with all black casts and made for black audiences. Back in the 1920s these films were very controversial and in the case of Body and Soul, there was trouble screening them. The original director's cut of Body and Soul has been lost to time so it's an impressive act of film preservation to cobble together a cut of the film at all.
• The new jazz score by Wycliffe Gordon is awesome. Seriously, I'd play this movie again just to have the score as background music for whatever I was doing.
• This was the first film that Paul Robeson starred in. Just for the record - I don't blame Paul Robeson for the bungle of a plot that's in this movie.
• Even though the film is largely remembered for Paul Robeson, the protagonists of the film are actually two black women, which I imagine was exceedingly rare at the time (hell, it's rare now).

THE BAD:

• I'll get to my major complaints, but a minor one first: Paul Robeson plays two characters in this film: The crooked reverend Isaiah Jenkins (AKA, the criminal "Black Carl") and his twin brother Sylvester, who is barely in the film. Honestly it's kind of confusing to keep track of why they even had the two as brothers considering it really doesn't come up. It just seems like needless recasting.
• This may be the first movie in the Criterion Collection that I've come away from disliking the plot of the film. I mean, don't get me wrong - The Phantom Carriage had a messed up "forgiveness" creed to it too, but at least there the film didn't linger so long on it as to really annoy me. Here though... well I'll just give a rundown
• So the plot centers around the arrival of escaped prisoner Black Carl, who is passing himself off as the Rt. Reverend Isaiah Jenkins and hopes to scam a small black community out of their money. The members of this community tend to fall for Carl's ruse except for a young woman named Isabelle. Isabelle, who is hoping to marry a young inventor named Sylvester (also played by Robeson), is openly suspicious/contemptuous of the reverend, but her mother Martha Jane just believes that Isabelle is being sinful, and hopes to make a match for Isabelle with Jenkins. Jenkins pays a visit one day at Martha Jane's behest, and it's heavily implied that he rapes Isabelle while Martha Jane is out. Isabelle runs away to Atlanta, leaving a note behind where her mother's funds were hidden away telling her mother of what she's done.
  Martha Jane soon takes off for Atlanta and manages to locate Isabelle, who is on her deathbed. Isabelle tells Martha Jane the truth - that she had been raped once before by Jenkins and that when he came around to the house earlier in the film, he had Isabelle tell him where the money was hidden under threat of raping her again. She gave him the money and then ran away, knowing that her mother would not believe her.
  Isabelle dies and Martha Jane returns to her town where she confronts and exposes Jenkins in front of the congregation. The people form an angry mob and begin hunting Jenkins down while Martha Jane returns to her home. While on the run, Jenkins turns up at Martha Jane's house and has the audacity to beg forgiveness of her - and she forgives him.... Following this, Jenkins leaves and appears to escape? He seems to kill one of his pursuers and disappears off into the distance, at least. Then we return to Martha Jane, and she hears a knock at the door.
  It's Isabelle... and Sylvester... and the money's back.... and it was all a dream.
  I'm serious.
  The film ends after Sylvester and Isabelle have married. They return home from their honeymoon and happily play the piano with Martha Jane.
• Woof
• Just woof
• Like, how do you even begin with this thing? If you try to untangle one knot, two more show up.
• For starters - using rape as a dramatic center of a character's journey... even if it isn't one's own, is an unfortunately common trope in storytelling - I don't mean to say here that it should be downplayed when it does happen (although sometimes I think the question of necessity does arise), but only that it's too often used as a motivating factor for action in storytelling.. I've got a few other films/stories down the line that'll probably be more fertile ground for exploring this topic, but for now I just want to register my distaste.
• And then! And then it's all a dream in the end? Okay so I thought of a few things when I saw this - 1) I think one of the only stories that gets to have the "It was all a dream" bit tacked on is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Here it seems to undermine all of the drama of the film and even seems to make the earlier abuse of Isabelle into just a plot device!
• Alternatively, the ending may be like the ending to Brazil, where Martha Jane's gone into a sort of catatonic reverie. Honestly, I could buy that possibility, but there's no hint of it given in the film other than just how bizarre the ending is in general. But jeez this would be an absolutely Kubrickian film if the ending is that bleak.

THE UGLY:

• Okay, so the concept of forgiveness that shows up in this film is an odd one. I remember a couple of years ago I listened to an episode of the podcast This Week in Blackness Prime, a news and culture podcast hosted by Elon James-White, Imani Gandy and (at the time) Aaron Rand-Freeman, in which Elon's mother, a devout Christian, addressed the concept of forgiveness as it applied to her own abusive stepmother. She seemed to imply that in the context of Christianity (and perhaps black American Christianity more specifically) forgiveness acts as a kind of way to not let the perpetrator of a crime have power over the victim, with the expectation being that justice will be meted out in some other fashion. From what I've gathered after talking to a few people, this is supposed to be something of an empowering act on the part of the wronged. I wonder if there's a reading of this film that reads Martha Jane's actions as good in this regard. I'm conflicted, of course, because it seems to ignore Isabelle's wishes, but then again Isabelle is dead at this point. It just seems like a messy component that's wrapped up in cultural idioms I am not really that well-versed in, so if anyone has any sort of commentary or insight into this they'd like to put out there for the purpose of understanding, feel free.

Final note: If you've experienced abuse at the hands of a religious figure (and you're in America, I guess) the National Domestic Violence Hotline can help you locate resources in order to get you help within your local area: their number is 1-800-799-7233.

Safety Last!

Safety Last!
directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor

Well this one's a little bit less thought-provoking than Nanook or Haxan. Still though, it's an interesting and at-times pretty serviceable comedy picture.

Harold Lloyd stars as a young man named Harold (called "The Boy" in the credits) who is set on making it big in the city. He leaves his family in the country and tells his fiancee that once he's made enough money they'll buy a house and get married. Unfortunately, his job does not pay as well as he'd like and he's having to pawn off his possessions and avoid paying rent in order to keep up the appearance that he is making money.... which, I mean, could just be avoided by being honest but whatever.

This early portion of the movie is probably the part that I find the funniest. It's mostly filled with slapstick as Lloyd attempts to go through his work day and must be quick-witted in order to avoid the ire of his managers. It's really reminiscent of Chaplin. However, while Chaplin seemed to almost stumble into and away from his problems, Lloyd has a little bit more thought given over to them. His ideas come across like schemes, and the humor comes from misdirection in that oftentimes the schemes appear to fail, only for Lloyd to quickly adapt and change the means by which he accomplishes his task.

After this opening bit of to-do with the daily grind, though, the movie begins to take a little bit of a downturn for me. Maybe this is just a personal thing, but I tend to dislike scenes in movies where a character has to maintain a charade, pretending to be someone they are not in order to keep another character in the dark about something. Particularly when it's a situation like this - Lloyd's fiancee comes to visit him in the city and Lloyd, afraid to have her figure out that he is only a salesman and not a manager or anything, contrives various ways to fool her into believing he is much higher on the organizational chain than he is. The whole thing reeks of class prejudice and although there's some cleverness in the way that the scene escalates, it's just not really my kind of thing in terms of comedy.

The final sequence of the movie though, and probably the most iconic, is really interesting. In order to try and make some money quickly, Lloyd proposes to his manager that he can pull in one hundred customers by staging a public stunt in which his friend/roommate Bill will climb the department store building to the roof - twelve floors. Bill is confident that he can do this, as he's demonstrated that he's pretty good at climbing buildings earlier in the film when he does this in order to escape a police officer who he and Lloyd prank. On the day of the event, however, the police officer is present and hopes to catch Bill, meaning that Harold has to take Bill's place. The plan is made that Harold will climb up a floor, go into a window and switch outfits with Bill. Bill will then climb the rest of the way up. This goes awry, however, when the police officer notices and starts chasing after Bill, meaning that with each floor Harold attempts to make the switch but can't, pressing him to climb further. I'm sure that one could look at this as some kind of hopeful symbol for American can-do-itiveness, but for me it reads more as really nice suspense... also it reminded me a lot of Bob's Burgers for some reason (Harold = Bob, Bill = Teddy). While each floor of the building becomes more difficult, with several close scrapes with death occurring, Harold eventually makes it to the top of the building where his fiancee has arrived. It's never made clear whether or not Harold comes clean, as the two walk off into the sunset, and Bill is pursued across rooftops by the officer.

While I wasn't exactly as big a fan of this movie as I was The Kid, I can see that in some ways the films are coming from different ideas about comedy. This film is very much about the misdirect, while I'd say that The Kid is more pure slapstick comedy. There are more films with both Lloyd and Chaplin on the list, though, and I look forward to seeing more.

A few other notes:

-There's a little bit of discomfort with some portrayals of racial and religious minorities in the film. While all are minor, and the two black characters don't stick around very long, there's a jeweler who I think is supposed to be Jewish, and is played in a very stereotypical, hand-wringy, greedy fashion.
-Harold's snobbish superior, the floorwalker Stubbs, is a great addition. He's all the right kinds of nose-in-the-air self-satisfied villain that works well in comedy movies featuring class dissatisfaction.
-The city in the film is Los Angeles, and Harold and Bill are able to rent an apartment there for 14 dollars a month. Converted to 2017 spending power, that's somewhere between 180 and 200 dollars a month.

Nanook of the North

TW: Discussion of racist/stereotypical presentations

Overall: How do you talk about a film like this?

I've head the name "Nanook of the North" since childhood. Usually some character in a work would be jokingly nicknamed Nanook and I learned that it was some reference to an old movie. The only reference I came across in recent years was from the Legend of Korra, in the form of "The Adventures of Nuktuk: Hero of the South". Where LoK sort of pokes fun at the film, I think it might actually be a good reference for me to check back with in addressing the film's interplay between Flaherty (the director) and Allakariallak (The Inuk star of the film, whose character is named Nanook).

That's a starting point right there, of course - the fact that the film is presented as a documentary is in many ways laughable. The character of Nanook is not real. He is an amalgamation of various Inuit half-truths presented in a manner similar to how some members of the Maasai partake in tourist attractions today. In the 1920's when Nanook was filmed, the Inuit were using rifles and had begun integrating western clothes into their lives. Allakariallak knew what a gramophone was, and didn't need to be told. However, therein lies the rub, I think. Nanook isn't Allakariallak, and this film, though it purports a documentarian stance, is mostly a fictionalized account of a fictional person's life.

There are tons of ethics questions to unpack here. On the one hand, indigenous peoples being presented as ignorant of western society is damaging and a real ugly way to go about making a film. On the other hand, I have to remember that Allakariallak was a star. As far as I know, he and the other people in the film were not forced to do any of the things their characters did - they were cast and paid actors who at the very least were actually Inuit people and not white folks in facepaint.

The film's narrative is almost entirely fabrication - Allakariallak did not die of starvation while hunting two years after production, as the film suggests--he died of natural causes in his home. The igloo that is built was not used for filming interior shots, as the camera could not fit inside. There are rumors that the scene in which Allakariallak wrestles a seal on the other end of a rope actually had no seal on the other end. The film is not a documentary in any "let the cameras roll" sense. It's an ethnographic film, that like an ethnography, purports to make claims about a population based on some minor observation and storytelling techniques. I'd really be interested in hearing various perspectives on this film, as I imagine there are plenty. I think for me the most troubling aspects of the film are the use of the term "e*****" to refer to these people, and the killing of various live animals that took place as a part of the filming. I generally don't like when live animals are used for film narrative purposes, and especially not when they're hunted as a "documentarian" venture. In terms of representation, though, I don't know that it's the worst representation I've seen. It's got its problems, but there is a measure of reassurance in the casting of actual Inuk people.

I realize as I write this that there's not much I can say by way of the film's "plot." It mostly follows the character of Nanook in the daily life of his family. They go about trading, hunting, building an igloo, and trying to survive. There is no real antagonist, except perhaps the elements, and the film doesn't really have a climax as much as it does a final scene in which Nanook's dogs begin fighting one another (ugh) and Nanook settles it down. His family is then unable to start building an igloo because it is too late, but they find an abandoned one to bunker down in for the night.

So I think for documentaries I'm mostly just going to do commentary and avoid plot synopses as I make my way through these collections... so then, like I said at the beginning, let's talk about Korra.

In The Legend of Korra, there's a sub-plot that crops up throughout seasons 2 and 3 surrounding the character of Bolin who becomes a "mover" star in a serial called "The Adventures of Nuktuk: Hero of the South" and while it's obviously a play on Nanook I can't help but draw some wider parallels between the production of Nanook and the production of The Legend of Korra.

Nanook is fake. Allakariallak was a movie star who played a character named Nanook. In the same way, Nuktuk is fake, played by a mover star named Bolin. But let's abstract this a bit further. Bolin is fake. P.J. Byrne is an actor who was cast in the role of an asian-coded character by two white directors. These two directors take potshots at the idea of appropriation and anachronism that plays into the making of the Nuktuk serials, while themselves creating a story which loosely plays on folklore and various non-white cultures as viewed through a white western lens. I mean, even the voice acting, although including some notable names (including Jason Isaacs as Zhao) is largely absent of people of color, especially when compared to another animated property that came out half a decade earlier and featured a non-white cast of characters, Disney's Mulan.

What am I trying to get at here? I'm not exactly sure, I guess. I suppose that if I have a point it's that I'd be hesitant to go after Nanook of the North as an antiquated, harmful, and racist piece. I mean, certainly these things are in it, don't get me wrong, the fact that they use the word "e*****" is point enough, but I don't really think that it's fair for modern audiences to posture as though our own media properties have undergone some great leap forward with regard to how non-white actors are cast and live action people of color are presented on film.

I'd be perfectly willing to hear other perspectives with regard to this topic, but I'm hesitant of inviting some kind of flame war... I may very well be overlooking some crucial analyses that have been done on Nanook over the years that could shed some new light on the topic, this was just sort of where my mind went upon viewing it. A film which seems to say more about the filmmakers and what they consider uncivilized (albeit admirable in some way). Which, ironically, is set against films like Haxan and what 1920s culture considered civilization.