The King of Kings (1927)

The King of Kings (1927)

dir. by Cecil B. Demille

So I've never seen a Cecil Demille film before this. I knew that he was one of the heavy-hitters of 20th century film, specifically with his work on epic films like The Ten Commandments but I don't know that I'd ever actually seen an epic film either. If King of Kings is any indication of what they're like, I think they can be interesting films, though not necessarily my cup of tea.

King of Kings basically tells the story of the last weeks of Jesus's life--the passover entry to Jerusalem, the last supper, the trial and crucifixion, and the resurrection--because of the nature of the plot I'm not really going to go over whether or not I was surprised by the events of the story. I think Demille probably expected his audience to know the story going in and was more using this as a technical achievement for scale of a work than for any real innovation to the Christ tale.

So how are the technical achievements? Well they remind me a lot of Georges Méliès actually. There are lots of people on camera during shots all just sort of milling about, although where in Méliès it could sometimes be difficult to know where the focus of the shot was supposed to be, it's always pretty obvious in Demille, with the shots usually focused around a central structure (either architectural or a person standing amidst a crowd) and the extras sort of radiate out from there. Additionally, it was interesting to see the film use color. First time I've seen it during this project and while it's only there for the opening scene and the scene of the resurrection near the end, it's done pretty well.

That said, there's a very "of its time"ness about this movie. I didn't really see anything patently offensive around (though I may be overlooking something) but the new testament as presented in this film is very much the one that I think a lot of folks nowadays inherited from their grandparents. It shows a Jesus who is infallible, confident in his actions, and pretty much has this whole "being god's son" thing figured out. He kind of goes through the motions, really, and it is always clear to the audience that he's the one in the right being set upon by the droves of old-time Israel. I've not seen this other film, but from what I understand The Last Temptation of Christ is sort of the go-to example for a more modern interpretation of Jesus, and while it's tempting to just think of the portrayal in King of Kings as a relic, it's still a distressingly pervasive one, at least in the southeastern US where I'm originally from. There's no choice here, it's portrayed as so patently obvious that Jesus is in the right that anyone who chooses not to opt into this belief system is given a sort of villainous paint-job that removes all nuance from the situation.

Some other examples of this? Dear word, why didn't the other apostles throw out Judas Iscariot from the get-go? He's always scowling and looking like he's taking no joy in anything. Raising the dead? Bah! That's boring! Where's my gold? 

Like, I know he's supposed to be the traitor, but it seems more like that role has determined everything else about the character, rather than the character growing into that role. Again, this is probably unfair to the film, which is clearly more classical than modernist in its presentation, but it just seems like aside from the technical achievements, that this film was aiming for an older audience even at the time of its release.

There's some impressive stuff here--the sets are well-designed, the music is pretty good and the large crowd scenes are very well-done, but at 2 and a half hours runtime (seriously, there are some scenes here that go on about as long as scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey), I'm not exactly chomping at the bit for the next Cecil Demille piece I'm going to be watching, which will be The Greatest Show on Earth.

Master of the House (Du skal aere din hustru)

Master of the House



dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

TW: discussion of domestic abuse, sexism

So this is going to be, as ever, kind of a different commentary. I'm not so much interested in attaining a consistent formula to these reviews of movies, though. A lot of times they are meant as sounding boards of my recent thoughts and ways for me to air out my thoughts on different topics which I see crystallized in film. In this case, I'm going to talk somewhat about internet sexism today, but I want to use the movie as a way to frame that.

Now about the film itself; I've never seen a Carl Theodor Dreyer movie, although I hear he is considered one of those all-time great directors alongside folks like Tarkovsky or Bergman or Rosellini or Godard. I recognize that those folks all came along in drastically different contexts and their movies probably shouldn't be so flippantly compared, but for now it's just a point of saying that Dreyer is considered one of the greats--which is why this film is a bit odd. From what I understand, Dreyer's work is largely concerned with the numinous, the religious, the ecstatic; none of which are present in this film. I hear this film's one of those works included in the Criterion Collection more out of a way to trace a director's history than anything else, and maybe that's something to do with it. I do not mean that to sound as diminishing as it does, but Master of the House just hits that key for me where I can see some of the story work being done but it just falls flat for me in some ways.

The plot goes like this: Ida Frandsen (Astrid Holm) is an entirely too beleaguered housewife whose husband, Viktor (Johannes Meyer) has recently lost his job "turning him into" an abusive shithead. Seriously, this guy is just relentless and I might move past it if not for the fact that it's the central conflict of the movie. Viktor is just the most constantly demanding, belittling, and denigrating piece of shit I've seen. He complains about every minor inconvenience in his morning routine, and when Ida sets about fixing one thing, he complains that she is not fixing something else. He has the audacity to ask her what she does all day right before it's made clear to the audience that Viktor has no job, prompting the obvious question for me: "What do you do, ass?" The first half-hour or so of this movie is just a constant barrage of Viktor's abuses, only eased up in the reproachful glares given off by the character of "Mads" (Mathilde Nielsen), an old nanny who used to be Viktor's nanny as well, but now primarily helps Ida with the children and attempts to condemn Viktor for his treatment of his family. This portion of the movie ends when Ida, frazzled to the point of nervous collapse, decides to retire to her parent's home after Viktor places one too many absurd demands upon her. Mads assures Ida that, given some time alone with Viktor, Mads will be able to set him to rights, stirring up the old fear of her that she knows Viktor developed in his childhood.

So it goes then, that Ida leaves the house and leaves Mads alone with Viktor and the children. At once I do kind of worry that the children are subjected to more of Viktor, who, while most of his abuse was directed at Ida, was not exactly anything close to a decent parent either. However, with a variety of cutting words and sharp observations about his character, Mads is able to bring Viktor around and reform him, making him do most of the chores which he had previously demanded that Ida attend to. By the end of the movie, Viktor is changed, Ida returns home, and they are presented a check by Ida's parents with the hopes that they will use it to buy an optometrist's shop and move on. The End.

But wow, do I hate Viktor.

It's not like the movie is unsubtle about who's the villain here. Viktor is flatly awful at the start of this movie and I don't know why the characters need to suffer so that he can have his transformation and become the good guy that he was all along. It's like an ugly duckling story in which the duckling needs to make everyone around it suffer in order to learn that it was beautiful all along. Thing is, this isn't exactly uncommon even in media today. Guys are given much more of a pass (in western media, at least) when it comes to the assumption that there's some hidden good within them; or that their awful behavior is a result of having fallen on hard times.

I guess this strikes me particularly within this movie because much of the domestic life portrayed seems similar to the one some online neoreactionaries advocate for in their own politics and commentaries. Ida, Mads, and the daughters stay inside and tend to the home while Frederik, the young son of the couple, is allowed to play outside and Viktor spends his days doing who knows what. This plays out only for Viktor to come home and complain about the unpaid labor being performed for his benefit in the home. It's gross to see the narrative play out almost entirely for Viktor's benefit--he is "degraded" through his treatment by Mads, yes--but it's all for his benefit, and the narrative forgives him at the end. It's kind of similar to The Phantom Carriage really.

At the same time, I do wonder about the time period involved here. On the one hand, while Viktor's absurd treatment of Ida is viewed as something which can be reformed, at least it is viewed as something bad by the narrative, which contradicts a lot of that bullshit "every man a king in his castle" crap that MRA's spew. Similarly, while there is a bit of a "wacky hijinks" vibe that shows up when it's revealed that the central plot will revolve around Mads's correction of Viktor, she does not spare him any feelings and does bring him down from his tyrant status pretty much on her own, which could be seen as a major role for a woman to play in a film. I know that European culture has pretty much always been patriarchal, but I don't know to what extent early feminist thought had begun to appear in Denmark by this time. I guess it's really a matter of judging how much of an exaggeration Viktor's early behavior is supposed to be. If it's not that far off of the mark, this is at once a sad but perhaps more politically relevant film for its time. If it is a parody, then there is still value in its proclamation that this sort of behavior is wrong, but a bit dampened by the portrayal of it as parody.

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.

The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen)

The Phantom Carriage
Directed by Victor Sjöström



TW: Talk of abuse, alcoholism, suicide, illness, death

You're a complicated man, David Holm.

It's New Years Eve, and two people lay dying, one will become this year's carriage driver, the other will be taken away.

This is the interesting mythology set up in the beginning of The Phantom Carriage. The last person to die before midnight of the new year must become the driver of the titular phantom carriage, performing a grim reaper role for the following year until a new person takes their role at the end. While time zones obviously present a complication to this, we're very much working in the world of folklore on this one, and while the film begins with some interesting shots of the carriage driving around the countryside, picking up accident victims, the carriage is actually fairly incidental to the plot.

The plot instead revolves around the two dying people. One of them, Sister Edit, is concerned for the welfare of the other, a man by the name of David Holm. After sending a colleague and friend to go asking around for him, she goes back to resting in anticipation of her death.

David Holm, for his part, is not exactly a well-off sort. Sister Edit's colleague finds Holm drunk with two friends in a cemetery. After telling Holm the situation, he refuses to come see Edit. Afterward, Holm's two fellow homeless friends begin to berate him for his choice. A fight breaks out and Holm is killed in the struggle.

Now here's where the movie kind of changes gears, and where its classification as a horror movie (on wikipedia and other websites) comes into question a bit. When Holm dies, he's approached by the driver of the phantom carriage, Georges (a former companion of David's), who tells him the situation. Holm is the last one to have died in the year and so he'll be the new driver of the carriage. Holm is then guided through a reflection by Georges as he's asked to remember how his life has come to this point.

We're then given an extended flashback which makes up the bulk of the film. David Holm was once a family man with a wife and two children who he seemed to love very deeply. Between edits, we're informed that he was led astray to alcoholism by Georges. After falling unconscious in front of his house one evening, David Holm awakens in jail. The policeman here is really pretty ridiculous in terms of his talking to Holm. He informs David that his brother has committed murder and that somehow this is David's fault for the two of them drinking the night before.

Now if this is where the film stayed, I could see David Holm as a sympathetic figure; in a sort of "one bad choice" kind of way. However, this is based on the previous characterization of Holm as a pretty alright guy only recently convinced to start drinking by Georges. Instead, when David is let out of jail he returns to his apartment to find it empty, his wife, Anna, having left with the children to get away from him. So, what does he do?

He vows vengeance against them. It's such a drastic change in tone and it's like David Holm just dedicates himself to being the most awful person he can from there on out. He is driven into poverty over his country-wide search for Anna and one New Year's Eve, he arrives at a Salvation Army shelter that's just been opened by Sister Edit. Sister Edit is such a bundle of goodness, just happy to do her job for a person in need of help. She gladly lets David stay the night, taking his coat to mend overnight as he rests.

The next morning, David is awoken by another worker in the shelter and is given a breakfast and his newly mended coat. Impressed by the mending, he asks to meet Sister Edit. Upon her arrival, smiling and all anticipation, he rips the jacket apart in front of her, undoing all of her work just to be a jackass. Sister Edit, cinnamon roll that she is, asks him to please return in one year's time on the next New Year's Eve, as she had prayed that their first visitor would find good fortune over the next year. He agrees, seeming to relish the thought of breaking her faith.

Real pleasant guy.

Georges then tells David that he's going to make him fulfill his promise. After working some ghosty-magic, he binds David and takes him to Sister Edit's side. Edit cannot see David, but sees Georges, begging him not to take her before David comes to visit her. David seems to be distraught over her situation, and we're given another flashback.

Over the next year following David's original visit to the shelter, Sister Edit runs into David Holm a few times and despite the fact that she has now contracted tuberculosis from the bacteria on his coat, she is still insistent that he try to better himself. Holm, for his part, grows more and more monstrous as if to spite her. He shows up at a Salvation Army meeting and begins coughing on people, hoping to spread his sickness further.

Just as it happens, Anna is at that Salvation Army event, and approaches Sister Edit about David afterward. Edit is insistent that the two reconcile and manages to arrange a meeting between the two (would not have advised that at this point).

David and Anna reunite and David is surprisingly not a total dick about the situation. The two seem to reconcile and decide to give it another shot. However, we see that a few weeks later David's reverted to his old ways and is now even NOT CONCERNED ABOUT INFECTING HIS CHILDREN WITH TUBERCULOSIS. When Anna asks that he not, he coughs on them directly. Anna manages to lock him in the kitchen of their house as she tries to take the children and leave. David, realizing that he's locked in, reveals the fact that he was an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's version of Jack Torrance and begins axing the door to pieces. Anna faints before she can get away with the children and David escapes and tries to get his wife awake.

We come back to Edit, who BLAMES HERSELF FOR DAVID'S DEEDS BECAUSE SHE BROUGHT THE COUPLE BACK TOGETHER. David manages to get Edit to see him, showing that he is moved by her admission of guilt and she dies in peace. Georges tells David that she won't be coming with, she'll have a different emissary coming for her, and he and David leave as they have one more errand that night before David is to take over the job.

They arrive at David's house, where he finds that his wife, afraid for their children's welfare due to the fact that she is also dying of consumption, is planning to poison both the children and herself. David, horrified by this, asks Georges to intervene, but Georges tells him that he has no control over the living. After pleading, David suddenly regains consciousness in the cemetery, running home to stop Anna from committing suicide. He arrives and manages to stop her, the two embrace as David mutters a prayer, promising to reform.

This film is complicated for me. On the one hand it is a beautiful film - wonderfully edited, orchestrated, and shot. The concept of the carriage itself is an interesting one, and Sister Edit is a bundle of goodness. But goddamn David Holm is just not a sympathetic character. He may've been at one point, but his actions across the course of the film paint him as a repulsive man who maliciously attempted to make everyone else's life as miserable as he could. I mean, I'm all for film's featuring bleak characters, but I'm a bit more conflicted about this film's presentation of Holm as a tragic character with hope for redemption at the end. While maybe he can reform, his actions seem to paint the picture of a really horrible person over the course of the film, and maybe the film is a bit more like Sister Edit in terms of its certainty that he can reform, but I'm a bit skeptical.