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January DVD Roundup:
Pandora's Box
Stalker
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm
Friday, January 05, 2007
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2? (2003)
Directed by William Greaves
(Criterion)
Pandora?s Box (1929)
Directed by G.W. Pabst
(Criterion)
Stalker (1979)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
(Kino)
Reviewed by Jared Rapfogel, Jos? Teodoro and Nicolas Rapold
*****
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2? (2003)
Directed by William Greaves
(Criterion)
Reviewed by Jared Rapfogel
One of the great whatsits of Sixties American filmmaking, William Greaves?s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, has burst back into view after languishing almost unseen for several decades. Thanks in part to the belated appearance of a sequel of sorts (Take 2?), the original has been treated to the ultimate enshrinement ? the full Criterion treatment ? with a set that includes Take 2?, as well as an illuminating hour-long documentary on Greaves and his career.
Take One is an experimental film in the most literal sense of the term. It's as playful and slippery as it is essentially serious. The core material of the film is an unashamedly over-wrought, contrived dialogue between a couple in a doomed relationship. But this scene is just the kernel of Greaves?s experimentation: By using two cameras to cover the actors and a third to shoot the filmmakers, Greaves emphasizes the process of filmmaking ? a strategy that truly bears fruit when the frustrated crew decide, in Greaves?s absence, to film their own highly critical discussions of the project. The result is a work of enormous complexity and inventiveness, one that moves freely between the scene being performed, the film-shoot itself, and the crew?s off-set meetings, all of which Greaves juggles brilliantly through the use of double and triple split-screens.
The crew?s discussions form the real heart of the film: They not only debate the film?s meaning, but question and criticize the project and Greaves?s control over it. Part of the fun of experiencing Take One is the nagging suspicion that all is not as it seems ? that Greaves is not really as lost and ineffectual as he appears, that the crew?s ?palace revolt? (as Greaves gamely characterizes it) is a ruse, that the film?s spontaneity is an illusion. Greaves has consistently dispelled these rumors, but it?s hard not to feel that the film, despite its apparent transparency, is always one step ahead of us. But the beauty of Take One is that it hardly matters. After all, this is a movie about acting: the actors are acting, the characters are acting, Greaves himself, according to the crew, is acting the role of director ? even the crew relishes its role as a hyper-articulate chorus. Ultimately Symbio?s subject is the permeability of the boundaries between truth and fiction ? the truth contained in fiction and the fiction contained in truth. However premeditated the film is or isn?t, in its finished state it?s a wonderfully loose but remarkably coherent essay on acting, the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and the process of filmmaking.
Take 2? isn?t as successful, largely because it lacks such mischievous slipperiness. But it has a poignancy all its own, thanks to the intercutting of footage from the Take One shoot and present-day footage of Greaves and the same actors we saw at the end of the original, this time performing a new scene addressing the passage of time. The collision between the two time periods adds a whole new layer to the mix, one that?s perhaps more conventional, but moving nevertheless.
*****
Pandora?s Box (1929)
Directed by G.W. Pabst
(Criterion)
Reviewed by Jos? Teodoro
One hundred years after the birth of Louise Brooks, the disarmingly magnetic actress has only grown in her stature as an icon for seemingly contradictory camps and as the quintessential case study of the artist merging with her fictional counterpart ? namely, Lulu, the perilously beguiling heroine of G.W. Pabst?s 1929 masterpiece Pandora?s Box. Yet in the midst of celebrating all things Brooks, the rediscovery of the film that defined her screen image should rightfully draw our attention toward that film?s director as equally as its star.
Arriving at the end of the silent era, Pandora?s Box, while unrecognized as such in its time, feels like nothing less than the crowning achievement of the form. It follows Lulu from her status as a kept woman, showgirl and, very briefly, bride in Weimar Berlin, to a life on the lam with her gambling-crazed stepson, before finally hunkering down in the cold squalor of London?s East End. Watching Brooks?s astonishingly natural performance in the context of Pabst?s elegantly structured episodic-poetic narrative, we?re able to see not only how sophisticated silent film had become, but where it might have led ? to a place where traditional melodrama dissolves into modern romance, complicated glamour, and a new vocabulary of gestures that accumulate meaning not only through montage but a growing set of specifically filmic semiotics.
What?s always been clear, of course, was how innovative Pandora?s Box was with regards to eroticism. Lulu inhabits a role unusual in movies to this day: the innocent siren or unconscious femme fatale. You wonder if silent film?s very muteness, its power gained from visual surfaces that evaporate around sound, is actually the only form that allows for a character like Lulu to emerge so fully. Pabst?s distinctive way of dividing up images ? of Lulu kicking her legs, her petulant pout, her suitor?s fatalistic resignation ? allowed for a delicate psychological negotiation to unfold between what scholar Mary Ann Doane calls the ?orchestra of gazes,? all the while maintaining such fluid ambiguity that every viewing of these sequences prompts new readings.
In bringing this story of a girl so reckless, sexy and elusive as to facilitate tragedy in all those attempting to possess her, Pabst employed at every turn inspired narrative techniques: the ongoing contrasts of characters with artificial doubles (paintings, statues, sketches) that reveal their shadow-selves; the mirroring of the characters? internal chaos through a balance of frenzied action and stillness; the use of smoke as a melancholy emblem of ephemera, building gradually until the film?s final moments simply swallow the figures into rolling mist. And in Lulu?s harrowingly final date with a lone man pulled out from the fog, Pabst engineered an intersection of otherwise disparate figures that feels inevitable, leading to all sorts of unsettling questions about destiny, and maybe even laying the groundwork for the narrative shock that would distinguish Psycho and push movie storytelling into still stranger places.
Criterion?s two-disc release features four musical scores; a dispassionate but enormously thoughtful commentary by Doane and Thomas Elsaesser, who emphasize Brooks?s role as ?the representation of pure presence? and Pabst?s as forerunner in the deeper study of women as collateral; an interview with Pabst?s son; and essays from J. Hoberman and Kenneth Tynan. Best of all is the 1984 doc Lulu in Berlin, featuring a rare interview with Brooks, a candid and terrifically engaging storyteller.
*****
Stalker (1979)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
(Kino)
Reviewed by Nicolas Rapold
From the bleak woods of Ivan?s Childhood to the deep space of Solaris, moments of stillness define Tarkovsky?s visionary cinema. These can be serene or foreboding, but it?s interesting how readily many viewers tend to the latter interpretation. Could it be that such ethereal quietude recedes for us more and more as modernity pushes solitude into extinction ? to the point of that it evokes the end of the world rather than, say, nature, or being?
Stalker, set in a mysterious postapocalyptic ?Zone? of unknown but possibly extraterrestrial provenance, is understandably vulnerable to this nervous creep. The 1979 film?s decrepit, overgrown locations (actually around an Estonian power plant) prophesy the ghost towns of Chernobyl: buildings hastily abandoned, artifacts strewn about, moss-covered vehicles laid low. (Even a new video game entitled Stalker and set in the aftermath of the 1986 disaster takes the connection for granted.) The ?Stalker? is a man who guides two visitors (known only as ?Writer? and ?Professor?) into the Zone, and he treats the place as unfathomably dangerous and fickle, like some poorly understood, barely tolerant god. This sense of infinite forces perpetually at risk of being neglected and unleashed most palpably evokes the nuclear age (something the director would revisit with The Sacrifice).
But mentioning these associations is a kind of purgative, clearing the way for Tarkovsky?s mysticism, which is paramount. Gradually we learn the three men?s objective: a room that grants one?s innermost desires. Although the premise echoes the subconscious feedback loop in Solaris, Tarkovsky is less interested in a studied sci-fi conundrum than an almost Eastern confrontation with the self. We join the journey, suspended in the existential limbo of Tarkovsky?s slow pans and meditative zooms.
As interviews included in this two-disc Kino set attest, the beauty of the director?s compositions was meticulously achieved ? not a single unmotivated flower in any shot, according to one incredible anecdote. For seeing the results of this care, there?s still no substitute for experiencing Tarkovsky on the big screen, and furthermore, Kino?s edition has its own problems. But perhaps, to invoke another of the director?s visual obsessions, you can think of it as an icon for contemplation of the film?s mysteries at home.