With the film’s recent advent on smaller screens, Brody continues to celebrate the film’s curious spiritual perspective.

One of the most audacious American movies of 2009, Jared Hess’s “Gentlemen Broncos” (on DVD from Fox) — a loopy comedy that blends frumpy down-market vulgarity with excremental humor and cartoonish, yet astonishingly simple and clever, action sequences — is hardly the type to attract Oscar consideration. Yet it’s a work of visionary inspiration that, like many outrageous Hollywood comedies of the classic era (such as those of Frank Tashlin), tackles remarkably serious matters. . . . Set in a pious Christian community in Saltair, Utah, (the film) is rife with religious overtones. . . .

Hess, a Brigham Young graduate who has worked in the Mormon film industry, daringly sets Benjamin’s naïve yet heroic visions in three sets of images . . . (including), most astonishingly, the fierce yet devout ones that Benjamin sees in his mind’s eye. . . .

In his jejune yet highly moral inspiration, Benjamin is the prophet of a pop-infused Gospel, an updated Book of Mormon, that speaks to a new generation of young people whose coarsened sensibility is paradoxically attuned to Biblical explicitness and ferocity. Hess’s vision is both childish and childlike, yet from the mouths of babes oft comes wisdom—as well as things that need to be wiped up.

In case Brody sets expectations too high, here’s the prevailing critical opinion, represented by EW’s Lisa Schwartzbaum: “As they did in Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, the Hesses claim to celebrate the amusing qualities of misshapen people and their misshapen dreams, insisting that amateurism and bad taste (both in filmmaking and in life) are intentional artistic choices. The audience may have bought the act in Napoleon Dynamite. But this time, the act bombs.The one saving grace of such a relentlessly unappealing movie may be that the emperor’s-new-clothes moment has arrived: Bad taste is sometimes just a vice, and amateurism in filmmaking is no virtue.”

Film Journey is a great resource in general, and his top 50 would be a wonderful way to catch up on cinema if one were so inclined.

Well, trust me. You want to.

The Secret of Kells is a movie full to bursting with the pure potential of animation, an aesthetic experience so impeccably designed that style and substance are indistinguishable. The obvious of source of inspiration is the titular Book of Kells, a medieval Irish illuminated manuscript of the four gospels, and it’s honestly overwhelming to catalogue the various ways in which the book’s celtic knots, symbols and even narrative panelling inform the film’s design.

An image from the Book of Kells

Perhaps the best example comes midway through the film, when Brendan, the film’s protagonist, climbs his way through the forest outside of Kells, and the environment abstracts itself into a kind of decorative motif, with branches twisting around like frames and creatures dotting the landscape with arabesque precision. Not only is it impressive, it’s beautiful, achingly so, and I admit my poor graphic designer’s eyes were misty. The characters themselves, while not an exact adaptation of the illuminators’ style, are as well-suited to flattened, abstract compositions as they are to fully dimensional environments, no small feat. It’s part of the animators’ larger attention to shapes and spaces, another nod to their source material: trees grow in interlocking patterns, and the monks gather together in groups that piece together their various exaggerated shapes like a puzzle. The animators’ repurposing of the illuminators’ art suggests that the only way to really understand their world is through the art they gave us, which reinforces the film’s conviction that art is what illuminates and interprets our world.

Brendan and Aisling explore the forest.

The design is integral to the film’s other themes as well. It codes the film’s battle between civilization and barbarism not simply as might versus right, but as beauty versus ugliness, order versus chaos and especially organic versus sterile. The Book of Kells, and hence the kind of civilization it represents, detailed and full of natural curves and patterns. The film’s icons of destruction — both the northmen and the “dark one” — are rendered in straight, harsh geometries, silhouettes and awkward scribble.

The story itself, admittedly, is less sublime: here’s a plucky young apprentice hero defying authority to do what’s right, develop his full potential and defeat the forces of darkness. But the whole affair is more complicated than the typical anti-authoritarian (and occasionally anti-religious) vindication in which such films normally indulge. The abbot, for all his stereotypical severity, has a compelling reason for his concerns — he wants to ensure Kells is well-defended against the encroaching hordes of “northmen” who are ravaging Ireland. He works nobly and sacrificially on behalf of both his community, and in the end both he and Brendan contribute, in their opposing ways, to the preservation of Irish civilization, though the historical facts of the situation necessitate that their victories be small. Ultimately, the film wants to suggest that survival depends not on shutting out the outside world — hence its depiction of the abbot’s plans in those harsh geometries mentioned above. Rather, survival comes from enlightening the outside world, building connections and sharing hope, which is at least true to the spirit of the medieval monastery. The literal specificity of the situation — this book is more important those walls — at least keeps the whole thing from devolving into a collection of truisms.

More subtle is the film’s treatment of its necessarily religious concerns. The actual contents of the Book of Kells, the gospels, are never made explicit — at best the film gives us Brother Aidann saying that the contents must be transmitted “so that the people may have hope in these dark times.” But the monks and the abbey are recognizably Christian, with attendant crosses and chapels, prayers and sacred music. That creates some tension, though not as much as you’d suspect, given that much of the plot hinges on the faerie world of the outside forest. Interestingly, Brendan believes with no hesitation in faeries, but is deeply the skeptical about Crom Cruach, a kind of dark god that haunts the forest.

The incorporation and demonization of folk belief are both as old as the Christian faith, and it’s not difficult to imagine that for many of the monks of medieval Ireland, there was no serious dissonance between the trinitarian God they worshipped and the faeries outside the abbey walls. And while there’s no explicitly Lewisian baptizing of the pagan myths, the film aesthetically ties the two, not just in making the natural world mirror the illuminated manuscript or vice versa but also by countless small details, working trinitarian symbols into the forest trees and crosses in the place of snowflakes, descending gently onto the earth. Aisling, Brendan’s fairy friend, is as delightful a pagan creature as you’re likely to meet, but she sides herself quite clearly with Kells and its mission. You can interpret that as you wish — softening the Book of Kells into a syncretistic gaelic mythology or trumpeting the divine spirit that animates the world. But in this ambiguity the film at least allows for the give-and-take that must have been going on within the Irish soul. That it does this largely through aesthetic choices — this film is all aesthetic choices — is a matter of no small commendation.

Ultimately, inasmuch as the Oscar for Best Animated Feature is an award for the best film that happens to animated, The Secret of Kells likely stands no chance. Up is the obvious winner. It’s the better film, with narrative nuance that Kells can’t muster. But The Secret of Kells is perhaps the best animated film of the year qua animation, the film whose virtues are most clearly tied to animation and the limitless possibilities therein. The American distributor plans to roll it out slowly over the next few months, beginning this weekend in New York and continuing the 19th in Boston. If you get a chance to see it in theaters, take it. It’s worth the effort.

“It sucks,” decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes have been winnowed to a curt kiss-off. In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream. Just log on, vent, and hit send.

The transfer of film criticism from its print-based platforms (newspapers, magazines, and academic journals) to ectoplasmic Web-page billboards has rocked the lit-crit screen trade. Whether from the world of journalism (where the pink slips are landing with hurricane force) or academe (which itself is experiencing the worst job market since the Middle Ages), serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed.

The ballast of traditional credentials—whereby film critics earned their bones through university degrees or years at metropolitan dailies—has been thrown overboard by the judgment calls of anonymous upstarts without portfolio but very much with a DSL hotline to Hollywood’s prime moviegoing demographic. In film criticism, the blogosphere is the true sphere of influence.

I may be seeing fewer film reviews in newspapers that are worth reading. But I’m grateful to have found so many friends and colleagues who write about cinema with the care, education, and insight of professionals even though they’re probably not earning a paycheck by doing so.

Perhaps if film lovers press on, writing with passion and excellence about the art of film, eventually we will see another shift. As international and independent cinema becomes more available online, curiosity about such titles is likely to grow. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of a Renaissance of serious film criticism, which could increase the value of well-researched film criticism again. I’d pay for a subscription to the reviews of Michael Sicinski, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Roger Ebert, and Steven Greydanus. Would you?

Nevertheless, with the rare exception of the TV-friendly Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, if there was a time when knowledgeable film critics were celebrated by popular culture, I missed it. Among my fellow college freshmen in the early ’90s, it was a rare experience to find a classmate who had heard of Paulene Kael.

Sure, newspapers may be firing their reviewers. But does that mean people have lost interest in real reviews? Most cinephiles I know began losing interest in newspaper film critics and favoring thoughtful bloggers a long time ago.

Bloggers have the freedom to speak their minds creatively and at length, while most newspaper reporters had to force their reviews into small spaces. And they had to “dumb down” their reviews for general audiences, going heavy on plot summary and celebrity commentary and very light on serious analysis.

From a certain point of view, the internet was a gift to film criticism; critics could reach an international audience of interested film buffs, and say whatever they wanted about a film as accessibly or as academically as they pleased. Chances that an aspiring film critic would ever make a living on such a passion were slim to none anyway.

Now, do I wish critics were paid well for their services? Absolutely. But I think the “pros” of the film-blogger revolution outweigh the cons.

Please note that Jonathan Rosenbaum is as vigilant and thoughtful as ever. He posted a substantial critique of Doherty’s article right there in the Comments section (Comment #5). And I doubt anybody paid him for his insight.

Steven D. Greydanus (of Decent Films fame) has posted a wonderful overview of Hayao Miyazaki, his films, and their influence on American cinema.

Miyazaki’s American proponents hoped Ponyo would be his breakout film stateside, but mainstream success in America continues to elude him. That is a shame, and our loss.

Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most important living filmmakers many readers haven’t heard of. He can easily be called the world’s foremost living director of animation. Even if you haven’t seen any of Miyazaki’s work, you’ve probably experienced his influence on American films.

[...]

While his influence is impressive, then, Miyazaki’s vision remains unique. The worlds he creates — the teeming post-apocalyptic jungle world of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the strange 19th-century science fiction of Laputa: Castle in the Sky, the surreal spirit world of Spirited Away — are as singular as they are captivating. There is a haunting quality about Miyazaki’s works; the viewer has the sense of having visited a place with a character as distinct and vibrant as any place in the real world.

Partly this is due to the artist’s painterly style and extraordinary eye for persuasive detail; partly it is the effortless authority with which he blends reality (or realities) and whimsy to create settings that seem copied directly from life, even if the particular architectural, technological and cultural milieus he draws on never coexisted in any one place and time, or in some cases never existed at all.

[...]

For all viewers, Miyazaki’s whole body of work (less one or two sub-par exceptions) offers unduplicated vistas of imaginative wonder and beauty, images of startling power, admirable and likable heroines and heroes, humanely conceived supporting characters, elusively engaging storytelling, wholesome moral themes, and unexpected sly humor. He is the sort of artist whose work doesn’t just entertain audiences, but wins enthusiasts. For those who haven’t yet discovered him, Miyazaki is a taste well worth acquiring.

Greydanus pretty much hits on every single reason why I love Hayao Miyazaki’s films, and then some.

I like to think of the list as a sort of back door to faith, your own private entrance to the houses of the holy. The Hidden God contains an essay by Nathaniel Dorksy on “Devotional Cinema,” in which he addresses the moments “not where religion is the subject of a film, but where film is the spirit or experience of religion.” He talks about a transcendent “alchemy” that happens in good film, in films that “lay the ground for devotion.” The list ostensibly contains these sorts of films. It is a monument to a history of people speaking a different language about eternal concepts, testing this new grammar of light, texture, and rhythm as it contacts the contours of faith and reality. The list honors artists in tune with the human condition, putting human faces on high-concept theological realities. And most of these films do more than simply describe these realities; they rehearse them, reproduce them, and enable us to inhabit them. These films are catalysts, mirrors, and antidotes. Simply put, the list is a guide to spaces of insight and reflection that exist off the beaten track of tried and true spiritual practices.

This was back when it was referred to as the “100 Most Spiritually Significant Films.” I really liked these annual lists despite the dozen or so movies that seemed to appear repeatedly with little regard for my annoyance. But even a cursory spin through the current list, the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100, indicates that times have changed. It has shed films like American Beauty, Changing Lanes, Dogma, Fight Club, The Matrix, Signs, Sixth Sense, or The Truman Show, and along with these a lot of its initial popular appeal. And then it has picked up many of the truly great films from this last decade, like Heartbeat Detector, Summer Hours, Syndromes and A Century, and In Praise of Love. Somehow even Brakhage and Deren found their way onto the list.

And in the midst of all these changes, I think the loose descriptor “spirituality” has become an even more abstract point of common ground for this wide range of films. This is not the fault of the over 40 voters involved this time, the list of films nominated, or even the voting process. I actually don’t think it is even a problem. What do Playtime, Meshes of the Afternoon, and Beau travail have in common? Not much other than the fact that they are on this list. I find this new sense of indeterminacy really compelling. It reflects the work the diverse community that developed the list has put into talking about international cinema since its inception.

In a talk delivered at a 2003 event, visionary INTERFILM president Hans Werner Dannowski remarked: “…the vivid crossing of borders between film and theology may save the film from the banality of cinema and festival business, and it may also save the church from the deep sleep of the habitual and the always known.” There is a lot of border crossing going on this list, culturally, ideologically, and formally. Brakhage’s wash of colors, perhaps along with the Punch Drunk Love interludes, responds to the clinical claustrophobia of The Passion of the Joan of Arc. The last scene of Beau travail provides an interesting formal counterpoint to the end of Ordet or Stroszek. The gentle comedy of Ozu’s reflection on modernization in Early Summer becomes a discussion partner with Heartbeat Detector’s more sinister take on the modern industrial complex.

This list is a work in progress, and next year may see it shifting towards a more eclectic or even mainstream taste index. Does my above 2005 description still apply? Yes. But I think it does now in a way that embodies the increasing border-crossing agility with which many have learned to talk about theology or spirituality and cinema in the same sentence.

Please visit the Arts and Faith Top 100 list. (Thanks to Image Journal.)

Jeffrey Overstreet has written a handy Q and A.

Watching Shrek in Iran:

Perhaps the question I should have been asking was this: What does it mean that Americans and Iranians make such different things of each other’s cinemas? I returned to Tehran last winter to try to make more sense of these cultural readings and misreadings, and in particular to try to better understand the debate in Iran over Iranian directors like Abbas Kiarostami, lionized in the US but not generally admired in Iran. Kiarostami, the director of Taste of Cherry (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Ten (2002), is the reason that Iranian cinema is currently upheld—by critics in France and America and elsewhere around the world—as the greatest since the French New Wave brought us Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Eric Rohmer.

And yet, to many people within his own country, Kiarostami, as one Iranian film critic said to me, is considered “a crime against the cinema of the world.”

Did you see that last sentence? More:

Makhmalbaf was one of several important Iranian directors who made public statements in support of the protesters: other important directors such as Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, and Bahman Ghobadi did so as well. The latter did so from inside Iran, which Mahmoud rightly saw as yet more daring—the critique from within always has more force for Iranians wary of outsiders’ frequently tone-deaf calls for Iranian “liberation.” (Makhmalbaf moved to Paris in 2005 after the first election of Ahmadinejad; Panahi was arrested in Tehran in July and had his passport revoked this past October.)

I ask Mahmoud what people are saying about Kiarostami. “Kiarostami is not in Iran right now. He is making a new film in Italy,” he replies. “If you want to know how people think of him see the latest poll in my blog. His films are absent from the top ten films.”

Mahmoud writes back a few days later to say: “Kiarostami now is flirting with Miss Juliette Binoche in the countrysides of Italy and making love stories among the poetic landscapes!”

Among other things in this issue, The Apocalypse Will Be Televised, Unproduced Screenplays by Famous Intellectuals, and an interview with Harmony Korine with what appears to be his typical “Things that are awkward. I just never really cared about perfect sense. I like perfect nonsense” shtick.

I didn’t like James Gray’s film The Lovers very much. But someday soon I’m going to love it.

You have one or two of those movies, haven’t you? The movies you frowned about afterward, but two years later you were watching them for the fifth time, your enthusiasm growing?

It’s my first experience with a James Gray film, and from what I’ve read about his previous works (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night), I was expecting something moody with decent performances.

What I didn’t expect was a film that would trap me in the middle of several difficult questions.

In case you haven’t discovered it yet:

The film follows Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), a lost soul still living with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov). He’s jumpy, twitchy, and he mumbles like… well, like Joaquin Phoenix in recent public appearances. Even though he looks to be in his mid to late 30s, he behaves there as if he’s a moody, bashful eighteen-year-old suffering from an excess of parental monitoring and concern.

In time we learn that Leonard is bipolar. And worse, he’s tried suicide more than once, traumatized by the breakup with his fiancee. But in spite of these explanations, it’s hard not to wonder if his hovering parents might not be largely responsible for his anxieties. (I even wondered, throughout the film, if we were being told the straight story about what happened with Leonard’s ex-fiance.) Whatever the case, his recovery from the crisis is a process of mothering and medication.

Leonard’s father, a Jewish immigrant and a longtime Coney Island dry-cleaner, is kind but distracted by his business. Leonard’s mother is so dutifully concerned that one comes to suspect she either shares Leonard’s feelings of imprisonment or she’s hiding beneath layers of formality for some reason that will be revealed. They keep Leonard under rigorous, but not unloving, surveillance.

For Leonard to find himself caught up in not one but two rushed romances seems unlikely. What young woman wouldn’t be thoroughly spooked by his shiftiness? He looks more like a potential stalker than boyfriend material. (But far be it from me to say it couldn’t happen. I’ve seen women I admire fall hard for some of the most reckless and unstable men I’ve ever met — and suffer the consequences.) Anyway, Leonard gains the trust and admiration of both the level-headed and sweet Sandra (the radiant Vinessa Shaw) and she who will be known as “The Accident Waiting to Happen and Probably Repeatedly” — a drug-addicted flirt named Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Of course, Leonard’s parents want him to fall in love and marry Sandra. She’s part of a family like theirs, after all. And what is more, this can only help their desire to see the two dry-cleaning businesses merge. And why not? She’s lovely, sexy, and clearly ready to climb all over Leonard (much to my bewilderment).

Leonard is willing to play along, as if a part of his brain gets that this is sensible, and the other part gets that Sandra is smokin’ hot.

But the same part of his brain that is clearly hot for Sandra is even hotter for Michelle. Michelle’s more exciting. And she exists outside the formidable walls of Leonard’s controlled existence. But she’s also in trouble. Having made her happiness dependent on the affections of a manipulative married man (Elias Koteas), she’s an emotional wreck, and strung out on drugs to boot.

So, there’s the setup.

Leonard is drawn to Sandra, against a backdrop that emphasizes history, tradition, and family.

Watching the film, I was frustrated to see adult characters behaving like such foolish teens. But I was also confounded that they would be drawn to each other in the first place. I couldn’t decide, was this just poor casting? The actors are good — no, they’re great — but this seems like a story for much younger characters. Or were they cast for the deliberate purpose of creating such discomfort?

Whatever the case, such a scenario can only end a few ways. Leonard ends up with Option A, or Option B, or neither, or he kills himself, or Options A and B fall in love and things take a perverse dive.

But the ending of Two Lovers, as unimaginative as it seemed at first, has been stuck in my head for days. And I can’t decide whether its presence in the back of my mind is welcome or not.

I found the story unpleasant, unlikely, and often very annoying. But the cinematography and the performances were so darkly fascinating that I kept watching.

And now, I can’t stop thinking about Leonard: about how I’ve actually come to care about what happens to him; how I want him to survive; to be free, living an authentic life of preferences and pursuits; but also to to remain under supervision; to be guided into wise choices so that he won’t mess himself up again. I want him to know passion, but also to grow old with a faithful wife and a loving, supportive family. I want him to have a good job in his future. But I also want him to live with zeal and courage, breaking free from the life his parents have so rigorously designed and predetermined for him.

What is best for Leonard?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character who is quite the same kind of aggravating and endearing as Leonard. Phoenix is brilliant here. He makes the dumbest lines seem real. He never overplays a moment. He makes Leonard scary, sad, and ultimately sympathetic, somebody we hope will break free even as we hope he stays under close observation.

And this is it. This is why I know I will come to love this movie. It does what the very best art does:

It wraps itself around a question. It gives us many entry points into the story, and leaving us in sufficient doubt about the conclusion. That way, viewers will arrive at myriad opinions and interpretations. They’ll have many different desired outcomes, many different concerns for the characters, many different predictions about what might happen next.

And yet, rather than just being merely enigmatic and confounding, Two Lovers expresses something that is true about all of us. Even if we look at these broken creatures with alarm or disgust, face it: We experience the tension between the desire to live a life of authentic passion and the desire to avoid catastrophic mistakes. We want to make choices with wild abandon, but we want to be restricted just enough that we will be rescued from the consequences of our weaker moments.

I sympathize with Leonard’s longings, but fear what will take place if he shuts out everything else and pursues them. It’s a fractured world, and any choice, any outcome will be imperfect and leave him wondering “What if?” But which outcome would be worse? Brief, reckless, and liberating bliss — leading, almost inevitably to disaster? Or enduring but difficult love and responsibility, in union with a woman of forgiveness and grace, surrounded by support?

But no, it doesn’t feel right to take from Two Lovers some abstract lesson that is universal. What I love best is that Gray and his co-scripter Richard Menello have given everything, and every character, such particularity. It is not about Everyman, but this man: This sometimes slovenly, sometimes boyishly playful man.

And it’s not about two “kinds of women”, but these women. Gray has not made Sandra homely; he has allowed Vinessa Shaw to make her genuinely alluring, warm, and wonderful. To choose her would not be to surrender sensuality and idiosyncracy. But in most directors’ hands, Sandra would have been painfully plain.

Nor is Michelle a goddess. She applies makeup with a trowel before going out on the town to behave like a spoiled college girl. She’s maddeningly fickle, capable of terrifying gullibility, and almost irreversibly damaged by addiction, sure to fail in anything she sets out to do. But thanks to Gwyneth Paltrow’s remarkably subtle work (Why isn’t she given great roles more often?) there is just enough grace left in Michelle, just enough potential for recovery, that we dare to hope she’ll escape the traps she’s set for herself.

Leonard and Michelle, on top of the world, where it is very cold, and it's a long, long way down to earth.

It also helps that the film’s locations and cinematography amplify the murkiness of Leonard’s quandaries. The walls of his Brighton Beach surroundings are claustrophobia-inducing. When he looks out his window it’s as though another part of the building is about to fall down on him. And there, far above, is mercurial Michelle all Rapunzel-like in the window, doing the “I’ll show you my true feelings for you by opening my shirt” thing — a move that made sense when it was the confused teen in American Beauty, but just seems like another immature display from the Mess That Is Michelle. She leaves Leonard as awestruck as a teen with a dangerous crush. His obsession make it seem entirely possible that he might cut all of his lifelines in a hopeless attempt to save her.

And as contrived as the climactic moments seemed when I saw Two Lovers the first time, I must admit I gasped when the head-slappingly obvious image of a solitary glove on the edge of the tide played onscreen. It wasn’t because it was a brilliant idea (it was Visual Poetry 101), but because the shot itself was fantastic.

This is a perplexing film. But I’d much rather have one of those than a dozen well-made films that wrap things up neatly, deliver their conclusions, and leave me stammering the next day as I strive to answer the question, “What did I see last night?” The script wouldn’t have given me much hope for anything interesting. It’s all the complications that fill those silences and burdened glances between the lines. And it’s the wave of relief I felt at the outcome; and then that second, unexpected wave of dread that quickly followed as I guessed what would probably come next; and then, the wave that came after that, which made me think, Well, isn’t that better than the alternative? And the next wave… and the next….

I’d better stop. I’m falling for Two Lovers even now. And I’m not yet sure if embracing this film is a wise and responsible decision or a mad and reckless crush  that I’ll eventually get over.

I suddenly feel like Leonard.

The number of film critics who have indelibly shaped my understanding of the cinema is relatively small, perhaps a half dozen, maybe a dozen at the most. Susan Sontag is chief among them, although I’ve never thought of her as a critic per se. During a youth spent at academic institutions in Berkeley, Chicago, Cambridge (MA), Oxford, Paris, and New York, she was trained as a philosopher and thought and wrote like one. And like a philosopher, Sontag had a precise intellectual agenda. As David Denby wrote in an astute summation of Sontag’s love of the movies, she had absorbed the ideology of the 1960s intellectuals who wrote for Partisan Review and then attacked their view of modernist art, partly because they had undervalued European experimental film, a medium which they hardly considered worthy of attention.

In challenging them, Sontag achieved much. She expanded artistic taste for a generation of readers and moviegoers, particularly those living in New York; she brought attention to an array of relatively neglected artists (many of whom are now widely respected); and she revised the very purpose of film criticism. For someone like me, born in the generation after Sontag’s, it is the latter achievement that perhaps matters most. Sontag’s writing on film was only a small part of her writing on the arts, and on the surface it can seem fairly clinical. Her expansive essays on directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Bresson engaged their films by exploring a variety of related intellectual issues, including questions of form, the relationship between literary texts, the internal mechanics of narrative, the integral ties between structure and content. And in these essays, she often indulged in esoteric aphorisms, calling Godard a “deliberate destroyer of cinema” or concluding that in some of Alain Resnais’ films “the memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of feeling.” These statements only made complete sense, only cohered, within the larger intellectual context of the essays that contained them.

Yet for all of its earnestness and rigorous formalism, Sontag’s criticism was always emotive and humanistic. She was interested in a director’s technique and in a film’s formal properties only insofar as they led to a deeper, more immediate delivery of the experience of the cinema, as if film criticism were the artistic equivalent of impact boosting. Understanding what Bresson or Bergman were doing with a film’s form produces a higher aesthetic and visceral experience, one that is unimpeded and truer, and in the process the viewer can be psychologically and emotionally transformed. Consider how Sontag ended her 1964 essay on Bresson: “the power of Bresson’s [films] lies in the fact that his purity and fastidiousness are not just an assertion about the resources of the cinema … they are at the same time an idea about life … about the most serious ways of being human.” Or, as Denby put it:

Sontag spent her life trying to grasp modernity, both as a specific series of developments in the arts and as the quintessence of experience in the violent and demoralizing twentieth century. Film was the new art of the century, and the greatest contemporary directors, going past mere representation and narrative, reformulated its language, expanding consciousness and emotion in the bargain. In 1968, in a long piece on Godard in Partisan Review, Sontag wrote that the director’s “approach to established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear cut story line is comparable to Schoenberg’s repudiation of the tonal language prevailing in music around 1910.” Film, then, was the last great wave of modernism. Or at least a certain kind of film, in which form became experimental and philosophically resonant: the movies of Resnais and not Bunuel, Bresson but not Dreyer, Godard but not Truffaut, Bergman’s “Persona” but not Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.” In such works, film amounted to nothing less than the making of new forms and the making of souls.

Sontag championed specific types of films because they illuminated both the artistic potential of the cinema and the nature of human experience. Her film criticism proceeded by a similar process of illumination. Her 1966 essay on the science fiction films of the 1950s, “The Imagination of Disaster,” is like much of her work. There she was, as usual, using aphorisms to enumerate all the qualities of a specific type of film. “Science-fiction films are not about science,” she argued. “They are about disaster.” Or: “the science fiction film is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction.” Or: “science fiction films are one of the purest forms of spectacle.” These assertions are just sign-posts to a specific destination: not science fiction films but what these films reveal about modern experience, particularly about the nearly unbearable anxiety resulting from the dehumanizing traumas of the twentieth century, the memory of mass destruction caused by two world wars, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation , and the “threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically — collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning.” The real meaning of these films is this:

the imagery of disaster in science fiction is above all the emblem of an inadequate response. I don’t mean to bear down on the films for this. They themselves are only a sampling, stripped of sophistication, of the inadequacy of most people’s responses to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness. The interest of the films, aside from their considerable amount of cinematic charm, consists in this intersection between a naive and largely debased commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation.

This brilliant interpretation comes towards the end of the essay, like a bang. Science fiction films reveal human limitations in coping with the extremes of experience; they also reveal a desire to “neutralize” or “beautify” terror and anxiety about the world, even if this is not necessarily beneficial (”they inculcate a strange apathy”, she wrote, “concerning the process of radiation, contamination, and destruction that I for one find haunting and depressing”). Sontag didn’t merely illuminate how science fiction films are constructed; she revealed why they exist and why we need them.

The force of these kinds of interpretations makes Sontag’s criticism compelling, perhaps even necessary in its own right. Sontag’s emphasis, in much of her writing on film, on the formal achievements of experimental filmmakers helped expand the canon to include different directors and films while also placing film on the level of the other arts. But her arguing, bravely, for the transformative, redemptive, or illuminating power of film refashioned criticism itself into something that could enhance the direct experience of the cinema while, in the most revolutionary manner, it could also permanently, and wonderfully, alter our sensibilities.

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Sources:
David Denby, “The Moviegoer: Susan Sontag’s Life in Film,” The New Yorker (Sept. 12, 2005).
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).
Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).

Famed Russian animator Yuri Norstein came to USC a couple weeks ago for a pristine screening of his animated shorts. More than anything, it was a privilege to finally see his works on film, bright and large and detailed — beautiful as they are, watching them on YouTube was like eating a five-star meal with a head cold.

Norstein is something of a DIY genius, a man who sees all of creation as ripe for shaping as clay. His characters, mostly cutout puppets, are delicate figures of texture and form, inscrutably built, existing in some fascinating limbo between two and three dimensions. Sometimes his world seems as thin as paper, and then a character makes a sudden turn, revealing depths previously unimagined. He is first among equals in a long line of Russian geniuses of animation: from the mad imagination of stop-motion pioneer and insectologist Starewicz to the nigh-impossible moving paintings of Alexander Petrov, Russia has always been blessed with masters of the form.

During the between-shorts Q&A, hastily translated for the packed audience, he talked a great deal about motion, timing and especially silence. He cited kabuki, pantomime and music as key influences on his sense of rhythm, and he claimed not to plan his timing in advance — no marking of extreme poses or key images — as if somewhere in his brain 24 frames a second is as intuitive as jazz improvisation. And maybe it is. It would certainly explain his facility for the form, the striking clarity of his comic timing and character moments.

His appeal is impressively international. Despite the brevity of his filmography — “The Fox and the Hare,” “The Tale of Tales,” “The Hedgehog in the Fog,” and “The Heron and the Crane,” and his currently in-production adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat, his first feature film, which has been in production for over 20 years and is barely a third complete — he enjoys something approaching critical veneration. When the Laputa International Animation Festival met to determine the 150 best animated films of all time — admittedly a ludicrous task — they gave Norstein both first and second place: second to his Soviet-era elegy for Russian culture, Tale of Tales and first to his delicate, almost numinous Hedgehog in the Fog. This is actually something of an unusual result: other international juries — such as the Olympic Arts Festival and Zagreb, while equally inclined to give Norstein top honors, usually give precedence to his longest and latest, Tale of Tales. And while Tale of Tales is a remarkable film, an ambitious, wordless, 30-minute lament for Russian culture in the face of Soviet modernity, I agree with the Laputa verdict. The Hedgehog in the Fog is as perfect as ten minutes of film can be, an effortlessly profound portrait of awe and wonder, a fairy tale without fairies that manages to be nonetheless numinous.

As the titles of his first three shorts suggest, anthropomorphic animals are Norstein’s stock in trade, and like most folkloric creatures, they are generally chatty, morally illustrative and prone to human foibles. The Hedgehog in the Fog begins much in this vein: A hedgehog goes to visit his friend Bear, with whom he passes time by counting stars. But on the way he gets lost in a fog-shrouded wood, a vast stretch of pure, untamed nature, from which the film derives much of its power. Here each creature, each hazy unknown region is capable of great beauty and great terror in equal proportions, unbowed by the dictates of narrative or moral order.

The hedgehog and the bear have modest goals: they bond over counting the stars, dividing them up into manageable portions and thus making some small contribution to the organization of the incomprehensible. This anthropomorphic concern for order and understanding mark the hedgehog and his bear off from the rest of the forest, which is in most respects far less human.

The hedgehog’s descent into the fog begins, in fact, as a matter of his curiosity: he is taken aback by the sight of a white horse whose body rises in splendor above the mists. The horse takes no notice of the hedgehog, wastes not her will on the affairs of the lesser creatures. But the hedgehog wonders: if the horse lies down to sleep, does she choke on the fog? The hedgehog goes deeper to investigate and is soon lost, never again to find the horse. Nonetheless she looms throughout the film, wandering onto the screen after the hedgehog leaves, haunting the hedgehog’s memory, a beauty, a mystery.

There is a moment in the middle of the film that summarizes beautifully the lost hedgehog’s position, as he takes a stalk upon which rests a firefly and uses it as a candle in the darkness: the music swells and for a brief moment the hedgehog appears as a pilgrim in a vigil, and it is breathtakingly lovely. For a moment it seems as if the hedgehog’s ingenuity will find him a way home. Then another firefly enters the screen and leads away the hedgehog’s own, and the fireflies dance, the music repeats, equally lovely but now more distant, and then they are gone, nothing achieved, nothing found. The forest is a world that cannot be persuaded to care one way or another about the hedgehog or his journey — though it may harm him or hurt him as it pleases, for its own inscrutable reasons. Other creatures of the forest pay a great deal of attention to the hedgehog, for reasons never quite clear to him. There’s an owl would gladly devour him, but there’s a dog from which the hedgehog cowers that wants only to return the hedgehog’s jam. Near the end of the film, the hedgehog falls into a river and resigns himself to drowning, and a creature — a Someone, as the subtitles tell us — rises from the water and carries the hedgehog on his back. The Someone requires nothing in return and tells the hedgehog nothing of his motives. Neither the hedgehog nor we, the viewers, are privileged to know what kind of creature the Someone is — A fish, as we have seen previously swimming through the river? A turtle? A minor river god? This is nature as we know it. The hedgehog, at this point in his journey, is content to let it be.

The hedgehog’s sojourn through the forest is an encounter with mystery — on the film’s own terms, a genuinely irreducible one. Though the hedgehog explores only the natural world, Norstein is able to imbue it with an almost numinous force, to put at the center of his tale something that will not be constrained by patterns of knowing. Certainly it leaves the hedgehog changed. The hedgehog and the bear are endearing but not especially deep creatures, gathering together as they do to count off the stars and have conversations that they’ve already rehearsed beforehand, everything in its proper place and order. But as the short ends, the hedgehog’s rehearsed conversation falls by the wayside and, still awestruck, he thinks about the horse — how is she, there in the fog? The image flashes across the screen again, and it is beautiful, she is beautiful, and it is hard to shake the feeling she is something more even than that.

“It is very difficult to get rid of that hard physic in film,” Norstein said towards the end of the screening. “The image is just an outer layer under which something else is hidden.”