Motion Studies: The Iron Horse

(John Ford, Mystic)

John Ford took imagery from the vaults of cinematic consciousness created by D.W Griffith and Cecil B DeMille and did those filmmakers one better: he charged this imagery with poetic rhythms that have stylized the western genre from then on.

The image in question comes a little more than halfway through The Iron Horse (1924). A herd of black and white cattle progress through a desert reservoir with two horsemen driving them from behind. Cut to a closer overhead shot of the herd; one cow circles around, strangely suggesting the human reaction to having forgotten something, yet not being certain. After a moment, the cow pivots back around and rejoins the herd. Now we cut to the herd moving on to the shore. Fade out as the horsemen reach the shore.

The motion here has a poetic quality mainly because of what it comes after: a scene of an Indian chief rallying his tribe with the call “My brothers, we will stop the Iron Horse forever!,” followed by a whirligig of horses stampeding across a desert ridge. (If there was ever a film that should be watched with a scratchy print, it is this one; the scratches compliment the constant flurries of dust.) The herd of cattle moving slowly and unassumingly across the water looks both foreboding and forlorn following this threat; will they be stopped forever? Are they pushing ahead for no reason? Man pitted against an obstacle is the ingredient of the story form, and film is the great condenser. Ford condensed the implications of an obstacle in to an image of slow motion across a body of water.

But the most important ingredient of this image is its use of the fade-out. The fade out was a device that was used before Ford more often as a melodramatic way of signifying that a scene was over. Ford may not have been the first to realize the greater possibilities of this device, but the used fade-outs and fade-ins in The Iron Horse, rather than suggesting that the scene had ended, suggest that nothing has ceased, but has rather moved on to a world other than the physical one our eyes see. The landscape the cows trudge through is never ending, the horsemen’s work is never ending, and the threat of violence on a group is a complex matter that cannot be contained in one scene. This is what the fade-out suggests. By using fade outs in such an ambiguous way, the delicacy of the image is preserved. The viewer wants to remember these cows and these men and does not want to fathom the true extent of their progress.

The Iron Horse is about people who just keep on progressing—the ideal kind of film—and it keeps fading in and out on them. This makes it one of the earliest Westerns to achieve a mystical attitude towards progression and the evils of the world. The film’s ongoing landscapes are a backdrop to this mysticism and the animals that work alongside humans while subtly adapting human qualities (the lone cow is not the only one) are oddities within this mysticism. Ford may not have known exactly what he had stumbled upon yet—he was still a young director, new to the epic form—but later directors would maximize on this Western mysticism and we must remove our hats to Ford for this stumble.

Here is a still from a film production in the works on the rainy streets of Paris. The blurry look was not

intended.

The White Ribbon

Germany is a country haunted by the downsides of collectivism and anti-conformity. The White Ribbon, a haunting film which is in most respects the most formal of Michael Haneke's career, is a film that deals with these downsides. Yet it manages to leave any ideas about the collective and conformity as afterthoughts in the viewer's mind, and this is one of it's greatest overall strength. This is because it works its way, with a remarkably even hand, in to our minds both as a rural memory and a rather spooky whodunit.

The setting is a German village on the eve of the First World War. The quiet farming village recalls the flashbacks in Haneke’s earlier Cache, in which the protagonist, Georg, worked on a farm as a child. The resemblance to that film’s handling of memory is eerily appropriate, considering that The White Ribbon is narrated by an elderly version of the village schoolteacher, played by Christian Friedel, as he looks back on the mysterious events he was witness to. Those events begin with the town doctor being tripped by a wire tied between two trees as he rides his horse home. As a result, he breaks his arm, and is played as a cold and abusive man for the remainder of the film by Rainer Bock. Gradually, the events escalate from hurtfully obnoxious to sadistic; months after the farmer breaks his arm, the Baroness’s cabbage patch is ruined, then a barn is set on fire, then a boy goes missing; later there will be mutilations and deaths. All the while, the schoolteacher is trying to court a shy young girl named Eva (Leonie Benesch). While the story could have easily become a love story that took place amidst horrifying events, it remains something far more sinister here: the relationship between the schoolteacher and Eva is fraught with uneasiness from the start and one always gets the sense that it is somehow beside the point whether or not the character gets the girl. Then the film tips us off: Austria declares war on Yugoslavia in 1914, and it becomes inevitable that Germany will join the war effort. All the murders, traps and wreckage have been precipitating a widespread national chaos; human bondage, to say nothing of romance, does not stand a chance.

If this is an easy way to summarize the trajectory of the story, there is no easy way to summarize the social dynamics, the visual rhythms and the odd narrative choices in this film. The village is inherently un-ordinary, as it appears to be comprised of farmers, businessmen, and a few ultra-wealthy “leaders” who preside over everybody else. Everybody clings to religion and each person has a strict role set for themselves; many of the adult characters, like the schoolteacher, are never given proper names and are merely recognized by their profession. This is a village that is bound to breed abuses of power and rebellions against conformity. That Haneke lets us see exactly who commits two of the crimes—one being a response to an additional crime that goes unrecognized-- is not a narrative inconsistency, but rather a method of hinting that the social hierarchies present in the village are the root cause of all the madness, and that all the citizens are essentially guilty. But it is to Haneke’s credit that the film never feels like a sociology lesson, as some of his earlier films do; as a storyteller, dare we say it, he has reached his peak of maturity.

The most impossible aspect of The White Ribbon to describe is the black-and-white imagery. It is never possible, or appropriate, to explain why black-and-white photography works; it just looks right. Cinematographer Christian Berger has used it to make some surprising choices himself, and has pulled them off. For one, the village never looks evil or corrupted; it is a flat-lying village, blanketed with wheat stalks blowing gently in the breeze. It is usually sunny outside, and when it is night or we are indoors, the shadows are never too dark (with several striking exceptions). Berger’s imagery is a far cry from German Expressionism or Mountain Film-grandiosity; it more closely resembles G.W Bitzer’s lyrical pastoral imagery from several of D.W Griffith’s films. (He is also notable for executing one of the longest fade-outs I have ever seen.)

The most mysterious part of the film is the title itself, which refers to a Christian practice in which a band is tied around a child’s arm after they have ‘sinned’ in order to purify them again. This is also the most ironic aspect of The White Ribbon, because it reflects the notion that Haneke, Berger, and the rest of the crew probably thought they were achieving something closer to pure cinema, after the modernity and experimentation of Haneke’s previous films. But The White Ribbon is still a long way from pure cinema: there are unnecessary dialogue diversions, and there is never a clear sense of the layout of the village, and where people dwell in relation to one another. Perhaps this latter choice was intentional, but it poses too much threat to the overall structure. But the film nonetheless proves that dark films to not have to look dark and a director with a clever spirit can still tone down that clever spirit and mold it in to austerity and quiet agitation. The agitation here is never overt or typically cinematic; it is one that we can feel creeping up on us from those lovely, grassy fields…

Youth in Revolt

Youth in Revolt is one of a number of films-- and television shows—that apparently is meant to evoke some sort of darkly comic and satirical world and ends up invoking a nightmarish, demented reality filled with people I wouldn’t go near even if I was wearing protective, anti-cynicism gear. The film could have been a Sundance winner, or a blockbuster, or any number of Hollywood comedies. It has it’s roots not so much in the foreign films it playfully deals with as in American Beauty and Fight Club: it is about a place (reality), which is funny and mock-able to a point, but ends up being vapid, uncaring and defeatist, because that’s what people are like anyway.

The film approaches us as a clever and outrageous take on the familiar premise of the dork who can’t seem to lose his virginity. Michael Cera plays that dork, named Nick Twisp here, a bored sixteen-year old suburbanite who lives with his flakey mother and her overweight boyfriend (Zach Galfinakis). Nick mainly prefers classic French films like Breathless to mainstream fare, and gets ridiculed for it. His voice-over narration betrays a sense of having cooled to the idea of humanity so long ago, it’s hard for him to even laugh at it; and in this sense the film is very honest in the way it fits voiceover with theme and content. Nick, his mother, and her boyfriend go to a lakeside retreat for the weekend where he meets a stunningly beautiful girl named Sheeny (Portia Doubleday), interested in all the same things he is and fed up with her Christian parents. Nick finds his optimism about his sexual inexperience rising. After he returns to his suburb, Nick sets about finding a way to move back to the lakeside retreat to be near Sheeny, even if there is the complication of her boyfriend, Trent. To get back out there, he will invent a suave French persona named Francois, who assists him in wrecking his mother’s ex-boyfriend’s car, so that his mother will kick him out of the house to go live with his father.

The rebellion implied in the title kicks in to high gear at this point, and it is a cinematic rebellion that bears some resemblance to—what else—certain Godard films in which the hero is on the run, the car is a central object, and the girl is always gotten; but not without a lot of postmodern cross-referencing to tag along. But while the parallels to Godard’s films are no doubt intentional, the tone of Youth in Revolt is not so much intellectually ballistic as it is rude, ironic and, well, predictable. Here we have a girl who acts so artificially hip and so teasing that we are ready to scold Nick for falling for her, beautiful as she is. Yet in Nick himself, we have a kid whose idea of revolt is to sedate his love with sleeping pills until she is expelled from her French-language boarding school. In his mother we have a woman unbearably trashy and self-centered and in Sheeny’s parents we have two obnoxious, shallow Christians. Grownups are a drag and kids are just unstable. The film depicts a world going to hell in a hand-basket, not an energized uprising.

Of course, you are meant to laugh at this. The film does manage to recognize the nightmarish of its humor to an extent. When Nick drives his car off a cliff only to crash it in to the shallow water below rather than sink it as he intended, the police on the other side see a confused kid wearing only boxers run up to the edge to see what has gone wrong, and it is an unexpected slapstick foible that manages to do the foibles that came before one better. And every scene with Fred Willard is a delight; as Nick’s hippy- activist neighbor who manages to get him out of one rough spot only to end up shirtless and zonked out on mushrooms later, Willard managed to squeeze a spirit in to the film that is not a pathetic caricature or a shallow pincushion; he is an earnest guy who is a total screw-up, in the great comic spirit that runs through Keaton and Sellers. Yet the other characters are not meant to amount to much, and as a result, the laughs may come up short or be stifled. This is a film that handles people callously, with cold hands. Perhaps this is best exemplified in the way that certain characters are picked up and then dropped, without any explanation or any sense that we should care; an Indian student whom Nick befriends and a grouchy girl who briefly helps him in his schemes are dropped off the storyline from a far greater height than Nick’s car was from the cliff. It’s also a great height to fall for American Comedies.