Category Archives: Film

Saturday Matinee: Peking Opera Blues

Posted on by
Reply

Running Out of Karma: Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues

By Sean Gilman

Source: The End of Cinema

I first saw this eight months ago, on my first night home after the birth of my second kid (I had rented it from Scarecrow Video and needed to watch it before returning it the next day). Needless to say, exhausted and occasionally interrupted, I remembered very little of the experience, other than that I liked the film quite a bit. Happily, a more clear-headed rewatch confirms that initial vague impression: this is a great movie, perhaps the best melding of director Tsui Hark’s twin impulses toward subversion and entertainment I’ve seen yet.

The setup follows two plotlines that will come together and intertwine with a third, each focused on a female protagonist. Brigitte Lin plays the daughter of a local warlord. She dresses like a man (having spent time studying in the West, and also because she’s Brigitte Lin) and is secretly a revolutionary. She and fellow revolutionary Mark Cheng (memorable as Louis Koo’s able assistant in Johnnie To’s Election 2) have to steal some MacGuffins from the general’s safe. Cherie Chung (from The Enigmatic Case) plays a musician who stole a box of jewelry from a soldier (Tung Man, played by Cheung Kwok Keung) in the chaos after the previous general was run out of town. Through a series of complications, the box ends up at a local theatre troupe, where Sally Yeh, daughter of the director (played by film director, actor, clock Wu Ma), wants very much to go on-stage but can’t because women aren’t allowed to perform. Lin and Cheng also find themselves at the troupe, as it’s the favored entertainment for the most powerful people in town, including the local police commander/gangster Liu, who becomes infatuated with the star actor, Fa.

That covers the first 20 minutes or so of the film, what follows is an elegantly structured twisting and deepening of the characters and their relations as the film progresses through a variety of suspense and comic set pieces. Ching Siu-tung choreographs some exceptional action scenes, usually featuring Mark Cheng jumping into or shooting a bunch of bad guys (the sequences at the theatre make ingenious use of the space’s multi-leveled design, with Cheng diving under and jumping over tables and benches, then on the main stage and up to the stage above it before swinging across the rafters and finally onto the rooftops), but there are also cunningly designed short sequences like the one David Bordwell describes early in Planet Hong Kong, where Mark and Cheung and Cherie hide in Sally’s bed from her father. The two father-daughter relationships are especially poignant, with Lin’s eyes exploring every aspect of her self-hatred for destroying the father she loves while opposing everything he stands for politically. It’s most remarkable to see her usually implacable image break down in anguish near the end of the film and even in happiness in a brief middle section where she gets drunk with the other girls. As well Wu Ma brings a note of knowing sadness to the theatre director father, a man who we took as a stock type gains nuance when we realize exactly why he so strictly keeps his daughter away from the stage: because if she catches the eye of the powerful, she’ll be forced to prostitute herself for the sake of the company (as Liu attempts with Fa). Complex as well are the film’s romantic relationships. Not so much the main one between Mark and Brigitte (if that even is a romance given Lin’s ambiguous orientation), but the all but unspoken one between Cheung (whose soldier I don’t think is even named in the screenplay) and Cherie, which exists almost entirely in the subtle looks he gives her of longing and disappointment at her more venal moments. That soldier, in fact, is one of the more fascinating characters in the film: a hapless guy, bullied by his fellows, who joins the revolutionaries by chance, falls in love with a girl and ends up saving the life of the heroine in a spectacular last minute rescue. There are few martial arts films I know of that have so many richly developed characters and relationships. The only one that even comes to mind in Tsui’s own epic Once Upon a Time in China.

The Peking Opera setting provides Tsui a world full of potential meaning, and he plays it up beautifully. The gender reversals required of the all-male stage echo the real-life reversals of Lin’s character, as she not only dresses like a man but takes on the traditional hero role (note that it’s the women who rescue the men time and again). When the other two women make it on stage, they become women impersonating men impersonating women, just as they more or less unwillingly take on the roles of revolutionaries. Eventually, the politics that undergirds the plot comes to be seen as a form of performance, with one general shuffling on stage as the other exits, the rebels scheme amounting to a lifting of a curtain (exposing certain warlords as conspiring with foreigners) all while the real power lurks behind the scenes, in the form of the black clad local police force. That the local commander is both bluntly evil and homosexual (as well as the ultra-effeminate depictions of the male actors) might be a cause for concern were it not for the sincere warmth with which Tsui depicts the homoerotic relations between the three women (Sally in particular seems infatuated with Brigitte). Instead, what we see is sexuality, with politics, as another kind of performance that serves to either mask our baser urges (the violence of the commander, the greed of Cherie) and/or complicate our nobler ones (the father-daughter relations, the multiple instances of self-sacrifice throughout the film, as each hero in turn faces death to save the others).

The result is a film not too far in spirit from the anarchic nihilism of Tsui’s earliest films, the burn-it-all youth drama Dangerous Encounters – First Kind or the cannibal comedy We’re Going to Eat You. But instead of merely exposing the world, politics, and human relations as a sham, Tsui instead finds a humane warmth at our core, while simultaneously celebrating the artistry of that disguising performance itself: Mark’s ultra-cool secret agent and Lin’s resolute stoicism, as well as the athleticism of the opera performers. The film opens with a series of close up shots of Peking Opera costumes and props and actors, scored to a traditional sounding song with a modern synthesizer beat. And it ends with a close-up from that same series of a performer in full make-up, laughing maniacally at us, or maybe with us.

Saturday Matinee: Donnie Darko

Posted on by
Reply

By Caleb Quass

Source: Medium

Enigma as a thematic device in itself is something I’ve applied to the films of David Lynch and his surrealist ilk, but until my third viewing of Donnie Darko, it’s not something I had considered for Richard Kelly’s debut film. Viewing once again the theatrical cut of the film, I started wondering whether or not the significantly-extended director’s cut could actually offer anything significant in its additional footage, or if it would merely obfuscate such an atmospherically uneasy movie through its clarity.

Like the characters’ immature dialogue and the mostly non-nostalgic depiction of a recently bygone era, the mysterious and almost unknowable nature (at least from casual viewings) of Donnie Darko’s happenings come across as a manifestation of the turbulence and teenage angst that define the titular character (Jake Gyllenhaal). That the film features such subtly brilliant performances and an alluringly spooky atmosphere are just the icing on the cake but just as important in rendering this a truly brilliant film.

Plot summaries have always been weirdly difficult for me, and that’s especially the case with the disorienting stream of events that Donnie Darko offers. The psychologically-unstable social outcast is awakened by a giant bunny rabbit and lead from his bedroom, where shortly after a jet engine mysteriously crashes through the roof in what would have almost certainly been his demise. This “imaginary friend” Frank continually appears and speaks to Donnie, compelling him to commit destructive acts with far-reaching consequences.

All the while, he regularly sees his therapist, forms a relationship with a new student (Jena Malone), experiences “daylight” hallucinations related to time travel, researches time travel via a book written by the town’s unspeaking hermit “Grandma Death” (Patience Cleveland), and generally copes with the frustrations of being a precocious, cynical teenager in a conformist society — all as Frank forebodingly counts down the “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds” until the world ends.

There’s a lot going on, but even as Donnie Darko climaxes without the sort of resolution that audiences may expect, it’s never unwatchable or less than compelling. From the opening minutes of the film where Donnie rides his bike around a darkly-photographed suburbia to the post-punk stylings of Echo and the Bunnymen, a mood is established and never broken. It’s typical Midwest American iconography through the lens of a disillusioned adolescent, and though the slow-motion, pop music-infused high school sequences, as well as the dialogue of aimless friendships and budding romances, are reminiscent of coming-of-age dramadies, Donnie Darko never embraces these things as genuine or even necessarily normal. Scenes have a tendency to bleed into one another with the slightly-hurried pace of the “paranoid schizophrenia” which Donnie’s therapist (Katherine Ross) offers as an explanation for the hallucinations, and the already somewhat downbeat pop music is complimented by a jittery, melancholy score by Michael Andrews.

Perhaps most peculiar of all, though, is the look of the film in general. The interiors of Donnie Darko are just a little too dark, and its daylight scenes just don’t feel sunny, as though constantly threatened by an impending storm. Something is extra dismal and extra drab about every classroom, street, and upper-middle-class household, and though this is an extraordinarily subjective designation, it just looks depressed. Donnie never forms an especially healthy relationship with anyone in the film, and his extrasensory premonitions are apt counterparts to his frustrations with society, labeling as an outsider, and all the implicit complexities of puberty.

Though admirable for its thematic strengths, Donnie Darko ultimately makes its impact through its sneaky emotional core, which continually grows in the background until exploding in the film’s fatalistic conclusion. Here again the movie embraces a pubescent concept, the notion that one’s own life is a direct burden on others, but with a sobering shift in perspective. After his mind-bending odyssey results in the literal death and figurative destruction of multiple people, Donnie’s ultimate fate is to sacrifice himself to undo his supposed harm upon the world, harm which, paradoxically, only occurred through his quest to stop it. On the level of pure logic, this might not make sense, but on a dramatic level, it’s pure poetic tragedy. The film’s “Mad World” montage could have been a miserable failure in its sudden spike in melodrama, but instead it is the culmination of the sorrow and emotional terror that was just beneath the surface all along.

The entirety of human emotion cannot, as the delusional teacher played by Beth Grant suggests, be divided into “fear and love” or any other two extremes. Donnie understood that, but what neither he nor anyone else understands is exactly how it does function. Donnie Darko is a masterpiece not because its convoluted story offers any answers, but because unlike the majority of shallow coming-of-age narratives, it knows that it can’t.

Saturday Matinee: Dark Star

Posted on by
Reply

By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

“Dark Star” is one of the damnedest science fiction movies I’ve ever seen, a berserk combination of space opera, intelligent bombs, and beach balls from other worlds. It has a checkered history. It began as a student project by John Carpenter (later to direct “Halloween“) and Dan O’Bannon (later to write “Alien“), and grew over a period of time and expanding budgets into a full-length film.

It was finished some four years ago, before “Star Wars,” and might have had a big success as a cult film if its original distributor hadn’t been so chicken-hearted that he dumped it in a string of Southern California drive-ins and then pulled it out of commercial release. As it is, “Dark Star” has found audiences on the campus and revival circuits, has been a hit here at Facets Multimedia, and, at last, is having its first commercial run at the Three Penny Cinema.

It was finished some four years ago, before “Star Wars,” and might have had a big success as a cult film if its original distributor hadn’t been so chicken-hearted that he dumped it in a string of Southern California drive-ins and then pulled it out of commercial release. As it is, “Dark Star” has found audiences on the campus and revival circuits, has been a hit here at Facets Multimedia, and, at last, is having its first commercial run at the Three Penny Cinema.

The movie’s best sequence centers around the care and feeding of the pet alien they’ve taken on board (a sequence that O’Bannon may have drawn on for the original screenplay of “Alien”). The “Dark Star’s” onboard alien looks like a plastic beach ball with claws, and has a nasty way of sneaking out of sight; a crew member chases it into an elevator shaft and gets himself into a very tight spot. (The elevator sequence looks suspiciously as if it were filmed on the floor of a horizontal hallway photographed to look like a vertical shaft.)

Otherwise, life just sorta drifts past, until a chain of accidents leads to a situation where a bomb does not detach from the ship as planned, and will explode in 24 minutes, blowing the “Dark Star” to smithereens. The bomb cannot be disarmed because, intelligent little devil that it is, it’s convinced that it has a mission to self-destruct.

The movie’s best sequence centers around the care and feeding of the pet alien they’ve taken on board (a sequence that O’Bannon may have drawn on for the original screenplay of “Alien”). The “Dark Star’s” onboard alien looks like a plastic beach ball with claws, and has a nasty way of sneaking out of sight; a crew member chases it into an elevator shaft and gets himself into a very tight spot. (The elevator sequence looks suspiciously as if it were filmed on the floor of a horizontal hallway photographed to look like a vertical shaft.)

Otherwise, life just sorta drifts past, until a chain of accidents leads to a situation where a bomb does not detach from the ship as planned, and will explode in 24 minutes, blowing the “Dark Star” to smithereens. The bomb cannot be disarmed because, intelligent little devil that it is, it’s convinced that it has a mission to self-destruct.

And so, in an incredible and hilarious scene, a crew member floats out into space, confronts the stubborn thinking bomb, and uses pure logic in an attempt to reason it out of exploding. The strategy: If the bomb can be convinced it has no evidence that the universe really exists, then how can its instructions be valid?

This is a fun movie, and a bright and intelligent one. It bears few signs of having been made on a low budget, and the special effects are reasonably slick. And it has a mercifully low-key comic approach; many satiric comedies by young filmmakers are frantic and overwrought, but this one is wry, laid back and fond of its situations. And on the same program is “Hardware Wars,” a short subject starring steam irons, pop-up toasters and other kitchen appliances in outer space.

Saturday Matinee: Buck and the Preacher

Posted on by
Reply

Buck and the Preacher review – Poitier and Belafonte are glorious in overlooked western

Sidney Poitier’s first directorial effort makes for a wild ride, packed with memorable turns and smart filmmaking

By Fedor Tot

Source: We Love Cinema

Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, two icons of the Civil Rights movement, sit at the centre of Buck and the Preacher. The two occupy a totemic space in the cultural imagination that has to some extent calcified their images. Part of the brilliance of this much-overlooked western is how it plays against this calcification – Belafonte, as the Preacher of the title, is introduced bathing stark naked, a rambunctious character with the gift of the gab, grimy teeth and scratchy beard. It’s a far cry from Belafonte’s more clean-cut roles, and a glorious against-type performance devoid of ego.

Poitier for his part, ostensibly plays another stoic good man, the type he built his career around. But here, too, there are wrinkles, perhaps unsurprisingly given that this was Poitier’s first directorial effort, taking over the shoot having had the initial director Joseph Sargent fired over creative differences regarding the depiction of race. Poitier’s Buck may be a lawful man, but he’s taciturn and cautious, pushed to lawlessness mostly by the threat of white violence.

The two titular characters meet out west. Buck is a professional wagon master aiding Black folk looking for safe passage away from the post-slavery South, with former masters hiring “labour recruiters” (as they call themselves) to force them back to the cotton field. The Preacher is more chaotic, a lifelong con-man primarily motivated by money. The clash of these two characters against a wider environment of white hostility provides the film with much of its dramatic tension.

As with many actors-turned-directors, Poitier’s direction could be accused of being a little staid at times: this is certainly a handsome western, but parts do lack a bit of flair, such as an opening raid that’s simply dull. And yet on occassion Poitier-as-director hits upon a rich seam of inspiration.

Two scenes late on in the film are a case in point, a brilliant marriage of action and theme. The first is the quietest bank robbery ever committed to film, told almost entirely in whispers, our protagonists pushed fully outside of the law as a means of survival. The second, their final stand, stranded on a rocky, claustrophobic outcrop, surrounded on all sides, having to remain hidden under cover. Poitier is using both aural and geographical textures to comment on Blackness – survival in a racist society requiring both silence and invisibility – expressed purely in filmic terms.

It’s remarkably smart and astute directing in these sections, yet the central charm of this film remains Belafonte. His Preacher is a delicious, smart-talking and charismatic creation, a shifty anti-hero that plays nicely against Poitier’s righteousness. Buck and the Preacher might not have the rawness or nihilism of the predominantly revisionist westerns produced concurrently, such as those by Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) and Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), but it remains a smart and entertaining film.

Saturday Matinee: Diamantino

Posted on by
Reply

By Peter Sobczynski

Source: RogerEbert.com

The new Portuguese/French/Brazilian co-production “Diamantino” could technically be described as a political satire but anyone going into it expecting the hard-edged humor of a “Dr. Strangelove” or “Wag the Dog” will soon realize that it’s not quite like those earlier works—probably around the time that the gigantic fluffy puppy dogs first make an appearance. Instead, it takes a far more whimsical approach that suggests a weird hybrid of “Being There” and “All the World’s a Stooge,” the 1941 Three Stooges short in which Moe, Larry and Curly are taken in by a rich woman who is inexplicably convinced that they are child war refugees, as presented by Michel Gondry at his absolute Gondriest. The results are uneven—how could they not be?—but the sheer weirdness of the whole enterprise has a charm to it and it certainly is never boring. Bewildering, maybe, but never boring.


Let us go back to those fluffy dogs for a minute. They are manifestations in the mind of Diamantino (Carloto Cotta), the star striker for Portugal’s soccer team, that allow him to filter out all distractions and hit the shots that have made him an idol on the level of real-life Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. Alas, one day, the power of the fluffy dogs fails Diamantino and he misses a crucial shot that prevents his team from advancing to the World Cup final and he becomes a pariah in his home country and a laughing stock around the world. This would be hard enough for most people to bear but we soon realize that Diamantino is basically a big kid himself who is innocent in most of the ways of the world—not only do the sheets on his bed have his face and logo emblazoned on them, it is evident that he has never had anyone into his room to share them with him.

In an attempt to do some good and honor his recently deceased father, Diamantino decides to take in a refugee to live at his palatial estate, much to the consternation of his cruel and abusive twin sisters (Anabella and Margarida Moreira), who mistreat him even as they are robbing him blind. The “refugee” turns out to be Aisha (Cleo Tavares), a lesbian Secret Service agent working undercover as a teenage boy from Mozambique to investigate suspicions that Diamantino is involved with a money-laundering scheme. That, not surprisingly, is the work of his sisters and if that were not enough, the two have embroiled their uncomprehending brother into a plot by Portuguese nationalists to leave the EU. Such a scheme includes an elaborate ad campaign focused on Diamantino as the epitome of Portuguese manhood, as well as machinations from a mad scientist determined to harvest the source of his greatness that winds up calling certain aspects of his manhood into question.

So yeah, “Diamantino” is strange as can be and then some, but the problem that it’s not as outrageous as it clearly wants to be in terms of the details. The material involving the shifting nature of the relationship between Diamantino and Aisha, whose true identity as an adult woman he remains blissfully unaware of for much of the narrative, would seem to be tailor-made for the kind of cheerfully transgressive humor that the writing/directing duo of Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt are clearly aiming for but never quite achieve. Likewise, the more overtly political material involving the nationalists duping Diamantino into participating in their anti-EU campaign leans a little more towards the innocuous than the incisive. The stuff involving the mad scientist and the unexpected results of her experiments on Diamantino are absurd enough but enter the proceedings in such an arbitrary manner that it fails to land the impact that it might have had with a more focused screenplay.

And yet, even though “Diamantino” never quite digs beneath its aggressively goofy, candy-colored surfaces to deliver truly penetrating satire, it still manages to hold one’s interest for the most part. As a comedic collision between the not entirely dissimilar worlds of political and popular culture and the mayhem that can ensue when the two intertwine, the film has a likable oddball energy that is further boosted by an outlandish visual style that’s reminiscent of what the legendarily over-the-top 1967 version of “Casino Royale” is like at its best moments. “Diamantino” is also blessed with a number of random bits of strange humor that wind up hitting more than they miss, ranging from the aforementioned bed linen to several hilarious needle drops on the soundtrack. Best of all, it has a performance by Cotta as Diamantino that is perfectly calibrated so that he comes across less as a moron, which is what might have resulted in the hands of lesser actors, than as a genuine innocent—a Candide of the soccer pitch—who we find ourselves laughing with instead of at. Admittedly, a film like this may not be to all tastes, but those with a taste for the silly and the strange should get a kick out of it.

Watch Diamantino on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/diamantino-carloto-cotta/17616054

Saturday Matinee: Nationtime

Posted on by
Reply

Documentarian William Greaves’s Restored Civil Rights Political Documentary asks, “What Time is it?”

By Jim Tudor

Source: ZekeFilm

In 1972, the mayor of Gary, Indiana Richard Hatcher welcomed a tremendous gathering of African American leaders, intellectuals, activists and speakers to hold the twentieth century’s first and only National Black Political Convention.  Luminaries such as Amiri Baraka, Charles Diggs, Walter Fauntroy, Dick Gregory, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Seale, Harry Belafonte, Coretta Scott King, Queen Mother Moore and Jesse Jackson took the stage in a crowded sports gymnasium in the fired-up interest of promoting “an independent national black agenda”.  With over 10,000 in attendance, the gathering seeked to bring together differing factions in the cause of Black advancement in America.  More to the point, their goal for the three-day Convention was “unity without uniformity”.

The National Black Political Convention of 1972 was a turning point in the struggle for self determination and equal rights.”

“ The convention adjourned without reaching consensus, and some deemed it a failure.”

“But the cry of ‘Nationtime’ reverberates as America continues to wrestle with its legacy of slavery.

So goes the entirely of the opening text viewed at the start of this newly salvaged presentation of documentarian William Greaves’s Nationtime.  Tasked with documenting the convention, Greaves and his crew do just that; the final version of this 1972 film a sort of fly-on-the-wall highlights reel of the event. Those who know Greaves primarily for his 1968 meta-experimental Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One now have this chance to view one of the filmmaker’s works which falls more into his bread-and-butter wheelhouse of African American-issues documentary filmmaking.

It is apparent that Greaves had no additional access to back-room goings-on and behind the scenes drama of the convention, which there apparently was no shortage of.  Rather, he and his handful of cameramen are relegated to the same level of observation as anyone in ordinary attendance.  As a result, the height of tension- a mass exodus of the contingency from Michigan- occurs with little contextualization. (Greaves’s friend, actor Sidney Poitier, provides occasional narration where needed).

In October of 2020, Kino Marquee released to virtual theaters a black and white version of the newly rediscovered and 4K-restored Nationtime.  At least, it was a black and white version that critics were given access to, thereby resulting in some incorrect statements that the film was shot monochrome.  We know from this subsequent Blu-ray release that that was not the case.  The black and white version is not included on the Blu-ray; Kino Classics instead opting to showcase IndieCollect’s extensive color restoration.  The valiant result remains quite visibly imperfect, though this is no doubt the very best it can ever look.

Nevertheless, a film that’s mostly podium-bound political and social speeches can only have so much traction as cinema.  Roger Ebert famously said that a film isn’t about what it’s about, but rather how it’s about it.  If that’s the case, a film like Nationtime cannot fare tremendously well.  Yet, there’s no denying the historical importance of the event documented, particularly in today’s tragic post-George Floyd world.  Nationtime (originally called “Nationtime – Gary”, for the town it takes place in) is a major, black-organized event as documented by a black filmmaker.  That alone secures it all the credentials it needs in this day and age to rightly present as important.  

But “important” and “cinematically compelling” are two different things.  Though the speakers at the podium are dynamic in their passion, there’s rudimentary catch-as-catch-can quality to Greaves’s film.  It’s an unfortunate showing of seams that often renders the film challenging to stick with.

An informal count reveals that Greaves had no more than five cameras in play, each shooting color film stock.  According to a notation at the end of the film, Nationtime was restored in both color and black and white.  The latter was apparently an attempt to conceal the irregularities in the footage from one camera to the next.  The amateur-esque variations in film stock, lighting, and perhaps exposure are apparent throughout, and unlikely successfully concealed simply by removing color.  (Per David Greaves’s audio commentary recollection, he was given some bad advice from Kodak to use a red filter on his own camera, likely contributing to why the finished film was deemed something of a lost cause at the time. Thankfully, today’s color correction technologies have undone that specific gaffe).  

The end result is what it is: an ultra-low budget effort financed by Greaves himself.   Greaves’s son David, who worked closely with his father and was also there, recalls that outside financing was never secured, though the filmmaker had no intention to not document the event.  According to one story on the new bonus features, William Greaves continued manning his camera during Jesse Jackson’s dynamic speech even when he had run out of film, so enraptured he was in that moment.  

Indeed, the raw enthusiasm of being there and capturing “the happening” of it all shines through the vast imperfections of the film.  Greaves’s knack for knowing and grabbing quality b-roll when he sees it is absolutely apparent.  Through the rough-hewn assembly of it all, apt cutaways of engaged faces and fist-waving crowd enthusiasm are the flourishes that shine.  

Through it all, in the face of all the racial progress in America that’s yet to be made, Reverend Jesse Jackson’s impassioned call and response of “What time is it?” “Nationtime!” resonates anew for a country still in great need of working things out in terms of equality and corrective justice.

Watch Nationtime on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/nationtime-sidney-poitier/17616062

Saturday Matinee: Once Within a Time

Posted on by
1

By Sheila O’Malley

Source: RogerEbert.com

Beatrice Loayza’s fascinating New York Times article “When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?” examines films that eschew linear storytelling, films more interested in mood and emotional tones than plot points, breaking free from the “tyranny of story.” The article was fresh in my mind when I watched Godfrey Reggio’s whimsical-terrifying doomsday-fable “Once Within a Time.” Clocking in at 51 minutes, the film is all mood, all rhythm, with a kaleidoscope structure and undulating ever-shifting visuals in a constant state of flux. It’s not a “story” so much as a tone-poem collage about technology, knowledge, innocence/experience, and the potential end of the world. Maybe something new will be born from the ashes, although considering the evidence that something may very well be a monster.

It all started in the Garden of Eden, when curious Eve ate the apple, and “Once Within a Time” starts there, too, in the gentle framing device that opens it. An audience sits in a darkened theatre, a red velvet curtain rises, and the “show”—i.e., human life on the spinning planet—begins. Adam and Eve, holding hands, wander underneath a white cotton-ball tree with red hanging apples. Around them, children play and cavort. The same six or seven children are used throughout: we get to know their faces and their expressions. Behind them, a grand visual drama unfolds, made up of stop-motion animation figures, real humans, found footage, and eerie created images: solar systems, a giant hourglass in the desert, black and white newsreel footage of bomb blasts, spindly trees bending backward. The children look on with wonder, humor, interest, and sometimes concern. They are trying to understand. The apple is a portal to another world, another time. The apple is also directly linked to another 20th-century apple, the Mac apple. The garden path Adam and Eve walk down is made up of iPhone cobble stones. The meaning is obvious.

Technology is a blessing and a curse, yes, but more than that, it’s inevitable. It can’t be stopped. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley wrote one of the most prescient books of all time, her imagination stretching forward 200 years, its warning message still and always relevant. The obsessed maniac Frankenstein doesn’t know when to stop with his experiment. He has to see it through, even if it destroys his mind, his life, and the world as we know it. Mary Shelley saw it all. “Once Within a Time” has almost as bleak an outlook.

Reggio’s celebrated “Koyaanisqatsi,” the first of the Qatsi Trilogy, features a similar cascade of images placed in fluid shifting juxtaposition: power plants and rain forests, rush-hour highways and crashing ocean, pollution and clouds, modernity and its ruins. The images are often beautiful, but the overall effect is anxiety-provoking, sometimes even despairing. What have we done to our beautiful world? Music holds it all together. Philip Glass composed the main score, with additional music by Iranian composer Sussan Deyhim (who also plays a “muse” type character, half-woman, half-tree).

Reggio’s vision has three central figures, symbolic and archetypal, but with shifting meanings. An opera maestro declaims his incomprehensible song to the masses, his figure a towering monolith, his eyes wild and fanatical. Behind him looms the walls of a Coliseum, and his figure is threatening, a demi-god dictator, gesturing and bending the masses to his will. There’s a female figure, a living half-human Yggdrasill (Sussan Deyhim), whose song helps create—or at least sustain—the living world. In the final segment, a “mentor” appears (Mike Tyson, of all people!), who encourages the cowed lost children, acting as a sort of Pied Piper.

Once you leave Eden, of course, you can’t get back in. That’s the deal. At the end of the film, a question is asked in multiple languages: “Which age is this: the sunset or the dawn?” In the atom-bomb-haunted “Rebel Without a Cause,” Plato (Sal Mineo) asks Jim (James Dean) if he thinks the end of the world will come at night. Jim says, “No. At dawn.” Either way, it’s the end.

Watch Once Within a Time on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/once-within-a-time-mike-tyson/17458850