Uncomfortable productions are the forte of director Lars von Trier. The allusions to and disquieting effect of his features and their focus is something to be realised in the prime of his works. What that area is can be debated and pulled at, but Melancholia appears to be the poetry in motion Trier fans so often praise the director for. Musical accompaniments to still shots of paintings that slowly peel and ripple. It’s a delightful piece for those that love the artisan qualities of a world falling apart and the destruction that comes from character sleights. The immovable nothing that comes from it touches deeper and deeper as Melancholia, the finest Trier work, rages on.
That much comes from the absolute beauty of its structure, of its characters. Shaped and informed by destruction, moving paintings that take place on strange canvases that display torment and passion, family and love. Melancholia has all the time in the world for its visual chemistry and the representations it can bring. There is no tiring effect brought by Trier, who trusts in his lengthy segments of two worlds, quite literally, colliding. Audiences are placed right at the end and know what is to come, what fate the characters meet and how it all comes to a crashing bit of destruction. In identifying the hopelessness, Trier brings himself to the inevitable edge that comes from discussing finality. It feels a bit like what The Fountain tried and failed to comment on, but with much, much more scope than the Hugh Jackman-led piece.
Within Melancholia is the profound beauty of visual meaning. It is a piece that relies more on the slower motions and relationships told in flutters rather than a full-on narrative that demands and desires strict following of the story. There is a fast and loose layer to Trier’s work, where his direction provides beauty and colour with that fear. Kirsten Dunst delivers a phenomenal catalyst for life. It gives the happiest moments of life and the cursed afterthoughts. Trier mixes the palette well, he provides that to the cast and relies on them so frequently to engage with the emotion, rather than dialogue. It is the choreography, and the appeal of his directing style, that makes Melancholia such an intoxicating watch.
Senseless destruction with poetic twists and turns at their finest, Melancholia is a touching and spiritually charged look at the useless tirades and meaninglessness of it all. With Melancholia exposing itself to the raw elements, it does often focus on its imagery more than its characters. Trier’s style, the unfocused extremes of the close-up shot, the shot-reverse-shot simplicity, it all has its place but where that is can come across as unfounded. His fly-on-the-wall appeal has its moments throughout this piece, with a triple threat of Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt and Stellan Skarsgård making the most of that. There is no harm in stacking the cast so high, it adds texture and richness to an already broad-in-scope feature. Melancholia feels right at home biting off more than it can chew, both narratively and emotionally.
Werner Herzog’s documentary films lie at an extreme distance from the Anglo-American tradition of documentary filmmaking. Part of that distance can be linked to the distinction between two fundamental stances towards the depiction of reality: “Objectivism” and “Interactionism”, which I have discussed in other essays, for example, Avatar (2009), Close-Up (1990), and SiCKO (2007). American documentarians generally align themselves with Objectivism and hold that they are presenting an objective view of reality. An extreme form of this approach is “direct cinema”, which seeks to create the illusion that the filmmaker is an invisible “fly on the wall” and has no impact on the subjects being filmed, thereby supposedly ensuring scientific objectivity. But even in more conventional American documentaries with explicitly polemical content, there is a presumption that objective reality, independent of any observer, is being presented. Continental European documentary filmmakers, on the other hand, have had a tendency to lean towards Interactionism and have made more personal films in which the filmmaker and his or her point of view is a confessed part of the narrative. Herzog is so much on the Interactionist side of the ledger that his documentary films not only include his personal perspective, but seem primarily to be his own personal essays about the world – he, himself, is an implicit focus of the film, and the “reality” depicted is self-consciously Herzog’s own reality. Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis, 1992), which was shot in Kuwait in the immediate aftermath of the First Gulf War (1990-91) is one such example of Herzog’s style.
Although focussed on the harrowing events and ravages that happened in Iraq and Kuwait during that time, Lessons of Darkness has clear-cut affinities with Herzog’s first documentary Fata Morgana (1971), which was shot in Africa. In that earlier film Herzog edited footage that he had (seemingly randomly) shot in the African Sahel and tried to fashion a dark vision about man’s hopeless ineffectiveness, and consequently likely impermanent existence, on the planet – an ephemeral existence like a mirage. Some twenty years later, with Lessons of Darkness, Herzog again collected footage, this time in Kuwait, and then assembled his photographic essay in post-production, and again his vision is one of dark apocalypse and pessimism concerning man’s prospects for a sustainable future. In fact both Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness contain vague commentary that suggests that humankind on Earth is being clinically observed, with amazement and horror, by a visitor from another planet. However, in neither film is there any real narrative or sequence of events that could amount to a story – they are both more or less personal essays of despair. But if we assert that they are both cinematic commentaries, we have also to concede that neither of these two films provides an explicit disquisition or argument, or even has a clearly articulated thesis. What we are really presented with is just a suggestive sequence of images, on which the viewer reflectively fills in many of the blanks and faces a greater-than-usual task of constructing his or her own story or vision. This process of placing much of the narrative burden on the viewer essentially fails with Fata Morgana (which was almost a random collection of lurid images of garish and pathetic human folly), but is more successful with Lessons of Darkness, primarily because the viewer in this case is more likely to bring to the film considerable familiarity with what happened during the “First Gulf War”and use that material for his own imaginative reconstructions.
The greater part of Lessons of Darkness consists of lurid scenes of fires in the Kuwaiti oilfields burning out of control and spewing gargantuan clouds of smoke. These images are interspersed with images of devastation, both at the physical and human level, and with human firefighters seemingly overmatched in their efforts to quell the multiple, raging infernos. The images are apparently meant to be abstractly horrific, and there is almost no spoken dialogue and no explicit reference to the Gulf War, or to specific places, or to any historical context. To set some kind of context, Lessons of Darkness opens with images of wasteland and destruction, and the prologue refers to a planet “in our solar system” which evidently has undergone a catastrophic war. So the viewer sees things simultaneously with respect to two overarching narrative perspectives: the real Gulf War and an abstract metaphorical fable of how bizarre humankind’s self-destructive impulses might be to a detached, external observer. The film is then presented partitioned into thirteen chapters, each identified by apocalyptic, perhaps oracular, intertitles which suggest chapters to some sort of apocryphal Book of Revelations.
“A Capital City”. This section features an opening voiceover narration with images of Kuwait City filmed from a low-flying helicopter, ominously suggesting that this doomed city will soon be utterly destroyed by warfare (it wasn’t, and this footage was filmed after the conflict).
“The War”. Here is shown footage of the aerial bombing of Iraq as seen via night-vision video cameras. Although this section is relatively short and no mention of “Operation of Desert Storm” is made, the context is likely to be familiar to a worldwide audience, since it was widely viewed on CNN.
“After the Battle”. Images of war devastation are presented.
“Torture Chambers”. This thankfully brief section is one of the most memorable, though difficult to bear, sections in the film. First is shown what is apparently the insides of one of the torture chambers run by Saddam Hussein’s government, and it features a mute display of mechanical devices designed to inflict unbearable pain. Then an Arab woman is shown who was been rendered almost permanently speechless by having been forced by the authorities to witness her own sons being tortured to death.
“Satan’s National Park”. Helicopter footage of what seems to be a vast marshland are revealed to be in fact entirely flooded with oil.
“Childhood”. Another Arab mother is shown, this time with a young, disturbed boy who has been rendered speechless by what he has witnessed during the conflict. As with the woman shown earlier, the horror of what happened is not shown, it is only something so unspeakable that one cannot bear to think about it. The viewer’s imagination then fills in the blanks.
“And A Smoke Arose Like The Smoke From A Furnace”. Here, 23 minutes into the film, the raging fires take over the screen. Again, they are filmed from low-flying helicopters.
“A Pilgrimage”. Now the (American) firefighters are shown, sometimes relatively up close and at other times at a distance and dwarfed by the towering flames of the fires that burn endlessly. This section shows the firefighters using explosives to try to put out the fire.
“A Dinosaur’s Feast”. This is more or less a continuation of the previous section showing the firefighters, but now emphasizing some of the huge construction and excavation machines employed in their work. The machinery has monster-like appearances, with arching cranes, serpentine bodies, and huge digging claws.
“Protuberances” – a brief section showing closeups of oil–and-mud swamps bubbling and frothing, and evoking more nightmarish images of Hell.
“The Drying Up of the Wells”. The oil-covered firefighters are shown, often in slow-motion, intensely engaged in the mechanics of their operations. The functional nature of these activities is incomprehensible to the typical viewer, and it all appears perhaps as an abstract Ballet Mécanique from the dark side. The macabre strangeness of it all, and the degree to which these operations seem to be foreign to what we might call normal human intercourse, are worth comparing to Louis Malle’s documentary, Humain, Trop Humain (1974).
“Life Without Fire”. With many of the fires now apparently having been extinguished, the voiceover commentary of the interplanetary visitor expresses wonder as these strange creatures to him (i.e. the firefighters) engage in the baffling act of relighting an extinguished geyser of oil. He comments: “Has life without fire become unbearable for them? . . . . . Others, seized by madness, follow suit. . . . . Now they are content, now there’s something to extinguish again.”
“I am So Weary of Sighing, O Lord, Grant That the Night Cometh”. The final portion returns to the fires, themselves, carrying with it an air of resignation and gloom.
Herzog’s fascination with fire extends to a fascination with its opposite, darkness (hence the title). The demonic forces that lurk inside the hearts of men seem to be beyond civilized understanding or rational control. These issues of cruelty and madness are as elemental as fire, itself, and are not confined to the Middle East [1]. This apparently was Herzog’s project: not to focus on just the particular horror of what happened in one part of the globe, but to fashion a fiction that would portray a more universal damnation. To this end, he opens the film with his own fabricated quotation (“The collapse of the stellar universe will occur, like creation, in grandiose splendor”) which he probably attributes to Blaise Pascal in order to give it the appropriate resonance – Pascal is perhaps not so well-known to English-speaking audiences, but his genius occupies a peculiarly iconic place in the European mind.
The horror that Herzog attempts to convey by his images of man-made Hell is enhanced by its unspeakable nature – it is beyond human articulation. Instead of a deafening roar from the fires drowning out occasional shouts from the firefighters, much of the stoundtrack is filled with funereal, dirge-like orchestral music from Mahler, Prokofieff, Verdi, Wagner, and Arvo Part. The unspeakable nature of this horror is explicitly referenced by the two mothers: one mother is unable to speak comprehensibly, and the child of the other mother has been rendered speechless by rational choice. It is left to our imaginations to fill out these nightmares.
Notes:
For example, consider the use of germ warfare by the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). Here is a quotation from an article on the subject (Judith Miller, “When Germ Warfare Happened”, City Journal, (Spring 2010)):
“The methods were brutal. Army trucks dumped gallons of deadly germs alongside roads and railway lines linking Chinese towns so that infections would spread from town to town; planes dropped porcelain bombs containing infected fleas on dozens of villages, causing devastating outbreaks of bubonic plague. The Japanese laced more than 1,000 wells in the area of Harbin with typhoid bacilli. They also inserted typhus into bottles of lemonade that children loved to drink in the summer, Harris reported. In Nanking, they distributed anthrax-filled chocolate and cake to hungry children. The Japanese discovered that packing fountain pens and walking sticks with deadly germs was a particularly effective way of secretly disseminating them. In 1940, Major General Ishii sent a train carrying 70 kilograms of typhus bacterium, 50 kilograms of cholera germs, and 5 kilograms of plague-infected fleas to the city of Hangzhou, a holiday resort favored by Shanghai’s wealthy. From there, the germs were dumped into ponds and reservoirs and spread by aerial spraying, contaminating all life in fields of wheat and millet during the harvest.”
The Bear is an unusually involving story about animals that will give you a fresh perspective on their world. It is not a documentary nor is it the kind of cute children’s fare usually cranked out by Hollywood. This strange and affecting film is directed by Frenchman Jean-Jacques Annaud (Quest for Fire) based on a 1916 novel by James Oliver Curwood set in British Columbia in 1853.
When a young bear’s mother is killed by a rock slide while she is trying to extract honey from a beehive, he wanders off into the wilderness whimpering. After several misadventures, the cub finds a protector in a ferocious grizzly bear who has been shot in the shoulder. The cub licks his wounds and soon the two are partners. The giant bear introduces the little vulnerable one to a wider world — catching fish, tracking down and killing a caribou, and knocking down trees to demonstrate strength in a courtship ritual with a female bear. The cub must then square off against hunters and a menacing mountain lion.
The scramble for survival in this wilderness world is exhausting. The cub manages a few moments of reverie — seeing the moon’s reflection in a pond and swirling around after eating a mushroom. Watching him mimic the elder bear’s activities, it is difficult to remember that this is a story being directed rather than a glimpse of life in the wild. Philippe Rousselot’s photography is magical, and the musical score by Philippe Sarde adds emotional breadth to the story.
The Bear has all the marks of a classic. Lauded by animal rights groups for its respect for the integrity of all species, it manages to speak out eloquently against the senseless hunting of wildlife without having to depict killing to make its point. Instead, it emphasizes the ties that bind the human and animal worlds together.
We know he lives in movies because we literally find him in one. Leos Carax’s much-debated “Holy Motors” begins with a man (Carax himself) asleep in bed, then waking and approaching a wall of the room that looks like a forest. Knowing just where to look among the trees, he unlocks a door using a key growing from his finger. Well, isn’t that what artists do? Unlock doors with their fingers?
Now this man is inside a cinema, and we meet Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who lives in a house that seems designed by the same architect employed in Jacques Tati’s “Mon Oncle.” He gets into the waiting limo, driven by a taciturn woman, and we see that the back of the limo, seemingly much larger inside than the outside, is a dressing room filled with costumes and props. When he gets out the first time, he has transformed himself into a wretched beggar woman. This will be the first of his many roles, or assignments, or embodiments. He performs in bizarre and mysterious ways, linked only by the desire of a mime or comedian to entertain and amaze us. His “appointments” take him into personas so diverse, it would be futile to try to link them, or find a thread of narrative or symbolism. If there is a message here, Walt Whitman once put it into words: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”
Here is M. Oscar as a madman wandering street markets and eating flowers or whatever else he can snatch up. M. Oscar in the most famous cemetery in Paris, Pere Lachaise, occupied by the dead and famous (Moliere, Chopin, Jim Morrison, Colette, Oscar Wilde). In “Holy Motors,” however, the cemetery’s tombstones carry no names, requesting us, to “visit my web site.”
Here is M. Oscar transforming a fashion model (Eva Mendes) into a Muslim woman concealed within her costume. And that’s not all that happens to her, although she adheres to the model’s code and never betrays emotions or opinions. Her job is to embody a beautiful object for the purposes of others. Their travels through the city lead to the roof of the Samaritaine department store, producing stunning vistas of Paris.Celine (Edith Scob), his reserved chauffeur, seems long accustomed to her role. Once she expresses concern that M. Oscar hasn’t eaten all day. Their day began at dawn and lasts far into the night, one “appointment” after another.This has been a year of leading roles for limousines. M. Oscar’s car upstages the limousine in David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis,” and the journeys of both cars seem to be odysseys through their cities, for purposes not very clear to the audience. “Holy Motors” is the more entertaining and funny of the two, although some parts are not funny at all, and many laughs are of disbelief or incredulity. Both end with their limousines going home for the night, answering a question asked in “Cosmopolis,” although when the limo in “Holy Motors” gets home, its day is far from over.Here is a film that is exasperating, frustrating, anarchic and in a constant state of renewal. It’s not tame. Some audience members are going to grow very restless. My notion is, few will be bored.
After the Crash 
