The whores in hors d'oeuvres: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

Bring on the multitudes with a multitude of fishes:
feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist!
Stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas.
Crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them.
Let them die, and by
their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands,
that he might form an ashtray...
or an ark.

  -- Maxwell J. Brock (A Bucket of Blood)

INTRO:
Italian art house cinema of the late 60s, she could be-a both dangerous and-a dull. European critics and American intellectual art critics alone could--their Herculean pens dripping with post-structuralist antivenin--confront its many hydra heads without passing out from the wounds of monotonous languor. Mainstream American audiences scattered to the four winds like frightened goatherds at the first sign of subtitles... unless they heard there was nudity. Just as Ingmar Bergman broke into America on the body of of Harriet Andersson in SUMMER WITH MONIKA; Italian neorealist sentimentalism of the late 50s/early-60s needed Sophia Loren; The French New Wave was launched on the backside of Brigitte Bardot and needed the loveliness of Jeanne Moreau keep it afloat towards American screens. But it worked! 'Subtitles' became a kind of in-the-know shorthand connotative code, like French postcards. And slowly, bathing scene by bathing scene, American 'adult' cinemas--those rundown houses in the disreputable parts of town in showing nudie cuties (under the arbiter of 'documentary importance') while self-appointed champions of morality snarled from the overgrowth--became art houses, birthed into co-ed respectability in the fertile wombs of Ekberg, Persson, Loren, Andersson, and Bardot.

But then--in 1966--came Antonioni's BLOW-UP. There was no putting European cinema back together again after that. As EASY RIDER would soon do to Hollywood, BLOW-UP handed European cinema's head to it on a Matisse bowler-bedecked Salome special platter. All the dime store Marxists now masqueraded as disaffected wunderkind beats to win the tourist distributor's fickle coin. All the best corpses, models, and stoop-shouldered socialist toothed birds a casting call could couch were then shipped wholesale to Rome and thrown into all sorts of art gallery-set situations. Producers started grinding up their red telephones into pigment to redden the canvas of the artist. Warhol, Lichtenstein, LSD, Vietnam, radicalism, labor strikes, women's lib --all were hanging around and kicking the bomb-blasted corpses of neorealist prostitute madonnas and pinball-and-cigarette pimps to capture the pen of the now fully-awakened critics.

But... paralyzed with the realization any step taken outside BLOW-UP's immediate blast radius would harden them into mock-ups of their plastic avenue parents--the dilated Now generation and the lecherous old Commie intellectuals in disguise (or, for the first time, out of one), now hired by bonanza-minded distributors to make wild art films that reached the signifier-trashing post-modern epiphanies of Antonioni (with a little sex in it)-- stood frozen on the spot, paralyzed through fear of paralysis. Trapped inside the mess of neorealism-splattered tiles and smoldering post-war blackened labor pamphlets, they waited, wondering, trying to decide how they were going to rewrite the history they'd just collectively admitted had been erased.

Finally, they began to rummage through the blast-darkened detritus, for old world survivors, images from the Weimar era, from gay 20s jazz Paris, and ancient, ancient Rome. What they found was a wounded Fellini, hiding under the ruins of a mawkish life-is-a-carnival-metaphor merry-go-round. They strung him up by his heels to finish the job, But when it came to slitting his throat, they were suddenly afraid of committing too far in that dark direction, of stumbling on their dad's mothballed attic-stashed Fascist Party parade sash in search of a sacrificial dagger. Finally, Dario Argento grabbed s jagged piece of glass and made the cut, for real, right across the screen. And from that gaudy rococo throat gushed a dishwasher ocean of red, followed by the rush of razor wire phoenix feathers. BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1968) soared aloft, like an own from the forehead of Athena.. and immediately everyone who had been so reticent to do more than pretend to strangle their mistress or their husbands for a party game fake-out (ala Death Laid an Egg) changed their minds and went scrambling through the ruins for their own giallo shard.

Suddenly breasts and fab clothes and kinky psycho art shows weren't enough. While Ennio mocked you from the playground with deft slide whistle and tra-la-las, you had to kill 'em, fabulously, ironically, brutally--but not tastelessly. The Money urged you on and you had to be an idiot if you let your feeling of virginal castration angst hang you up instead of the other way around. The Money commands a sacrifice, and then another, as thirsty as an Aztec god on a hot summer day.

Anyway it wasn't blood that flowed so free, but red -- pigment for the artist. BIRD was a horror film the way 1966's BLOW-UP was a conspiracy thriller, or PERFORMANCE a British mobster film, or PSYCHO film noir. The father along the imitations trail, the less the post-modern art meta/artist trimmings framed the violence. That was the compromise: the finger points to the moon; Argento cuts off the finger as a tribute to Dali and Bunuel's LA CHIEN ANDALOU; the next generation just film bloody stumps pulsing red; the moon long forgotten. Have you forgotten Balzac too?

When you film a girl in her underwear looking at tawdry X-rated photo books, thou has committed post-modernism AND made the distributor happy,

And that's where 
A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968) comes in, for it is one of the weirder, more vaguely satirical contemporaries of Argento's definitive Italian post-BLOW-UP giallo; it's the brother, not the son, the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when they can get away to visit him at the 'funny' farm. The kids would never know from his address how cool he is, I mean what is up with that title? A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY sounds like a Squaresville Merchant Ivory bucolic reverie about "love, laughter, and a little bit of heart," the kind of film only a half-asleep grandmother with her old lady book club would love. It doesn't even have a poster, for gods' sake (PS - this has been solved, and now there's a nice Blu-ray - 5/18). Is it deliberately trying to be lost to time?  That's why I made one (above) poster, changing the name to u3prufj]gi]42go[ggr=gr.

Whatever it's called, the line between artistic genius and psychotic mania has seldom before been so succinctly erased, and that deserves at the very least a more evocative title!

Not only is psychotic mania succinctly erased but there's also the by-far best performance of a young Franco Nero (dubbing his own voice in the English track), as an unhinged modern art painter named Leonardo. The way he tears around the crumbling estate, happy as a lark, reminds me of that old children's song by Napoleon XIV they used to play us in elementary school. Apparently he was shacking up with Vanessa Redgrave at the time, and they both really loved making this movie together, and it really shows, especially with him; he's alight with joy. If you're used to his terse inexpressive deadpan cool from DJANGO or THE FIFTH CORD, it might be a pleasant shock to see how opened and giddy and light on his feet he is. Whether he's chasing the ghost of a nymphomaniac countess, skipping barefoot around his crumbling country mansion, or being chased by his needy art gallery owner girlfriend (Redgrave), he's gorgeous, magnetic, manic, and free.

Redgrave, on the other hand, is his agent / gallery owner girlfriend, whose visits to the mansion often expose her to brutal pranks perpetrated by the previous inhabitant's maybe-ghost.  Redgrave is painfully convincing as the bewildered needy clueless type, familiar to any 'experienced' traveler, the one you kind of leave in the dust after your first big acid or shroom trip opens you all the way up, the one who won't or can't follow you over the edge, so hangs on the void's lip looking down, trying to lure you up by babbling about vacations and other prizes that until a few moments or hours ago you would have salivated over but now seem inane. When that doesn't work, she tries sex, then crying and stamping her foot but that suddenly seems so childish and manipulative to your open senses that you sneer instead of getting all paternal and supportive like you used to. 'Awake' to the world of the villa, like his own private wonderland, he has no time for such triviality. Consider the episode where he takes flowers from the place where Wanda was killed and then throws them to Vanessa but she's too busy moving 'civilized' stuff in for him, like a dishwasher, to care. With his unkempt haircut and  "alive to the wildflowers that the plastic fantastic types cannot see" vibe, he resembles Assisi's "Brother Sun", leaving comfortable bourgeois textiles family to go chant and dally in a half-restored stone church in the middle of nowhere, if his mom showed up after a week to move in a washer and dryer to keep his burlap rags clean. Francis of Assisi's legacy might not even exist if he hadn't picked a church way far away from his mom's apron tentacles, and kept the surrounding fields kee-deep in mud and offal so no cart carrying a major appliances might e'er trespass. (Consider too Violet Venable following Sebastian to the Buddhist monastery in Suddenly Last Summer).

For a male artist struggling with the usual individuation issues, the worst thing a woman can do is try curtail or control his madness. The second worst is to try and cajole their way into being part of it unless it's a totally natural fit, in which you're able to represent the the anima (the way say Pallenberg and Faithfull were animas for Richards and Jagger) rather than the devouring mother (like Redgrave here). It's the difference between a parent actually able to enter their kids' imagined world, seeing things through their eyes (very rare and precious), the parent who just shrugs and says "oh you kids" and goes back to reading the paper, but with one eye on them to keep their madness from spinning out of orbit (the average 'good' parent response) and the worst option: the parent who tries to enter the imaginary world but ruins the mood (the average 'anal' parent response), and the one who makes the kid stop imagining things altogether out of a kind of buzzkill jealousy or misplaced piousness (the worst response).

What's interesting is that in art the genders are often reversed, with the father able to enter the imaginary world easier than the woman who gets roped into playing authority figure the way the father is outside of the imaginary realm. Even the photographer Vanessa's PR agent brings on a studio visit to the crumbling mansion has more of a grasp of the method to Leonardo's madness than Vanessa. He alone notices the flowers, Nero has thrown on the ground for Vanessa to notice, or at least snaps a photo of them - recognizing that a photo of this tossed-off natural bouquet might constitute his own art--in a future photography exhibition (outside his PR job).

This photographer's snapping the flowers enrages Franco, as if the photographer is stealing his wildflowers' soul! This young turk, setting himself up like an Eve Kendall, building his own art off the madness of Leonardo, who-- rather than lighting a cigarette and talking about Marxist aesthetics through opaque Armani shades during this PR visit--reaches out to grab the photographer from inside his canvas hideout like an old dark house gorilla reaching through a secret panel in the wall above Paulette Goddard.

As for other, non-Vanessa girls, there is only one who understands him, who doesn't try to nail Leonardo down to sensible hours, clean dishes, and regular meals, and that's the ghost of the nymphomaniac countess, an obscene combination of obscene nymphette and ghost anima (ala Rebecca. In order to find a similar ghost we have to hop genders to examine the ever-corrupting Quint in The Innocents. In covering both roles, she both sucks the film deeper into Poe's mournful quagmire while simultaneously dragging to dangerously close to the purely obscene/pornographic (his obsession with dirty magazines is defiantly not MOMA-ready). As consumes the photographer in Blow-Up, Leonardo winds up on a kind of scavenger hunt/detective thriller hole climb, solving her possible murder (initially written off as WW2 collateral damage) as he collects old photos and memories of her - but he's not a cop, just an insane voyeur, thrilled to hear all the old men reminisce about losing their virginity to her during the war. Is this just his distraction from doing any work or is this somehow mirroring his work? Or leading his work astray? Is the genius of art hinged at the edge of smut? Is the madness caused by obsessive voyeurism really in the same league with conventional investigative journalism?

Antonioni's madmen tended to be women, driven insane through lack of an artistic outlet while men turn their bodies into temples to be worshipped or defiled; by contrast, Redgrave is a warm sane human who structures and profits by her male artist's madness. Her love is based on his resistance and absence (expressed even to the point of his anima/the nympho ghost attacking her at odd moments). He's the cracked one, and he's full of outlets but resists making any actual conventional art. When Redgrave shows up, the whole house conspires to kill her via roof cave-ins and falling shelves and exploding pipes while Nero stalks her like a combination Italian spy and house cat stalking a mouse-shaped felt toy - that becomes his art. Stifled by her suffocating sanity, her pedestrian conceptions of art, showing him her collection of electric knife sharpeners as if begging him to cut her apart  (it's never been this easy, especially with our patented three speed process!) pleading with him to touch her and make her relevant, to shave off her consumerist edges, Nero can only channel his misogynistic kinkiness through mock strangling or Poe-like fits of Morella-Ligeia possession. That's how the film gets to be both horror and not, because it fits both quite well without committing to one side or the other.

To avoid a feeling of being cheated or that the film is copping out on a satisfying ending, murders within a mise-en-scene can only turn out to be just dreams and hallucinations instead of 'reality' if it's unclear enough whether or not the 'all a dream' ending is itself the dream, that either way, reality is severely jarred (as in, say, De Palma or Bergman) and will never quite be distinguishable from fantasy ever again. It takes a true surrealist (like Lynch, Cocteau, Argento or Bunuel) to recognize there doesn't ever need to be an 'it was all a dream' denouement in movies-at all-no matter how illogical things get. We can tell when things get 'dream-like' that we're in a special in-between place.

The feeling of cheating and disappointment comes when there's a lack of trust in the audience, the producer or writer doesn't think we're mature enough to handle surrealism, that without a solid reality to go home with society itself may crumble. Even the most masterful of visionaries feel often feel obligated to bring things back to Squaresville at the end, remembering logic and linearity like the dutiful spouses waiting at home to chide them for not wanting to be patiently chided. But if they let go and trust in their audience, then the film can be all dream, all the time, and logic, truth, and reality can go to the devil. We'll be fine, mom!  You and your Fellini carnival megaphone can go end some other film. We already know life is a carnival, it's been drummed into us like a prenatal hearbeat. Now sashay... away.

So why is Quiet Place not more widely seen and praised? Critics pee their pants praising other surrealist portraits of Italian male artist egocentric sex addict dysfunction like 8 1/2, but Quiet Place makes Fellini look like that insecure childhood friend who tries to keep you reading comic books and playing D&D past the date it's 'normal'. Part of TCM's Creepy Art and Artists series, the film was preceded by Mystery at the Wax Museum (the original) and Corman's Bucket of Blood. They're two favorites of mine, so the TV was still on afterwards, me, folding laundry in the other room, half-listening, when I heard Ennio Morricone's unmistakable cacophonic counterpoint cut through my deep focus like a knife. I never in a million years would have found this film otherwise. What kind of giallo is called A Quiet Place in the Country!? I had already forwarded past it on the TV menu scroll a dozen times, kind of a priori dismissing it from my attention's channel surfing filter, where I note and dismiss things I deduce to be turgid British costume dramas or saccharine musicals.

TCM's entry on the film mentions it kind of disappeared off the radar and never came to the States at all, and the "only reason it probably received distribution in an English-dubbed version in the U.S. in 1970 was due to the tabloid notoriety of Redgrave and Nero, who were living together openly and had a child." Which is interesting since Performance was also filmed in 1968 and only released here in 1970. Were they both considered too dangerous for the time? Too likely to spark a revolution, a riot, or a surge in mental hospital self check-ins? Even for a town that saw the receipts for Easy Rider?

Regardless even in 1970, nothing you could say on the poster could would lure anyone under 40 to a movie called A Quiet Place in the Country. Good god... I know, because I never in a million years would have seen it nor be writing this even at 50, if not for that Morricone muted trumpet recognition while in the other room. After all, what kind of film has that bland name and then this is the first image you see:

You might look at this kind of self-reflexive student film self-indulgence and groan, thinking about incoherent image stringers like Baba Yaga or even annoying 'visualization of mental states' one man show quirkiness like Caro Diario but hey, fellow, relax. Director Elio Petri is no whimsy-merchant, ego tripper,sooty  or softcore hack anymore than he is giallo / gangster journeyman, a white elephant 'alienation' technician, nor some Marxist snot filming pinball and polemics through cafe windows. He's a bonafide pop art post-Marxist artist whose Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is on Criterion with all the hearty handclasps that implieth. So-- even if Quiet is such a down and dirty mindfuck it would make David Hemmings cry like little Chester in The Fatal Glass of Beer--and even if the fantasy visualization bits are done so that we can't tell which is which--well, it's still Art, baby, Capital A small R, small T.

In other words, we can wonder in this weird overly-symbolic opener if: Nero is tied up as part of some contemporary art gallery show she's curating; is himself a performance art installation; or if this is just an abstracted sex scene, and not worry anything so crass as clarification on this point will deign to be offered. We can wonder if Leonardo is being haunted by a real ghost at the villa; whether he is just a paranoid schizophrenic sex addict; whether he's genuinely dangerous or just 'playful;' whether this is little window of tied-up hairiness is meant to be: a dream or an art gallery show; a critique of modern living, the pair-bond social system, or a couple hanging out in their apartment, with him feeling trapped in a tied-up situationist strait-jacket and she faux-enthralled by all the wonders of the electric age (demonstrating them with pleading eyes as he stares emptily, she's the height of bourgeois neediness. He must go insane if only to escape her).

Again - we don't need to worry we got the wrong answer--the only answer is the only answer isn't.

To repay this favor of no wrong/right answer duality, let's talk about this film and why it's not getting more love from the fringe contingent. I think it's first the title then the way it is defiantly not any one genre. It defies expectations for a giallo while riffing on them in a deadpan absurdist abstraction that puts it more aligned with Spasmo and nothing else.

I've only read one review in English that gets it, on Electric Sheep (from the UK, naturally):

Petri’s foray into experimental horror. It’s a film that demands repeated viewing as it is all too easy to get engrossed in the intricacies of the delirious plot. Once you know how this flamboyantly elusive tale of a troubled abstract painter obsessed with the ghost of a nymphomaniac young countess pans out, you appreciate all the more how brilliantly it is all set up. Blending sex, love, madness, identity crisis, alienation, death, art, consumerism and social commentary in a hypnotic, dazzling visual swirl of bold colours, powerful emotions and artistic expression, it is a feast of experimental visual imagery, but not without Petri’s typically dry, caustic touch. - Pamela Jahn

One of the legendary Situationist ad campaigns hushed up by A.O Range

All the Candide clowns you crayon can't compete with a single electrically-sharpened switchblade slash from the sandman's blood-blackened brush!
In dreams I'll find
who's there?
'Ennio Morricone carving bologna from the fattened calves of the schmaltz-fattened phonies"
Ennio Morricone carving bologna from the fattened calves of the schmaltz-fattened phonies who?
One electric guitar sting instead of a whole tedious orchestra equals Da Vinci.

Insanity pays dividends (done ideally without real violence), regardless of the severity of the strait-jacket's initial application. Art thrives on censorship the way muscles thrive on free weights. The trick is to be successful enough in the market that they wheel you to the nicer home, the funnier of farms, the satin strait-jacket, with pretty views and indulgent staff, and access to paint and brush. An attendant who brings you whatever obscene magazines you want in exchange for obscene art works he can immediately sell. If Pollock had been medicated and under house arrest, with an alcohol-detecting bracelet, he might still be alive. If you care. Would his work even be so fawned over? I've looked at those drios of his on all sorts of different drugs, after reading all sorts of how-to theorists, and I still think it's shiite. I do love his pre-drip work though (below) where there are enough perceptible forms that my pareidolia is engaged, just barely, to allow the abstraction to have something to work with. Without the visible forms to start the eye rolling, his drips seem to me like a wood chipper without any wood, or even the chipper, it's just the roar of the engine and grinding of the blades, divorced of all else.

I mention Pollock too because his Ed Harris biopic is a classic example of trying to white elephant a termite (see here), again and again, visionary (i.e. mentally ill), as excited corny orchestras pump artist's in-progress painting with pomp and import - only slightly less misguided as showing someone's fingers at a typewriter while they pound out a future classic. Minnelli got around it in Lust for Life by turning the whole film into a Van Gogh, with glowing light. And here, Petri gets around it by bouncing it all up against the tropes of a ghost story (just as Antonioni sprang off Hitchcock with Blow-Up).  The problem in this case is that his aesthetically rip-roaring child's eye view of the world, where size is a matter of dilating and contracting perspective, like Alice eating mushroom stems in order to match the height of each new character she encounters, he runs into people who stay the same dull size, always.

Maybe you've been there (brother, you know I have), the place where spittle-flecked speedy mania, spiritual enlightenment, and madness intersect and liberate consciousness from the old self's locked parameters. But your old lady, man, up for the weekend, a little concerned to find you in such a state, stays locked up in her old self's parameters. She wants to keep you the same size, like a dwarf star albatross anchor of bore-o-drome. She can't follow you into that zone of play, so she can only try to lure you back out of it by showing you products she's brought for the house, or her own personal adornment. You being a character written by a communist, her consumer mindset seems suddenly small, shallow, pathetic, and irritating--in ways impossible to alter via the aforementioned spatial perception flux.


It's like if Hemmings' photographer had his elderly accountant interrupting constantly his 'flow' of jazzy image-chasing in Blow-Up, nagging him why he won't sit down and do his taxes, trying to steer the whole movie out of this kinetic signifier-melting 'Now'-ness and into fiduciary logocentric absolutes. (A three can never be a four in accounting, but in Blow-Up the only difference between those two numbers is that four has no curves and three no lines, other than that they are identical). Flavia can understand this as his agent--she's been cultivating his mystique to make them both richer--but as his lover she hungers for some kind of traditional pair bond, and that demands valuation.

Never afraid to seem manly or ghoulish, like some monstrous lesbian from an Aldrich hag movie one minute and a sexy carefree bird the next, trying on thing after another to reach him, Redgrave is achingly sad, funny - almost painfully human yet still full of British fire -seemingly beyond the confines of Britain's class system but nonetheless hung up on Leonardo. We're invited to see her from his side, her crying in a deep manly choke, in ways only Fellini would probably be moved by.

Wanda, the ghost nymph, is not moved, and scalds Flavia in the bathroom. We would cheer...

if we were able to close our agape mouths.

EPILOGUE

If you're still lost in the Italian 60s art house morass after this movie, still need to understand the bizarro world Joycean dialectic at play here, hey, I relate. Watch the newsstand scene where he orders all these dry political news magazines, calling their names loudly while whispering the names of the dirty ones below, alternating back and forth like a kind of crazy counterpoint jazz, building and building in mania while Ennio Morricone's score chides him like a gang of rock-throwing Catholic school truants. Got it? Now watch Bird with Crystal Plumage (with its sing-song chiding chorus) and then you will maybe not even or finally never know that any confusion on your part is the correct modernist response. Even Antonioni wasn't able to handle that level of all-consuming cinematic signifier meltdown. He followed his own clown's candy-colored exhaust trail to the American Southwest for Zabriskie Point in 1970 but within that confining vastness even he, the titan of lostness, was lost. Here the threes meant threes and love meant love and red state bullets meant the same as they always did--freedom, man --and too late, it's gone. So written history was blown in slow motion to Pink Floyd but there was only so many angles you could film the explosion in, so many speeds, to hide that fact that without the old world's effigy to throw rocks at there was nothing in the air to knock one out.

"I can hear him saying it now," the writer says at the end of Crystal Plumage, "it's a peaceful country, nothing ever happens there." Argento knew that art was the time travel portal where the demented past comes slithering out across the galleria floor like the molasses lava flood tide of the living dead. No need for Dario to chase hippies around, he'd chase the artists themselves. He'd chase Antonioni as the effigy of the curious artist, fit to be gutted or at least scared; the photographer voyeur suddenly face-to-face with the killer he's been chasing; the painting reaching out from the frame to stab the artist in his disaffected eyeball, to-- at the very least-- affect its own final image. Blow up as many post-neorealism hacks and paint as many graveyard hussies as you can find, dear Petri, but Wanda will never be sated, not 'til it's your soul dripping from her sexy gorgon fangs, and every Redgrave is dug deep for her departure.

NOTES
1. You can argue Bava was the first to mix fashion and gory murder --in 1964's Blood and Black Lace, but that movie was a failure at the time, never released to the States, so Bava turned back to the traditional genre forms. Argento's '68 film was on the other hand an influential success and explores a far wider post-modern field than just fashion and soapy backstabbing.

Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of the RED DESERT

Crazy gorgeous, crazy mental, highly unstable, reckless, spontaneous--today they'd be called bi-polar, but at the time just post-modernly alienated--there's a lot going on with modernist European art cinema's women of the 60s. Even now, more than ever, maybe, we love them and they love us back, with a kind of scathing distaff ambivalence. Though how do they see us, sitting there, in the future, jaws agape? Somehow, due to their madness-sharpened psychic senses, they seem to feel a future history of eyes all over them. Somehow these ladies 'accidentally' peak behind the curtain to realize how trapped they are by the confines of male (directorial) desire--especially if they're in super sexist Italy, where half the male population freely whistle and howl like lunching construction workers with total immunity. We see their pain, we want to be their unseen child spirit trying whisper words of comfort across time and media platforms into their forlorn fossil ossicles. We're like the tiny human figures little girls commonly dream they give birth to in great numbers, like a plankton flood from the netherworld oceans. Sometimes you'd swear-- as you gaze up at their gigantic faces--that no matter how far away and small you are in perspective to them--they can read your mind. They know whether you're actually sympathetic to their pain, or just using it as an excuse to drool a little closer... sigh. But in that dress, how can you not?

No wonder these girls went mad. Any hot babe in Italy would feel just the same, all that pawing and leering anytime they enter the public sphere, like hungry jackals nipping at a dying calf. Come, cry on Erich's shoulder, sweeties--he's an "ally". He'll keep all the other jackals at bay better than a wedding ring and screaming baby. But does he even know his own heart? Is this all just a sly jackal's long con?

Women like the one played by Yvonne Furneaux in La Dolce Vita (1960, below, right), or Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964 - above, below/left) are forever reaching for a 'real' connection with the men inside their film's mise-en-scene, trying to trap them into a full commitment, to devour them through hydra hair anemone tendrils. The men all just want to pollinate, whet their probosces and split. They feel trapped and suffocated the minute their feet stick to the stamen.

These poor harassed, molested, objectified and leered-at ladies need more than just assurances from some pretty boy trying to get them into bed --they need a champion, a little man they can keep it their cinematic pocket! You should be small, so you can look up to her, so she can be your ideal.

But is she the sort of girl the "ideal" you would want? I mean, she's fucking crazy! And too hot for words, and isn't it strange how they go together?

Not really, if you realize the toxic effect of a lifetime of endured leering by the inevitable drunk uncles. Even a sensitive intellectual like Antonioni may fall into the dress-leering trap as he endeavors to sympathize with his female character's neurotic condition. We hope his star can eclipse the confines of this Red Desert - this Mussolini-period architecture, this minimalist gallery space--and escape out some momentarily open corner of the screen. Whether it's into his/our arms, or, to some character we actually like, someone mature, rich, and debonair, who loves her for her, and can somehow survive her maternal maenad devouring need for constant love.

Alas, there is only one Marcello Mastroianni, and he spreads himself thin. All other men in Italy are ten times worse. He's the best bet, but only suicide threats seem to get him to come home anymore.

Even if she just shrinks by running away from the camera, then crawls out of the screen and out through the 'Exit' door so boldly marked below the screen, anything to be free - free!

In this, Antonioni is much more of a nice guy to his women than Fellini is -- who seems eternally trapped in an apron string latticework of webbed denial (lying to both wife and mistress, neither of whom believe him but somehow he believes himself). In the past Antonioni's madwomen could find solace and escape from modern life via breathtaking island views (as in L'Aventura), mysterious boat engines on the other side of the island that spirit her away; in piquant vacant lots (ala La Notte), or even the quiet of a glider over the countryside (L'Eclisse), but for Red Desert all these avenues are blocked by condemned roads and marshes, or gone altogether. Yellow poisons give the air a red speckled hazy hue; the waters of the river are choked a dull coal black above an almost Star Trek alien worldly sky. Vitti's post-modern apartment seems like just a different wing of the same factory her husband works in. This time she needs a different escape avenue, She has to go all the way through the looking glass, into post-modernism metatextual refraction, until her persona finally shatters like a Lady from Shanghai funhouse mirror. '

Only thing is, we in the dark Chinese theater are stuck being Welles' sleeping pill-sloshed Irish sailor dupe. Maybe in a few more movies, we'll finally lern ta fergetter.

Twelve years ago Dr. Paul Narkunas (the skeptical professor in The Lacan Hour if you're keeping score) lent me his DVD of The Red Desert, painting it in my mind as a lurid desert odyssey that went dark places he knew I'd been to, neurochemically. And he said it was funny, too.

But twelve years ago I was a different person--I didn't know Spinoza from Shitfaccia and the DVD Paul had was a far-off cry from the gorgeous Criterion Blu-ray I have seen thricefold since, weeping with joylessness as my throat pouch widens to encompass more and more hot, psychotropic gas with every viewing because sooner or later I shall 'ribbit' with realizaccione.

But the Narkunas disc was a bust. My TV was smaller and farther away and back then DVDs used letterboxing; even my socialist art filmmaker then-wife was bored after twenty minutes. The story's vagueness and incoherence weren't recognized as intentional even by her from so great a distance. We saw it as just the result of language barriers and our own modernist post-work headaches. I fell into a half-sleep for the rest, and coasted through to the end, one eye open, unwilling to turn it off lest I have to admit defeat to Narkunas, or that I was not man enough or intellectual enough to 'get it' - that my psychotropic throat pouch was.... tadpole-ish.

My problem was not uncommon for an American of my posture, sloth, social conditioning, and drunk-English Lit bachelor degree education. Now I realize my initial response of boredom was intellectual, was correct. French critics labor for years to reach such complete disinterest! And how can a film that bores you stiff the first time get better with repeat viewings? That makes no sense, and no sense is very Antonioni. But Criterion's Blu-ray is gorgeous and now my TV is larger and wider and flatter with deeper blacks. The purple pollution diegetic fog is 3-D now, pulsazione como veleno deliziosa. The purple and dark blue flecks taste like cotton candy to my long-since shattered senses.

Naturally as a result, my outer (or 'real') life has gotten sparser, less anamorphic, to accommodate the balance shift as I merge with the televisual HD clarity. My glasses are dirtier, my mind shrunken and blessedly polluted with rivers of pharmacological run-off. My lily pad is littered with empties (or emptiness). But even as this world fades to a dull scream, the screen breathes and grows, ever sharper, deeper, vaster.

Speaking of psychotropically inflated throat pouches, let us vault into the future for the new post-modern comic mini-series, Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of Babylon, a recently de-vaulted 70s miniseries deconstruction from IFC. Here, at last, is high camp trash deconstructed past the point of being genuinely funny, and more like Godardian abstraction. Somewhere between Ed Wood (1994) and an actual Ed Wood movie, between intentional failure and unintentional result, Real et Surreal, just as Guiliana (Vitti), the crushingly alone and confused wife in Red Desert lets modern alienation vault her into madness, for Eric Jonrosh, the madness is already there, itself, as a whole. Locked in a deadpan absurdity ouroboros, it is madness' final destination.

In both, the acting and writing are intentionally 'off,' with no grounding in anything approaching reality, reaching a heightened abstraction that makes even Sirk's Written on the Wind seem like kitchen sink realism (see here on Splitsider for a shot-by-shot comparison). While Red Desert achieves post-modern affect through mixed signals and ambiguity (in short, art), Spoils achieves it through specific soap signals which are then delocated to the point of abstraction. Giuliana doesn't know what kind of movie she's in -- comedy, tragedy, horror, sexual soap, clinical study of depression --she has no idea what the right response to any situation is and the movie never gives her a signifier without contradicting it a moment later. In Spoils, the link between signifier and signified is forever broken. Meaning spills out everywhere, adding up to nothing through its sheer abundance.

Spoils' story, for example, apes the 70s mini-series and 50s soap only for the first two episodes. By the end there's no longer a sense of being in any one style (though probably it's meant to be the late 60s). The story of foundling adventurer Devon Morehouse (Tobey MacGuire), his capitalist amok sister Cynthia (Kristin Wiig), and their forbidden love begining in the Dust Bowl Depression before rising up in Rink-like plumes of oil, WW2, beatnik junkiedom, hipster underwater observatories and into a climactic shoot-out in front of a bemused Shah of Iran. Just as the core of Red Desert comes from Giuliana's--and therefore our--inability to decode the social signifiers around her, the six-part series' deadpan humor comes less from jokes and more from signifier collapse as a result of inept direction, dialogue, framing, mismatched rear projection and obvious miniatures, all threatening and challenging any attempt at genunine narrative immersion. Carey Mulligan's voice shows up inside a mannequin playing a British wife brought home by Devon when he the war from home comes a-marchin' - and that's the order they would use those words in France (and thus maybe under the sloshy pen of trash novelist Eric Jonrosh, played with windy Paul Masson-era Welles-ishness by Will Ferrell). The idea of a mannequin as a legit rival for Cynthia is both oddly foreboding - a Stepford wife moment - and funny, depicting the dehumanized interchangeability of characters when stripped to the bones of meaning (ala the son's erector set robot in Red Desert). The iconography of the mini-series becomes a tattered yard sale as easily as a red velvet smoking jacket might sell for $500,000. if it was owned by Errol Flynn, or tossed into a rummage pile for four bucks if owned by Errol Flynn's stand-in, and yet it's the exact same jacket - and in fact, it was the same jacket (or a Jeff Beck guitar neck), because the two got switched at the cleaner years earlier or later. Deal with it.

The idea of stand-ins, and a deep ambiguity illuminating the arbitrariness of place, value, and ownership, courses through Antonioni's work constantly in both micro- and macro-, cosms and chasms. In Spoils madness is prevented via an arbitrary dividing line, incest. In actuality--not related by blood---their extramarital affair is the ultimate unimportance, just as the disappearance in L'Aventura turns out to be. Neither Vitti nor Wiig can consummate their desire due to loyalty to missing or dead signifiers -- the dead father, the missing friend). The forbidden love of Cynthia and Devon is made so only in the sense of social propriety --they are not related by blood -- but soap opera cannot function without such refusals, such sacrifices of love in the name of propriety; this sense of sacrifice helped found the Italian film industry, stemming in part from floridly romantic opera and verse, Verdi and Dante, and the realities of the post-war post-class economy and censorship which also factors in Red Desert: man's willful exile from an Eden that exists only in the memory (being in Eden is impossible by definition); one can't be an impassioned sensualist and a 9-5 captain of industry, yet one without the other is not freedom. Operatic soapy romantic signifiers are cinema's way of mourning the loss of sensuality, the sacrifice of sexuality and romantic love in the name of victory --in war, commerce, and construction -- and the way the rise of provincial conservative censorship is intrinsically tied into that industrial age commerce, and how grand actress gestures of selfless sacrifice are the icing that sells the workers this bogus cake. I shouldn't say it's bogus when all other cakes are even more ephemeral. "Real" cakes are eaten and forgotten (or, in weddings, flash-frozen for decades in some pointless loyalty to soon-frosted-over frozen sludge); the 'bogus' cake, never having been eaten (due to not being real) is always 'there.'

the answer, my friend

It's these gestures of sacrifice--of renouncing the cake altogether--that Antonioni subverts, just as the Cinq au sept movies subvert the censor's limited imagination and inability to to comprehend the naughty bits in the center of a quadruple entendre. Codes and the symbolic structure of language point towards specifics; did they or did they not have sex? Sexually frustrated moral ethics guardians insist on knowing! Whole presidencies have been endangered over these nagging questions! But the code can be skirted, the censors stymied by symbolic references that point back only to themselves, forcing the prurient and the narrow-minded literalists into a tizzy... on purpose! And creating modernism... by accident!

"Ooops, I post-moderned. "

Spoils' Cynthia further mirrors Giuliana in Red Desert in that they both need to to waken from the idealized Edenic fantasy their persona embodies. They represent the objet petit a (for a man) and yet seek it without (for any other man). The only resolution is renouncement, sacrificing love on the alter of propriety. Each has an idealized Edenic space to retreat to (i.e. the riverside picnic tree in Written on the Wind), but the difference is that Giuliana knows hers no longer exists, it's been cut-off and blackened by toxic sludge, and that even thinking some new man understands her isn't even a pipe dream (unless the pipe is 'exhaust'). If we've been presuming the signs in the film point towards it being one of Italy's countless 'red telephone' dramas of forbidden extramarital affairs, we're as confused as she is. The signifiers pointing in that direction don't add up; they're more like one of those Salvador Dali dream sequences from the late 40s, only using smokestacks instead of scissors. We 'get it' kind of, since that's how it is with mutual attraction. You can easily forget you don't know the first thing about the other person, and that's dangerous.

Similarly, Cynthia pursues Devon because forbidden love is dangerous and sexy and befits the very rich, for whom the only thing they can't have is the only thing worth having (hence the proliferation of incest in rich people houses, i.e. Chinatown). But whether genetically inadvisable or not, incest is very detrimental to the organization of one's unconscious language syntax. The whole psyche explodes like a house of cards hurled smashed flat between two mirrors. Signifiers no longer have any space to 'mean' anything. In Spoils though, it's less out of that, or out of seeing the world through the eyes of a crazy person, and more seeing it through the eyes of an Ed Wood-meets-Harold Robbins-style windbag.

I think being American is a distinct disadvantage to getting the modernist alienation affect. Europeans and South Americans all sneer at us for not tolerating subtitles, or for learning languages (other than our own) and yet they admire our innocence, knowing it is born out of a single language system that frees us to dwell in isolationism and therefore think more elaborately (taller houses of cards) since we're not constantly having to translate our every utterance three times at the same dinner conversation (until all but the most airy bon mot sink).

The closest thing Americans might have to being 'continental' is if we imagine seeing a foreign film in a high school foreign language class (hence without subtitles) and not being able to understand because we haven't paid attention ever in class, but we're struggling to read facial cues and other signs as it will be on the test, maybe we too can get the modern alienation effect so coveted by the Cahiers du Cinema set. And if, after twenty minutes or so, bored and restless, we start to notice how silly and strange the people onscreen seem when language isn't there to contextualize their behavior, then we can feel the spirit of Bazin rise within us like an excited Harpo Marx pounding enthusiastically on his seat and whistling. Antonioni helps us realize how we're bound up in signifiers even without language - for we have been to the cinema enough times that: if we see--on the movie screen--a woman at a child's bedside, and the child looks pale, and the bed is against a stark, institution white plaster wall, and the kid in the bed has what looks like a thermometer in his mouth, we would totally believe that the kid is sick and the mom is concerned. But then we pan back and the thermometer is revealed to be a cigarette and it's not a hospital room but a post-modern apartment. So who is the woman? Suddenly an orderly comes in to take her away and you think she's insane and this is a mental hospital, but how did we know it was an orderly? Did he have a white lab coat on? That was no orderly! And it's not a kid at all! It's a pile of clothes she drew a face on. It's not even a cigarette, it's just some steam from the fresh laundry.

Now we can either get the post-structuralist leaning tower of Babel alienation effect.

The Americans and censors don't want this aha! moment to ever happen for US audineces. They already demand a certain kind of code of conduct and a secret code to imply sex has occurred --if you're adult enough to read it, and hasn't if you're not. For snazzy post-modernists though it's a small step from the code adherence to leading that crazy Jack Torrance dirty-minded censor on a wild goose chase through the Overlook maze of contradictory signifiers while oh, how you laugh and laugh. To take Americans outside the prison walls of language takes a great deal of this laughing. It's important to realize that Antonioni arrives at his 'plain as the nose on a plane twirling like top' effect through serious artistry, while the three layers of intentional-accidental post-modern intention in Spoils of Babylon occur through the accidental-intentional. It's the difference between acting the role of a guy leaving a half-eaten doughnut on a park bench and realizing there is no audience, or camera, or script around you, and so you were really just a dude leaving a doughnut on a park bench, like, for real.

Did anyone in the park see you leave that donut there? If no one saw you leave it, how do you know it was even yours? Maybe you should quick pick it up and eat it before they notice! After all, maybe you're hungry! If only you could tell... someone. You go up to some strange-looking old lady on a bench and ask her discreetly if you're rolling and if so where the cameras are. You honestly don't know whether she'll point and shrug, or avoid eye contact and edge over to the traffic cop without making any sudden moves.

An example of a similarly dry refracted modernism in Spoils of Babylon is right there in the name of one of the characters: Seymour Lutz, a variation of course on the name 'Seymour Butz,' an old Bart Simpson prank phone call favorite ("Is there a Butz here? I wanna Seymour Butz!")

This joke in its unaltered form would be far too crass for Jonrosh--a great Falstaffian bargain of a man--so, in Babylon, the name is abstracted, mispronounced by Cynthia constantly, leaving him to finally shout "it's pronounced Lutz! LUTZ!" 

Now of course any comedy lover reading this set up will presume Wiig's calling him Seymour Butz instead of Seymour Lutz, which is where the joke would be if it was only once refracted. But Cynthia keeps calling him "Seymour Lund." Quintessential Jonrosh (that Falstaffian, etc.). Hardcore fans of classic surrealist comedy will note he is, in these scenes, invoking the tone and delivery of W.C. Fields in 1933's International House saying "Nuts! Nuts!" while fixing a loosened nut on his autogyro) starddled to Moe Sizlak in a loop of meta-modernist Fatlstaff Ozzymandia. 

Look upon my DVD collection and despair! 

One similar favorite moment, late in Red Desert, made me finally understand why Paul Narkunas recommended it so very... very long ago: Feeling guilty about the affair--even before it has begun--  when she's finally alone with Corrado (Richard Harris) in his swanky hotel room, Giuliana looks up from the bed, sees the door is open, and--worried neighbors or husband or the porter might barge in any minute--guiltily closes the doors and windows, but the ones she's closing aren't doors or windows where neighbors could see in, but drawers and cabinets, bathroom door, and etc. She sees, meta-correctly, eyes and ears looking in from every signifier of orifice, passage, doorway, window, camera, screen, viewer's eyeball, etc. -If she could she'd crawl off the screen, slide down the angle of our eyes watching, slip inside our ocular orifices, and start pulling down the shades, turning off the juice, smashing the aperture, anything she could for a minute's respite from our scalding gaze. 

Another key earlier moment of this meta-breakdown is when she runs off from the group (post-'orgy') down the dock after him towards a ship that's been quarantined, carrying cargo he's connected with, to stop him from what she thinks is him risking his life by going aboard to help with the sick. Then she catches herself and tuns around, realizing everyone is left behind in the fog' when they come out of the mist, Corrado is at her side; the others look at them as if they've been caught red handed in an affair; but are they really feeling that, or is it just another passing wave of paranoia? (a classic Antonioni guilt trip fake-out ala outside the hospital in the nymphomaniac aftermath in La Notte). Now she thinks she's the one who needs to go rescue the sick on the ship (one might recall similar moods affecting guilty heroines in W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil and its imitators.

Either way, both impulses are forgotten by the next distraction, just like they would be for someone on strong acid, or sane enough not to hold onto crazy impressions when no one else around them is. ( like when you make some racist or sexist slip no one seems to notice, so. don't call attention to it--like you'd be more racist to apologize for it than to have said it). Maybe it's just our expectations for these mature Italian post-neorealist doctrines, but everyone drrmd always about to start an orgy or come onto her or stop one from happening, or doesn't remind her they already had an orgy if she announces she's ready to 'make love. Is this what being a hot mess in sex-crazed Italy is like? Or are they just more ghost Repulsion wall arms? You can read more from the audience who automatically assumes the orgy happened, either in that little shack, or the Big Sleep bookstore, or Baby Doll's crib with Eli Wallach. If they want to believe it, fine, as long as they keep it to themselves with a knowing 'worldly' nod. If they have to know, they show themselves up as repressed hysterics more than they 'out' their quarry. 

In truth, we wonder if Harris' architect is even seducing her, or just simpatico, bound up in this archaic social model of behavior. They're the only ones in town with nothing to do, and all the time in the world to do it, and are remotely young, attractive and lonely. Naturally they'd hang out together. The issue is, how much does a physical affair mean to either of them. Aren't they, perhaps, mature enough to realize how seldom that act is rewarding, a fleeting gratification, permanent guilt, awkwardness, and special simpatico lonely heart connection sundered by nature's dunderheaded impulse towards crudity.  

Finally, let's examine the cart selling apples in Red Desert, all of which are strangely painted silver-grayish, on the Ravenna street (above). Who would buy gray apples? Are they some kind of decoration? Are the apples poison? Then why the gray paint buckets? Is this art or pollution? We can't tell, but when Giuliana sits by the cart for a minute she becomes a post-modern portrait of an apple/art peddler. Still, we can't deduce what's up with this cart, or her relationship to it, anymore than we can deduce if an orgy happens later, or after that a cheap affair, tortured bonding, or none of the above. Like the censor we might be driven into a tizzy, or like some child, dead with boredom, but if we don't fight the surreal de-signification domino effect then not knowing is like waking up from a dream within a dream. The hidden puppeteer hand is clumsily pulled down onto the stage and the mind's tendency to lose itself in green smoke and booming voices finds itself challenged by the sudden sight of an old man wizard in his underwear, without a testimonial or diploma to his name.

But there's a reason we like that puppeteer hand offstage, our wizards clothed and behind curtains hidden: once we no longer fall for the illusion then we have to face our own lady death and her poison apple. And she speaks to us, as always, through a collage of remembered movie lines, song lyrics, and poetry, in a voice like Veronica Lake's in This Gun for Hire, patient, but grown surly with waiting, and burdened by concern, like she just rescued one right guy from another bad orphanage, and her legs are lovely, but they're squeezing the life out of us like an anaconda. We will not leer.... We will not leer.

Let the Darionioni Nuovo entrain your Dissonance: AMER (2009)

Stendahl syndrome is a real thing and now I know because it happened to me with this experimental-narrative post-modernist hybrid fairy tale-erotic awakening giallo bit of mind-melting genius, Amer (2009). I didn't pass out but I did get a full bore panic attack mind shatter moment of pure Vulcan mind meld between image and reality. I have fallen into this film like Alice into that K-rabbit hole down through the 'David Lynch-as-a-girl twisted up with a giallo fan version of Maya Deren' Wonderland. Amer isn't just a film, it's a disintegration engine, sucking up the distance between the viewer's mind and the screen like lovers on either end of a Twizzler, swallowing towards the middle and into the blackness.

What sets Amer apart from almost all other films, and it's clear from every frame, is that it's written and directed by a male-female team, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. They come together like the reunification of the conscious mind and the unconscious. "It’s because we are a couple that we can work together," they noted in a 2010 desktop interview. "It would have been impossible to make the film with someone else. We trust in each other and we can speak honestly about intimate things. That’s why we can collaborate." That they sure as fuck can. Their names evoke their respective Italian male and French femaleness, which makes sense because there are certainly strains of Catherine Breillat as well as Argento, Antonioni as well as Claire Denis, but then again, they're Belgian... and beautiful. So that does happen.

If it helps the process, maybe have seen enough experimental cinema to check the references in advance: Antonioni-ish ur-ambiguous 'intentionally signification resistant' art, and Argento-ish European erotic fairy tale horror films from the 60s-70s, so the analytical signifiers and references can cascade upon you, the way Un Chien Andalou cascaded instantly recognizable political horror upon rioting Parisian art critics in 1929, or the Basilica of Santa Croce cascaded upon poor Stendahl. Thanks to these two kids who made this wild film, Stendahl syndrome's not just for Florentine tourists, or Asia Argento, anymore. This time it's poison L. This time they came for me.

Until mon Amer there's always been a weird dissonance, a grinding disagreement, between the iconography of experimental film and narrative film, even in Europe, where art doesn't have to be framed and velvet roped the way it does here. A mirror to this twin dissonance might be found between the Jungian anima and the Mulveyan male gaze, between Jess Franco's 1967 Succubus and Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman. But Amer brings to this twin dissonance (experimental vs. narrative / male fantasies about what girls dream vs. female artist's impressions of girls dreaming about men) a twin serpent DNA lover's frequency that harmonizes all those dissonant tones, and the resulting unified field harmony expands wider and wider until it envelops and entrains other dissonances, widening its wave until even the most ideal sympathetic response to the film is swamped and carried off ever outward into space until the floor rises up to meet you like a wall

and then forward into panic
the image of self within your mind shatters
like Ellison's glass goblin
ancient crumbling nitrate like Edison's ghost dance.
Your crystal skull's shambling pedestal falls
to the marble Florence floor
Its eye sockets, twin gondolas, stay afloat.
Your back's hard against the couch still
watching the shards of your coil's shard's scatter,
the cards shatter off the diving board
couch in a 52 pick-up of fluttering
raven-hoofed watery wings,
and you swim

deep

deep down, Diabolik-ish.
The floor sinks towards you like a mouth,
Betty Blue Boy blows candy canings,
the outcast cowboy burning constantly at stake

But what mouth?
Don't do drugs,
but let them do you if they wish-
it would do you honor.

And what is the difference between faking not having amnesia and not having it but secretly pretending to hide that you have it (as in pretending you know what's going on when you don't but not really, i.e. faking it even to yourself?) This is what we black-out drinkers are familiar with --easing our way into our lives each morning like we know all that happened the night before but we don't - it's an art, a bit of sly detective work as you suss out the night's events and all witnesses' remembrances of your actions without letting on you don't remember. With a level of remorse that would crush a sober man, we eye our girlfriend on the couch for signs of her displeasure, trying to fathom what we may have done to embarrass her... pretending we already know and are sorry, as we quietly (when she's in the bathroom),
and with practiced legerdemain,
spike our orange juice.

Many have tried and a few have come close to harnessing the kind of alternating current a romantic male-female directing-writing team couple can generate: Debra Hill and John Carpenter came as close as anyone with Halloween (1978) but every film has to get up from the table and go pick a bathroom sooner or later, and Halloween eventually chooses the Men's, which means John Carpenter in the limelight, Hill to the side. No film has made it all the way past the border of gender and to the boundary of the split subject, avoiding picking the man as the director, woman as producer, or writer, or vice versa --no film makes it past nationality, temper and even age, smashing through the wall between the bathroom doors and finding its own special hidden alcove. Amer isn't the male gaze or the female gaze but both gazes sliced up in long celluloid pupil Laura Mars strips and arranged in Sergio Leone eye close-up layers to form something as new as neither, something genuinely transgressive without relying on anything so paltry as meaning, story, narrative, coherence or logic... or even cheap shocks. Would your dreams ever deign to use them? Why should Amer? Instead it resists even the fundamental hazard at a guess of meaning critics might find in something similarly post-structuralist like Antonioni's Red Desert or Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. It's something as slick and enjoyable as any modern movie but deeply entrenched in the experimental and certain to confuse or irritate anyone expecting signifiers of the real to properly adhere.

The male-female creative interaction of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani seems mirrored in the zig-zag rhythm of the shots - one step into giallo narrative, one step back along fractured dream surrealism, each refracting and reflecting the predecessor - move, countermove, and so nothing is ever clear or unclear. Everything resists a concrete interpretation but continually beguiles us into wanting one, uses that want for its own purposes, maybe even better than Antonioni did: it doesn't charge ahead like a boy with an Uzi and climax or dissolve into curios like a girl with a flower, yet if you don't run away in disgust, or boredom and if you don't dismiss it all as girly stuff or misogynist or think you don't know what's going on, and if instead you just ride with it, but remain alert and enthralled and ideally high on lack of sleep and Jung and art and Robitussin, then there it is, in its sublime perfection, the mind--both halves--inner and outer, conscious ego and unconscious animus locking into place while busting open at the same time, the unconscious's language signifiers becoming reshuffled, the normal narrative progression cracked open like a nut, the inside goodness free falling in slow motion and for a moment you and the unconscious and the images onscreen are all one - the barrier of screen and speaker between you has evaporated.

When dealing with the giallo genre in the scope of female fairy tale iconography it's important to stress that the collective as well as personal unconscious does not recognize the border between life and death, between the alive and dead version of you, the ego/soul/body/consciousness. Your dreams are the same whether or not you die outside of them - death in your bed doesn't wake you from the nightmare. The razor in the hand of the man chasing you is never just a phallus, penetration anxiety or even fear of death. It's a fear of dissolving, a loss of self, the split - you are afraid to turn around and face the demon chasing you in your nightmare for a very good reason - once you turn around and face it the demon will merge with the 'you' who stopped running, both will cease to exist and a new life will begin. Only through fear of change, or merging, of opening the self's border, does one hold onto the virginity of a tangible unchanging self. All else is transition. All of Amer is this transition - it is a coming attractions highlight reel of infinite length, the narrative arc of the 90 minute film split three ways, and from there three more.

The first such split occurs during childhood - the Freudian key that unlocks Bluebeard's secret dead bride storage: Bava's Black Sabbath, Suspiria, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Brothers Grimm, and Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The second turns sunny and erotic with the girl on the cusp of sexual maturity: Rohmer, Betty Blue, Emmanuelle, Fellini, Blow-Up and Chabrol, and even maybe Cocteau. The third and final turns to the dark again: Argento, later Bava plus Blood and Black Lace, Soavi, Fulci... but with the jittery bipolar modern 'twang' of Antonioni's Red Desert. The eternal dance of metatexual refraction never ends even at the end. The movie becomes a male-female duel in exquisite corpse fashion, each image reinterpreting the one that came before, ever circling dark truths but resisting meaning and remaining the pinnacle of cinematic 'dream logic.'

The only way to describe what's going on is to give these kids a name that can link them with certain of their peers, so I'm calling them the Darionioni Nuovo, a group of filmmakers who have melded the experimental and deeply psychoanalytical styles and substances of Argento and Antonioni into a modern new vision for cinema, one geared towards not just the moviegoer's eyeball but their pupil, not just their ear but their ossicles, a group who refuse to label Antonioni and Godard as art and Fulci and Franco as trash, but to see each as half and half. This is a zone that we usually don't trust 'new' filmmakers with, especially not in America where everything has to be laid out with big yellow lines and breasts and 2.3 children and token minorities and police and moral lessons and zeitgeist-dictated products placed according to rating and market. But in Europe and South America and places where socialized education and less hysterical reactions towards sex and cigarettes lets the youth get super intellectual for free, there is thrives. Maybe it's their less repressive attitude towards sex that frees them from infantile obsession, helping them to make deeper movies: Berberian Sound Studio, Only God Forgives, Magic Magic, Boarding Gate, Beyond the Black Rainbow, A Field in England... but mainly or totally in this instance, Amer. Maybe they can't be appreciated, or even endured, without familiarity with the 60s-70s European horror film canon, but if you haven't experienced any of it, then what are you, un poulet? dive in to the grinder! If it don't make sense, congrats. Take some acid and try it now. If it makes sense at last then bro, you missed it.

Now when a guy, a bro, a dude tries to make a female coming of age story, no matter artsy or 'feminist' it's still a male fantasy, in the end, am I right guys? And that's a shame, because on the one hand we're not allowed to get turned on by the Blue is the Warmest Color because it's still the leering male gaze (a middle-aged man filmed it), and on the other we can't enjoy Chris Lilley's HBO show Private School Girl because our anima gets jealous (if anyone should pass as a school girl, it should be us). And when a woman makes a coming-of-age film she either lets her animus, "her master's voice" lure her into a phallus-sacrificial circle in the forest, ala Thirteen, or she projects said voice clear out of the room with the flat-age swack of a musketeer's sword (Breillat's Bluebeard). Instead of either, Amer rolls elegantly along the sharpened edge of the blade and into the 'win a free game' hole at the end. When it emerges it is, como si dice?, ready for the Lynchian eraser factory.

Counter, Paul!

And what then? The lights come in corners of this massive mausoleum of industrial space that have been dark for years. You forgot those lights were even there; you forgot the corners were even there; you forgot the machines were even there. The machines that now start whirring but you forgot what they do or what you're supposed to do to them to make them run. But people are applauding you, Nina! You didn't even know you were onstage! You've moved from being just another American whining for his phallic climax to a European calmly engaging the bivalve sensual. Now, Nina, Now! Now you really are the Black Swan. And as some trick velvet light trap choker snaps shut behind you, the concrete Basilica floor tilts up to greet you like the concrete smack of a grounding lover. And on the count of three you are back to one / true unified / split. Two/ Snap, dragon. Truth or illusion, George, at last, and for all time, there is no difference. 3

Cinq à sept vs. the Censors: LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, CHLOE, LOLITA, BABY DOLL, ON THE TOWN, RED DESERT, THE BIG SLEEP

Censorship has been a constant bane of our great country, but the need to outwit dogmatic Christian 'morality' has inspired great writers and directors to new heights of sneaky double entendre. One of my favorite tricks of theirs is a common enough thing in Paris but unknown to the Christian right: the afternoon tryst. The censors of the 50s-60s never could grasp the idea of love in afternoons; sex to them was limited to one position (missionary), one place (bedroom), one time frame (night after everyone had gone to sleep). Having boys and girls even in the same room at night was presumed to leave someone pregnant by morning, but in the middle of the day these girls were safe as Fort Knox.

If anything this proves censors are both unimaginative and vile. The more tightly they try to control sex the more paranoid they get, hence the tighter the grip, and the more limited in thinking. Thus their sexual repression leads to the notion that most men change into date-raping monsters as soon as bedtime looms and the censor/camera isn't there to chaperone/spy.  They know something is going on in that fade out from night to morning --that's a long time- but not knowing what drives them insane. All men become the raging id of repressed desire, all women easily willingly overpowered. This low opinion of human behavior serves to justify the chaperone-like censor's sense of self worth, that their job mattered, they were the bulwark against the tide of baser instincts.

That doesn't mean sex wasn't all over censored films, just that there had to be a 'code' for every thing: if someone unmarried of the opposite sex did sleep over in a post-code film, for example it goes like this: If there's a fade to black after a kiss between two lovers at night, the editor can never fade out to the next day or morning. The scene must always end with him going home alone, or being interrupted by the terrified maid announcing some sinister distraction, OR the director could cut away to something, like a clock tower (in CASABLANCA) and come back to the scene with the lovers still fully dressed, but now smoking -and then you might presume (if you were over 18) that they were both just very fast dressers. But you had to show her leaving (or him) before actually she goes to sleep, nonetheless. If she or he does stay over, the butler might be shocked to see a girl lounging in his master's bed in the morning, but then find his employer not in bed beside her but in a knot of sheets on the living room couch. Whew!

In the days of the small town idyll of the soap opera 50s there was plenty of post-war modern sex colliding with pre-war small town moral hypocrisy, and movies and novels lolled in the horrific toll taken when a young free spirited girl and boy tried to stifle their romantic impulses to please the shrewish old gossips next door. A kid hangs themselves to be free of all the slander in PEYTON PLACE (1957), and in A SUMMER PLACE (1959), Sandra Dee comes home from spending the night on the beach with her boyfriend to find her mother (Constance Ford) waiting with a doctor to examine her hymen. What the fuck is this, you think, Sharia law?  No, just a reminder, perhaps, that the censorship boards are terrorist-affiliated, very very misogynist and backwards, prizing virginity, which is something only a very sexually insecure, small-dick punk would want, with no idea of what's involved in getting a girl to loosen up. There, I said it.

That's what that moron Sam Neill in Jane Campion's THE PIANO (1993) also doesn't understand. He'd be much happier if he just rolled with the sensual blowback from his new wife's affair with Harvey Keitel. But Neill is so sweaty and repressed and easily led along by colonialism's backwards ideas of propriety that he thinks it's much saner to mutilate her hand instead. In short, he is a natural-born censor.

Censors even insisted husbands and wives had to sleep in separate beds, which makes no sense if you're trying to endorse marriage as desirable. No doubt sex was present, but censors suspected even husbands of turning into rapists once the lights were out, though of course the night table between the beds was considered be enough to repel them. Laymen will also bring up the rule of lovers having one foot on the floor on each side of the bed but I've never seen that. Still it's pretty damning evidence of the sexophobic Catholic censor board.

Thus it's natural that one of the most interesting ways the filmmakers sought to baffle the censors is through elapsed time (the way lovers in the 20s would fool the dozing chaperone by moving the clock back).

It took most of the later 30s (from when the code was implemented in the back half of 1934 through to the late 60s) for screenwriters to bamboozle the censors while providing what the code was all about -- enough doubt over what happened in the fade out to let innocents think nothing happened and laid adults to know something did. Two examples most film fans should be familiar with are CASABLANCA (1942) and THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). The former cuts from an embrace to an airport watchtower and back to the lovers, still dressed, smoking and looking out the window. Since it's only later that night, and the lovers are still formally dressed, they can smoke and look contented.

In FALCON, there's a fade-out with Bogart leaning down to kiss Mary Astor that moves away from them (we never see them kiss, just Bogart bending down past the window towards where she's sitting) and out the window, where a figure in a trench coat watches up at the window like a ghost wondering if a womb might be going up for rent. We move from this to the next morning but the censors couldn't stop it because a) we never see them even kissing before the fade out, and b) the assosication with danger (the gunsel) and sex is subtextually implied anyway, and c) they are very far from the bed at the fade out, and not even shown in any representational manner.

But the easiest way to baffle and flummox the censors was love in the afternoon, which is a common French practice, as I never get tired of mentioning, and which decadent continental-minded directors and screenwriters use to their advantage, making fun of the censors' lack of earthly carnal experience as they do so. Here are some worthy examples:

BABY DOLL (1956)

Elia Kazan's masterpiece takes the “did they or didn’t they” aspect of production code censorship and makes it the focus of the story, something they could never forgive him for. Here the censor / prurient viewer stand-in for whom all things must be clear and literal (hick cotton gin owner Karl Malden) goes insane trying to figure out whether the hazy dissolve in the nursery where Vacaro takes a nap in baby doll’s bed late in the afternoon signifies they had sex. 

And this was the way Hollywood dealt with the issue of “did they or didn’t they" --the narrative split. If you expect a yes or no answer and really try to find one, you will go insane. In the tree of sex, the cardinals can rest easy in one corner, and the horny bald-spotted Maldens can go nuts in the other... it must be so, or society cannot function. BABY DOLL calls attention to this split however, and ridicules those who would prefer one side over the other... if you feel the need to insist "they did it," you are a pervert, and if you insist they did not, you are a prude. As such, BABY DOLL poses an affront to the pious and phony moralizing of so-called "decent" citizens, which may account for the huge Catholic protest the film created.

After Vacaro and Baby Doll wake up from their nap, neither Archie Lee nor we in the audience know if they did or didn't have sex. Rather than confront them directly, Archie Lee hems and haws around the issue, and Baby Doll and Vacaro play up their flirtations... but is solely for Archie's benefit? At least partly, yes. What makes this scene so “dirty” is not the seductive play between Vacaro and Baby Doll, but its performative aspect. They exaggerate their seductive fire for each other in order to enflame the jealousy of Malden. Their kisses are passionate in direct relation to Malden’s proximity; the harder Malden tries to get a clear yes or no, the steamier their interaction gets.

The lesson to be learned is how to let go of control: Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression and playful retreat, an ebb and flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Thus play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role, without any forward move on her part leading immediately to a man slobbering all over her. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex, Vacaro forces her to sign the statement against her husband for burning down his gin. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "underdeveloped" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly -- one dissolve between a kiss / fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out, stretching that black bar until it forces Malden into a corner.

LOLITA (1962)

A whisper, a fade, no mention of anything ever. But what did happen in that hotel room the next morning? We're still wondering... in removing anything remotely even double entendre, the film makes Debbie Reynolds movies look raunchy by comparison, yet the whole film fairly sizzles over because of our fascination, or censorial-prurient desire to look deeply into the did they/didn't they crevasse... (more here)

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)

It's kind of weird to think that Billy Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON came out a year after BABY DOLL. It's classy enough for the 30s but naughty enough for the early 60s. (Wilder was an unrepentant fucker-with of censors). Audrey Hepburn visits millionaire Yank wooer Cooper at his killing floor hotel suite (which he keeps stocked with a band of serenading gypsy troubadours) only in the afternoons, while her detective father Maurice Chevalier is at work (Chevalier gets a lot of cases trailing errant wives to Cooper's apartment), then splits in time to deal with her dull musician geek boyfriend, cello homework, etc.). She acts all worldly and experienced, almost a burlesque of the women she reads about in her father's lengthy file on Cooper, and slowly uses his own playboy image to slowly infuriate him with jealousy ("if it's any comfort to you, Mr. Flanagan, you are the first American in my life"), gradually shifting the power seat from his worldly wiles to her playful manufactured put-on. Her elaborate imagination with conjuring alpine guides, Spanish bullfighters, and Dutch alcoholics recalls the Lady Eve train scene. Meanwhile the censor gets easily sidestepped through ingenious pans away from the lovemaking to the swoon-worthy gypsy musicians, each song keyed to a stage in the seduction. The censor can't say shit about an orchestra, but when we pan back it's clear something has happened. As long as they're still on the couch, and more or less dressed (even if the clothes are mussed and they can't find a shoe or two), and it's not yet night, all is well, as far as 1957 is concerned.

I really resonate with this film for a few reasons, and one of them perhaps hinges on my whole enamored feeling towards the French cinq a sept (5-7), a tradition whereby one visited one's mistress between work and going home for 7:30 dinner. I still long for mine, now some seven years gone. Notes Chevalier in Wilder's film, "In Paris people make love . . . well, perhaps not better . . . but certainly more often. They do it any place, any time," but the film didn't do well, and as Film Projector notes, a lot of that was maybe the age difference:

Hollywood has a long tradition of teaming older men with younger women (and also that there is psychobiological evidence to explain such mutual attraction: men tend to equate youth in women with fertility, while women tend to equate age in men with the stability and material resources necessary to maintain a family), and such a romantic pairing as Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn—although certainly not fashionable in today's more age-conscious world—doesn't seem entirely implausible. (more)

Damn straight, age-consciousness --one is a dreamer wooer quite getting along in years, the other Hepburn in prime gamin beauty and jubilance, innocent but visibly intrigued. May-December relationships are as stigmatized today as gay relationships used to be. But it goes deeper than how an older man is in a much better position to benefit a younger woman, sharing wisdom and gallantry galore, while all a younger man can really share is surly petulance and vitality. I also think that goes both ways, and older women should take younger men lovers as often as they please. Why not? It's good all around, and might even save this fucked up country from its current quagmire of gender and age relations. And it's very French, n'cest pas?

But rest assured, these relationships exist, behind closed doors, denied in public, deep in the closet, and safe from the censors by making love mainly in the afternoons (by evening, the old man is usually too tired anyway, at least pre-Viagra).

ON THE TOWN (1949)

The war was over but girls were still being nice to guys in the service, and a certain sexual leeway was perhaps implied, especially between the working girls of New York (or San Francisco as with Dorothy Malone and that cute cabbie in THE BIG SLEEP - 1946). Once she gets rid of her roommate, taxi driver Betty Garrett all but devours Sinatra during the afternoon while Gene Kelly chases Miss Turnstiles and fellow sailor Jules Munshin hooks up with sassy sketch artist Ann Miller. We don't see much of that hook-up but it sure is great watching Garrett devour Sinatra: "I like your face," she tells him. "It's empty, know what I mean?" At least she keeps her goals reasonable -- going for Frank. "I knew you'd come back. They all come back." And since they all meet later, 8 PM I think, up in the Empire States Building, the unchaperoned nooner between Frank and Brunhilde (as Garrett is named) goes off without a hitch. The censor dozes right on through it. It was the war after all, or had been. Girls could hook up with sailors before marriage as long as they didn't stay the night and made it to their wartime riveting job on time the next morning. (see also High Society Matrons of Frank).

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

"...On the other hand -- we never know what happens in between being 'closed for the evening' and going out - he doesn't kiss her goodbye or anything - yet perhaps less gallant or experienced viewers will instantly assume it was a full on tryst, a 5-7 shag (vs. snog). Well, the censor is a great one for compelling lovers to not kiss and tell; the time between the glasses coming off and the paper cup toast and the "so long pal" exit are strictly their own business. At any rate, it would be pretty hard to believe even in the 60s-70s that something so cavalier as a sexual hook-up between strangers could go on during regular working hours and not leave any repercussions. You could say it's all just a male fantasy--all those young., available women in all those working wartime women (taxi driver, etc.) leading old Doghouse Rileys like Marlowe to gambol wild and free amongst them while the boys labored overseas. Further wartime references are scattered through the dialogue ("How are you fixed for red points?" Marlowe asks Bernie, meaning to corpses and culprits he has along with their guns, red points being weekly ration booklet meat allowances.)" - full review

 CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972)

Eric Rohmer is a quiet genius when dealing with sexual tension of first kisses and hook-ups, and that genius is on big display in this tale of a Parisian man who runs into an old friend-of-an-old-girlfriend and starts hanging out with her in his lunch hour, gradually leading closer and closer to cinq a sept territory while his pregnant wife waits at home. Sure it might be a mid-life crisis and sure I can't give away the ending, but it's a great example of that love in the afternoon...

In closing, sex in the afternoon is such a great loophole to the conventional mores of the life-choking censors that it's naturally Parisian in origin. Paris, where people have sex rather than obsessing about it (to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich). What a delight censors can be confounded so easily!  Here sex is displayed all over the place as the ultimate status symbol: the stakes are high, and every one is holding out for a perfection they'd only run away from (or would run away from them) if they ever actually found it. We put all this pressure on the third date sleepover to deliver a wonderful mythic poetry that we can spend the next week analyzing and/or bragging about in long phone conversations with our friends; is it any wonder we're so single and so eager to settle? Ladies and gentlemen, let our great country discover the cinq a sept, and stop expecting sex to deliver all the answers... only film can do that.

RED DESERT (1964)

It's Antonioni's big art joke --the modernist response -- writ fast to the frisson disconnect of censorship - Vitti, her husband, her maybe lover, and a few assorted wives, secretaries, managers and swinging bosses all rendezvous for lunch at a brokedown shack by the docks. A conversation about the aphrodisiac properties of fertilized bird eggs leads to one of Vitti's few outbursts of ease-in-the-skin, "I want to make love," and this big bedroom space in the shack, painted red, is gradually full of bodies all being drawn to each other, dancing and slowly acting on their lusty interlocked blase cool. Have they gathered for an orgy? Or is just one almost happening? Is it a matter of Italian censorship that Antonioni can't be specific or is this the modern art genius? Yes, of course it's both, as in all these 5-7 movies. If we demand to know what did happen in the fade-out then we are like Karl Malden in Baby Doll, and we will lose our mind! Ah... Modernité!

Anyway we have the dissolve to darkness and when we fade in it's clear some great energy has been expended, or they ran out of wine or there's just one of those momentary lulls that occur sometimes among people having a really good time and almost having an orgy, but then backing off and feeling their good mood turn on them, pissed they chickened out. We're not meant to know, and by accepting never knowing we realize that's the point and that's why Vitti is crazy because even she doesn't know yet there is no knowing. She's the 'awake' character beginning to realize that all these other people know stuff she doesn't, that they have lives between frames, scenes, before and after, which she lacks. But is there really anything to lack? Again, that's the genius - no questions - we must embrace ambiguity as a pre-requisite to waking from the dream of consensual linear time. The result of our collective slumber to our true reality is what is poisoning the world. We miss the beauty of the trees so lose them. We 'don't know what it's got til it's gone,' but even when it's gone we don't know - unless we first get enough perspective, enough distance from our beds. So wake up, sleeper! The nap is over, the mistress is sated and watching the clock. The censor will be getting home soon; time to feign dignity and dishwater dull decency, until tomorrow, same time, same brief candle. The best part of it all is, you can wait.