2024 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Elfriede Suárez Reichenberger

The Timeless Horror of
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

by Elfriede Suárez Reichenberger

Editor note: We loved Elfriede’s essay but as they are a college student we could not score it as one of the placing essays but still wanted to recognize it!

In the world of film horror, success is mostly fleeting. While the idea of terrifying their audience has stirred the spirit of filmmakers practically since cinema’s inception, the enduring status of a single film as a horror classic seldom stands the test of time. Technological breakthroughs bring about new horizons and suddenly, what terrified one generation, amuses the next. It is a genre in constant need for reinvention. This begs the question of why then, almost sixty years after its initial release, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers continues to make its audience’s skin crawl? The timelessness of the film lies in the viscerality of its central appeal: man’s fear of losing his humanity.

At its core, this is a simple movie. Something is a little off about the inhabitants of Santa Mira, CA; the key term here being little. This is a horror film shot in a sterilely broad daylight: so the monster lurks in the minds of men. If we follow the original 1965 film’s storyline, the inhabitants of this charming suburban daydream of a town have been replaced by identical versions of themselves while they slept by an alien race looking to move their dying species to Earth. Subsequent film adaptations have changed some of the details to infuse their take with freshness; but in truth, the devil here is not in the details ― this horror runs deeper and it takes the shape of whatever crevasses run through the minds behind the eyes that watch it.

Upon its release, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers was widely considered a thinly-veiled metaphor for the surge of Mccarthyism in the America of the fifties. In the midst of an era marked by government-planted paranoia that the enemy is among us, the seeds were planted in the minds of theatergoers and took the shape of a communist neighbor: the disruptor of hardly-earned suburban peace hidden in plain sight. But as the decade faded into the Swinging Sixties and the Generation Gap deepened, its new audiences sowed the opposite message, and toyed with a new paranoia of totalitarian government control, of losing oneself in the conformity needed to power the country’s social and political apparatus. They found their support in the rumors of censorship, with the movie’s original ending being deemed “too bleak” for the audiences of the time, perhaps because it supposedly rolled the credits right after Dr. Bennell faced the camera yelling “They're here already! You're next! You're next!" The following remakes leaned increasingly into the movie’s political undertones, against the backdrop of the post-Vietnam era, the Korean War and later, the Gulf War and the War on Terror. Regardless of the year, audiences everywhere saw the film’s potential as a mirror for the society of the time, and they didn’t doubt to look into it.

It may come as a surprise, then, that the movie’s own star said in an interview that after extensive talks with Jack Finney, the author of the novel which inspired the picture, he felt no political allegory was intended. This posture, although certainly valid, may be missing the point entirely. The film’s ability to terrify audiences across generations lies not in the political subtext that was or wasn’t undoubtedly present in each of the film’s versions, in other words, the answer to the film’s question of why the “body snatchers” are taking over the bodies of humans; it lies in the question, of whether or not we could do anything to stop them.

We could say then, maybe, that humanity's greatest fear is not just of losing itself, but doing so unknowingly. It is a fear which plagues the minds of people such as you and me, taking the shape of the horrors of war carried out by people whose government has lied to them about the nature of the enemy, or nameless figures lurking behind the shadows of power, controlling our minds, be it through our television sets or cellphones. In this sense, Invasion of the Body Snatchers may as well be a cautionary tale meant to remind its audience to take a good look around because the day in which they take over will look almost exactly like today; it’s just up to us to decide whom or what exactly “they” are.

2024 Tarkovsky Prize 3rd Place: Isabella Mo

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

by Isabella Mo

I still remember the day I felt like the Demon Child. Waiting in line at preschool to wash my hands before lunch, the girl in front of me told me I looked like a princess. It was a silly comment, but I felt a surge of confidence. I spun around in a circle, arms spread wide, mimicking the twirl of a Disney Princess in a lavish gown. Unaware of my surroundings, I hit the boy behind me with my hand—right in the face. Before I could even reach the sink to wash my hands, I was cemented to the timeout chair. The boy was now crying, cupping his cheek in the embrace of a preschool teacher. She was calling our parents. I felt scared and hungry—they did not let me eat lunch. Meanwhile, the girl who commented was enjoying her food at a table nearby. I overheard her complain to the kid next to her that I was such a loud cry baby. I shouted at her to shut up. The teachers scolded me, my words justifying that I was a bad kid "acting out." That night, my Mom’s voice echoed through the house, demanding I stop my problematic behavior. No one asked me to tell them what happened. I was the perceived aggressor, the Demon Child.

The pain of not feeling heard nor believed from this experience resurfaces when I watch Don Siegel’s film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The 1956 black-and-white film has many scenes of characters responding to the rising issue in Santa Mira in typical, unpanicked ways, which extracts familiar emotions from my perspective of feeling alienated. The human instinct to adhere to what is familiar and make assumptions to protect one’s perspective of the truth emerges continuously.

Most notably, we see before discovering the body snatching, Dr. Bennell uses typical treatments and advice for the less mentally sane to help his patients who claim their family members are not the same. For Jimmy Grimaldi, Dr. Bennell sends him off with medication and a hearty slap on the butt, instructing Grandma Grimaldi to have him stay with her for the night. For Wilma Lentz, he schedules an appointment with Dr. Dan Kauffman for psychiatric help. Though Dr. Bennell listens to Jimmy and Wilma’s worries, he fails to take them seriously. What I fear most, looking back at my memory. The trust characters in the film had when asking Dr. Bennell for help vanishes as he takes Dr. Kauffman’s word about what has happened in town the past two weeks—an epidemic of mass hysteria. Interestingly, it is odd how Dr. Bennell initially ignores the many identical worries of his patients. When abnormalities like these become increasingly common, scientific experts typically dig deeper to discover why the phenomenon occurs. However,Dr. Bennell mutes his patients’ voices, much like how mine was after the boy started crying. Reverting to treatments for those who are mentally insane reflects the lack of care Dr. Bennell takes to hear them out. But his perspective quickly switches.

As the film progresses, those with qualifications use "logic" to dismiss the concerns Dr. Bennell raises. When Becky Driscoll’s double in her basement has vanished, and the only evidence of Jack Belicec’s double is a spot of blood on the pool table, Dr. Kauffman concludes that the body on the pool table is the product of a murder. As Dr. Bennell and Jack try to convince him with evidence, Dr. Kauffman only responds with his reasonable assumptions: murders can leave little trace, dead bodies often have plain appearances, people can burn off fingerprints to hide their identity, and mass hysteria can cause one to hallucinate a double of Becky in her basement. If an audience member were a character in this film unaware of the body snatching and noticed the lack of Dr. Bennell’s evidence in the scene, they would agree with Dr. Kauffman. His responses are nothing less than convincing, surging feelings of uneasiness. He manages to build a plausible argument that Dr. Bennell is delusional. How can one defend oneself when one possesses no weapons to do so?

Though Dr. Bennell finally finds people who listen to him, this film highlights the ever-present dismissal of one's words during times of need. It is painful seeing Dr. Bennell's desperation grow, seeing the voices of others outweigh his own. Throughout the film, the justification of diverting one’s problems compared to helping the characters is constantly prevalent. In our world today, we see just that in many ways. From police arresting and shooting people of color because they assume they are or will cause harm to people telling girls and women that they are asking to be harassed, assaulted, and raped. We see how some decisions are out of one’s hands. They can only be made by those with more power and privilege. This film is not to say that we cannot trust those around us or those who serve and protect us. But it reminds us that they may not want to hear our voices. Evidence is crucial to making informed decisions, but manipulating it to fit preconceived lines of reasoning and failing to hear multiple perspectives is unethical. The truth is worth more.

2024 Tarkovsky Prize 2nd Place: Muhammad Rehman

ORLANDO: A Society’s Review

by Muhammad Rehman

I have never been more ashamed of society than when I was watching Sally Potter’s film Orlando. Enacted in 1992, Orlando loosely takes the basis of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography. Potter does a splendid job at wittingly criticizing the “predetermined” societal roles of both, female and male, sexes through the experiences of Orlando. Brilliantly acted by Tilda Swinton, Orlando is a character who gained immortality for 400 years and switches sexuality halfway through them. Unlike the novel, the film is given a structure with seven small time intervals focusing on a specific topic: death, love, poetry, politics, society, sex, and birth. In each chapter, I was daggered by the judgemental looks of Orlando, pointing out to me the many flaws of society I was oblivious to.

In the chapter on death, the passing of Queen Elizabeth I symbolizes the unsatisfactory nature of humans who continue to live in pursuit of evading death- chasing immortality- in hopes of finding pleasure. Before her passing, the queen commands Orlando: “Do not fade. do not wither. do not grow old.” Despite living a long life, in which the queen undoubtedly must have had myriad pleasures, she is shown to be unsatisfied with the final outcome. In initial reflection, this sentiment bewildered me. Why would she be discontent when she lived such a prosperous long life and met an end known to all? The answer did not come to me until I put myself in her position. It was not the past that would sadden me, but the prospect of a better future in which I would be absent was the demise of my happiness. Here, I began to realize the flaw of human nature which is its insatiability. Despite knowing that we are to meet a similar end, we remain dissatisfied with our current state- not living lives to the utmost. In the next section, Potter further explores the aspects of human nature.

In the chapter on love, Potter highlights the abrupt and unsympathetic aspects of human affection. Male Orlando’s quick disregard for the emotions of Euphrosyne, his loving fiance, when he grows an infatuation with another lady is evident in those aspects. Despite Euphrosyne’s devotion to Orlando, he chases Sasha- an indifferent lady. Like her, too often we have individuals whose love goes unrequited. Watching this, I wondered if it would not be more righteous if love was earnable. If one could choose whom to love? Although it may extinguish an aspect of romance in love, the number of heartbreaks reduced would be immense; any love triangles would cease to exist. Alas, that is only hypothetical. In reality, humans are imperfect with the randomness of love.

In the chapter on politics, Potter illustrated the absurdity and the lengths humans would go to justify their wrong actions. During the war between the Middle Eastern countries, Orlando is stopped from tending to a dying man by a politician exclaiming: “he’s not a man, he’s the enemy.” Additionally, in the contemporary world, politics has integrated into society at each of its levels. And humans have constantly failed to keep equality between these levels. In every corner of the globe, we deal with injustice of some sort- racism, sexism, terrorism, homophobia, xenophobia- which are then legalized by laws. It is maddening to realize the depths of suffering we may cause to others and then attempt to justify it with mere laws. Maybe if people knew the pain caused by their actions on others, some trickle of humanity may shine through. This aspect of inequality is further explored in the section on society.

Although each chapter stuck out to me, the part about society was my favorite. In the chapter on society, I had the greatest revelation of all. I am a man and I know only a few distinctions between men and women, disregarding the physical, and biological differences. And I may be inclined to owe that to my culture but I will not do so. Instead, I wish to wonder if I was born to know neither, would I gain the ability to distinguish between each? I realized, when watching Sally Potter’s film Orlando, that men and women have essentially very little differences but it is society that teaches us how to distinguish and treat one sex from another. When Orlando switches from male to female, she claims: “same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex” but society claims her to be “legally dead.” As a male, Orlando was allowed to own land, and take part in important decisions of society but, although capable, as a woman, her all existence was taken from her unless she bore a son. Although society has improved from the times represented, the fundamental principles that resulted in these inequalities are still present.

We continue to fight for a world where each human is respected and treated as if they deserve a life and Potter’s film Orlando paves a path to do just that by pointing out the many flaws of our human society. The issues presented do not remain in the movie but apply to the real world as suggested by each judgemental glance Orlando shares with the audience- breaking the fourth wall. Watching Orlando is emotionally enlightening as you learn to understand the difficulties of many perspectives in multitudes of settings; it provided a unique opportunity for me to understand the point of view of both sexes and realize they are not fundamentally different. Although Orlando does not speak directly for our times, I think humans could learn a lot from watching Orlando . . . if they are ready to feel the shame.

2024 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Logan Ragland

THREE COLOURS: RED

by Logan Ragland

It begins with a simple telephone call: one single voice amongst the clamor of millions, traversing thousands of miles—through underground cables, deep within networks of tunnels and caves, across entire seas—all to be heard by one single person. But it doesn't go through; the phone at the other end of line isn't picked up. Oh well, the film seems to suggest, seemingly forgetting about the call in the midst of the day-to-day bustle of its main characters. Had the phone been answered things might have been different—but it wasn't, so they weren't. The call is never mentioned again; ultimately, it's not important.

So begins Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Red, a sweeping, subtly intricate masterwork which ranks among the most complex and powerful films I've seen. The third in a trilogy of films inspired by the colors of the French flag, Red avowedly addresses the concept of fraternité—the seemingly random forces which cause us as individuals to cross paths with strangers, forming the bonds which shape almost the entirety of our lives. But through this, Red also tackles much more. It's one of a select few works of art that dares to take a grasp at the core question underlying our existence: what exactly it is—if anything—that gives meaning to everyday life.

At the beginning of the film we meet Valentine, a model in Geneva who seems to be doing perfectly well for herself. She's in a decent relationship, has a moderately successful career, and seems happy, in a general way. This, in a way, is realism; Valentine lives an ordinary life, and is portrayed such that she could be anyone, really. But all of this changes when she meets Joseph Kern, a retired judge, after hitting his dog with her car. The two interact only briefly at first, but he immediately strikes her as callous and unfeeling; she wants nothing to do with him, and the two agree that the dog, Rita, would be better off under her care. Time passes, life goes on—but eventually, by pure chance, Rita escapes in a park and leads Valentine back to Kern, causing the two to begin a sort of bond. She gradually learns of the old judge's regrets—his guilt for past rulings, his failed love life—and all the while strange parallels are drawn between him and Valentine's unknown neighbor, a young law student named Auguste. Little connections between each character in the film begin to bud, slowly at first, and then more and more rapidly until each has been driven to the character's very emotional core—much like how relationships develop in real life, often without us even noticing. But in the midst of all these coincidences and sudden change, however, Red never removes itself from reality. Instead, it walks a thin line I would call magical realism—coincidences do happen, after all, audiences will think, and it's not difficult to believe that sometimes life's randomness can just fall into place. But even still, something about how everything plays out doesn't quite seem grounded in reality.

Every shot in Red connects to this theme. The camera glides through the story with a mind of its own—at times drifting between parallel stories in the very same shot—which not only builds a world for the characters that feels whole and familiar, but also grants the film a beautifully poetic sense of intimacy and flow. Of course, nearly every scene is also steeped in varying hues of red, which traditionally represents love, passion, and fraternity. Yet strangely, upon first glance these ideas seem to be discussed rather little in the film: relationships are constantly shattered, trust is repeatedly broken, and the film overall actually feels quite lonely, with its empty city streets and emotionally isolated characters. But perhaps, Red suggests, there are other forms of love and connection—ones that can somehow be established long before two people have even met. Valentine and Auguste, two characters with distinctly warm, burgundy names, do seem destined to come together, after all. This could just be blind chance, of course, but there's a creeping sense throughout Red that some other forces may be—must be—at work. In the film's final sequence Valentine boards a ship bound for England to visit her family, but in the midst of an abrupt and violent storm the ship sinks, killing nearly everyone aboard. The only seven survivors: all the main characters from each film in the Three Colours trilogy, including Valentine and Auguste. In the closing frame, Kern watches television coverage of the disaster through his shattered garden window, at last seeing the pair emerge, shivering in their wet blankets, and briefly lock eyes. The judge's final line before Valentine departed for her journey: "Leave. It's your destiny."

Importantly, Kieslowski was not an especially religious man; he was raised a Catholic, but always saw God as something deeply personal—an abstract concept one ought to carefully consider, and which can be felt at a person's core whether or not they subscribe to a particular faith, or even believe in a God at all. Red follows this philosophy closely. It almost never mentions religion—and certainly doesn't argue for or against there being a God—but there is an unmistakable spirituality embedded in nearly every aspect of the film. "The light is beautiful," the old judge says to Valentine in one early scene right before the room floods with a heavenly glow. Fortune, it seems, can only account for so much before it begins to bleed into fate.

More than anything, Red carries with it a sense of humility—one that allows viewers to feel that there must be something more out there, some order and reason to it all, but simultaneously to recognize that, ultimately, none of us has a clue. There's a certain comfort in this smallness, the idea that what truly matters is building connections and enjoying life, without worrying too much. In the grand scheme of things, it'll be okay if the telephone at the other end of the line is never picked up. It's not religious, but it is a sort of faith. And whether or not you believe it, it certainly is a wonderful thought.

2023 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Ivona Sutilovic

Suspense in Reed’s THE THIRD MAN

by Ivona Sutilovic

Fear and suspense are the key methods utilized in film making that leaves the audience on the edge of their seats not knowing what’s to come next. This is the very essence, and beauty, of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Through chiaroscuro and deep historical perspectives, Reed evokes horror and uncertainty as a main motif surrounding the deaths that occur throughout the film.

The Third Man takes place in Vienna when an American pulp western writer, Holly Martins, accepts a job offer from Henry Lime, an old friend, but soon finds himself investigating Lime’s death. As Martins gets deeper in the investigation of the death under unusual circumstances, he is in search of the third man who has been involved with Lime’s death. What the audience, and Martins, begin to discover is Lime’s involvement in the black market—robbing, deluding, and reselling penicillin to children in the military army who were sick, consequentially killing innocent children.

Reed paved the way of using lighting in this film noir to emphasize the horrendous actions and destiny of the characters. Chiaroscuro, a type of lighting used famously by Rembrant, highlights the contrast of light and dark. Reed evokes emotions of creepiness and heavy subjects using the darkness, and in contrast uses a spotlight for the character’s faces. This technique was widely used in later Hollywood films because of The Third Man. Reed also uses elongated shadows to evoke the feeling of mystery and uneasiness in the characters, and the audience. In an iconic clip, Martins is walking the streets of Vienna at night and the light from street lamps nearby casts a shadow on the buildings—the shadows, however, are enormous, and are exaggerated to emphasize the feeling of suspicion and creepiness when he is walking in the dark. His shadow, being even longer than the street lamps, shows how great and important his character is, how his shadow takes over the streets of Vienna—one of the most iconic scenes in the film.

During the chase in the sewer, similar lighting techniques are used. It’s incredibly dark and you can only see shadows and flashlights, but that specific gray lighting shows the musty feeling of the air. The audience is literally being kept in the dark when this chase is happening since Martins is trying to get Harry, who is undercover, to surrender. But when British sergeant Paine is caught off guard and in the open, Harry shoots him. The audience is just as bewildered and have not been expecting this death. The shadowing evokes suspense and thrill that deepen the emotions of creepiness and surprise. 

The historical significance of this movie helps further understand the characters. After WWII, Vienna was torn into four sections and became exhausted of its resources. The people didn’t have any money, and were incredibly desperate. This shows the motive of Lime’s atrocities in the military hospital. To Lime, diluting and selling wrongful medication was the best and fastest way to make money, even though it had immense consequences—killing children and families. On top of the chilling use of lighting, this movie covers in depth the post-war effect on people. I was born and raised in the post-war Balkans and can relate to witnessing the post-war depression of the people. The atrocities have caused a physical and mental strain on people, and this movie shows this suffering through Lime and various background character’s stories such as Anne’s. Reed almost makes the audience feel bad for Lime at times because of this suffering post-war, even though he is a murderer and a criminal. The contrast and the tension that develops in the characters as Martins begins to unravel the mystery makes the plot incredibly suspenseful. 

The Third Man helped pave the way for many Hollywood movies with use of heavy artistic style of chiaroscuro, film noir, and rich historical meaning that creates tension and suspense throughout the movie keeping the audience on edge. As we carefully look at the actions of Martins and Lime throughout the movie, during a time of immense hardship, we hope to learn from their decisions and behaviors.

2023 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Marlena Rohde

LA DOLCE VITA

by Marlena Rohde

Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni first met on a beach in Rome. Fellini told Marcello that he wanted him for a movie he had begun working on, La Dolce Vita, because Marcello was “the face of normal,” and Marcello asked to see the script. Fellini handed him a folder of pages, all blank except for the first, on which Fellini had sketched a man with an enormous phallus swimming in the sea, surrounded by dancing mermaids. When I learned about this interaction, La Dolce Vita suddenly began to make sense to me. La Dolce Vita follows a journalist named Marcello over seven days and seven nights, as he goes from a cynical observer of the wealthy and famous to one of them. Fellini was influenced by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and therefore uses monsters and the subversion of the physical form to make a statement about Marcello. La Dolce Vita uses Marcello’s transformation into a sea creature to criticize his indoctrination into the lives of the wealthy, opening up a broader connection between Fellini’s life and Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about two transformations: the mutation of Gregor Samsa into a bug, and the growth of Samsa’s sister from a girl to a woman. Gregor Samsa, an ordinary traveling salesman, is the sole supporter of his family, until he wakes up one morning as a large insect. Samsa’s family suddenly fears and ignores Samsa, making him compliant and aimless. Samsa’s transformation inadvertently turns his sister, Grete, from a passive girl without passions to the leader of the family. She also dedicates herself to her violin playing, emphasizing her choice to and ability to pursue art, in contrast to Gregor’s hollow career. 

In La Dolce Vita, Marcello undergoes the transformation from man to creature, while Fellini himself undergoes artistic growth that mirrors Grete’s. La Dolce Vita ends with Marcello and the wealthy and famous attendees of an all-night orgy standing around a large sea creature that has washed ashore. “It insists on looking,” says Marcello. Marcello, like the paparazzi and like the audience itself, is unable to turn away from the world of the wealthy and famous. The party picks up the sea creature and carries it home to eat it, and Marcello himself is dragged away from the foreground of the screen, away from the audience, into that inaccessible world. Like Gregor Samsa, Marcello becomes complicit, loses his self sufficiency, in his transformation from man to sea creature, from author and observer to one of them. Like Grete, Fellini seemed to undergo the opposite transformation – he became self-assured and dedicated to his craft. In The Films of Federico Fellini, Peter Bondella writes: “Up to the appearance of La dolce vita, in fact, Fellini's intellectual trajectory seems to be clear: His films begin in the shadow of neorealist portraits of life in the sleepy provinces of Italy, focus upon various forms of show-business types, and ultimately lead toward the capital city of Rome and the "sweet life" of movie stars, gossip columnists, and paparazzi scandalmongers. After that point, Fellini's cinema turns inward toward an overriding concern with memory, dreams, a meditation on the nature of cinematic artistry, and the director's fantasies.” La Dolce Vita was a turning point in Fellini’s career, away from the neorealism that had a grip on Italian cinema, and towards art films regarding his childhood, his dreams, Italian history, and the nature of cinema. After La Dolce Vita, Fellini no longer cared about commercial success. His films became more personal and artistic, with 8 ½, The Satyricon, and Casanova. Fellini blossomed into an artist with his own style and a real belief in his work and its authority. 

Marcello interpreted the man with the large phallus, surrounded by mermaids, to be a self-portrait of Fellini. I agree. Fellini himself came from humble parents in the small tourist town of Rimini, and dreamed of going to Rome. By the time he began working on La Dolce Vita, Fellini had been fully incorporated into the empty but glamorous world of the wealthy and famous. In the image from the script, he drew himself as malformed, almost inhuman, and surrounded by people who were glamorous and beautiful but also mythical. Marcello is an extension of Fellini, the dreamer from Rimini who had creative pursuits but didn’t know how to follow them, or how to believe in them. I think that in La Dolce Vita, Fellini was forced to see what he could become, the final stage of his transition in the sea: the washed up sea creature. And I think that by confronting that image, Fellini was able to turn away and begin making art for himself. But the audience insists on looking.

2023 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Marshall Muscat

AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE

by Marshall Muscat

Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table (1990) follows the life of Janet Frame, a real-life poet and author. It covers her journey from a child to adulthood. We get a vulnerable experience of someone's life through a film that feels like a turbulent sea, full of devastating low points. 

Opening on the green farmlands of New Zealand, we meet the Frames, a working-class family with heads full of curly, red hair. 

It's an idyllic landscape, but the tone of the films quickly becomes more serious as one of the first scenes of Janet in an elementary school where she is caught sharing chewing gum by the teacher and lied when questioned, resulting in her getting sent to stand against the blackboard until she tells the truth. She is singled out in front of the class, creating a divide between her and her peers.

As the film continues, the tone darkens more as her brother struggles with epilepsy, causing fear to spread throughout the house and making a financially unstable household even more uneasy. Tragedy continues as one of her older sisters drowns, driving Janet into a depression. 

Later when she's in college, she abandons her studies to realize her dream of becoming a poet, and sets off to start a writing career where she moves around Europe creating poems. 

However, she experiences more tragedy as her issues with depression get misdiagnosed as schizophrenia and she is sent to a mental asylum where she is subjected to over 200 sessions of shock therapy. 

She is only freed when her work is published and becomes popular. With her newfound freedom she moves to Italy meeting a new cast of characters, including a love interest who eventually leaves her, but she moves on and moves back to New Zealand. 

The film has frequent time skips such as jumping from Janet's life in high school to seeing her as a fully adjusted college student in the next shot, but the shift in time always feels so seamless and I was easily able to understand what was happening right away without it feeling like the director is obnoxiously announcing what stage of life Janet is in. 

Even with the dark tone of the film, it never feels unrealistic and the characters feel very relatable. All of this personality and human empathy is pushed into the audience by the camerawork. The movie is filled with shots of faces shot on a handheld camera, 

making the viewers gain a better understanding of the characters' emotions and even draw them into the world as if they were a part of the story as well. 

The ending of the movie left me extremely satisfied. The final shots of the reporters struggling to climb the green New Zealand hills that Janet comfortably sat upon tied the story together expertly and made it feel like a full story. We are returning to the place where the film started, but with Janet as a changed and complete person. 

An Angel at my Table was a story that made me think about helplessness and start to understand what it means to be a woman. Throughout the film, her feelings are discarded, she isn't taken seriously, and she's seen as an object by those around her. 

From the elementary school classroom, the treatment of Janet by her teacher makes her feel ostracized in her community from the very beginning. 

At home, she's never put first because of issues with money and her brother's condition. This has a severe impact on her mental health and shows how the situation that she grew up in put her at a disadvantage from the start, which serves as a parallel to the situation many women find themselves in, even in today's society. 

Her sister's death scarred her, but nobody was able to take her feelings seriously, leaving her to feel hopeless and lost. 

Her roommate that she was forced to stay with in London put on a front of "looking out for her, but there was always an uncomfortable implication that treated her like that because of her gender, and because he wanted to keep control over her as a woman. 

The electroshock therapy was probably the most difficult part of the film, where countless women during the time were dismissed and the only solution provided was to essentially cause brain damage to them. She is only released from the facility and given basic human treatment after gaining a reputation and following from her poetry work that almost none amount to, further emphasizing the lack of credibility that society gives women.

In Italy, she is cast aside by a man she thought she could trust because he doesn't see her as anything more than a naive woman. 

Even the man that Janet finds romance with struck me as weirdly pushy and it felt like he was pressuring her into the sex that they had at the start of their relationship. It felt like he didn't entirely value Janet's feelings, even if he did "love" her. 

I went to see An Angel at my Table on a whim, but I ended up thoroughly enjoying the film and it felt like something that contributed to my understanding of the world. In an age where movie productions capitalize on showing off women's bodies, this film offers a contrasting look on real struggles that people can relate to, and even makes the sec scenes. not feel sexualized. Campion doesn't offer something empowering, but used this film to recognize those struggling like Janet and I believe that it could help them feel less alone in their lives.

2023 Tarkovsky Prize 3rd Place: Catherine Hung

RAN

by Catherine Hung

Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is nothing short of a beautifully tragic and visually devastating masterpiece. The 1985 action drama dances and pierces its audience with the usages of colour and symbolism through the impact of consistent themes to draw you into the complex world of Ran. 

Colour is a prominent character in the film, representing multiple characters and setting an environment. Initially, the three sons have their primary colours—red, gold-yellow, and blue, with their father Hidetora Ichimonji donning a silver-yellow outfit. However, as the film progresses, red, the original colour for the eldest son Taro, is stripped from his literal corpse and taken by the second son, Jiro. Something to note here is the fact that red is seen as a prosperous colour in Japanese culture, which is interesting considering the red colour seems to symbolise all-having power and strength in the film. It is no mistake that Jiro essentially replaces his brother, taking his title of the Great Lord of the Ichimonji as well as Taro’s wife, Lady Kaede.

I noticed something intriguing whilst watching Ran in regards to colour: both Taro and Jiro are warm-toned colours, red and yellow respectively, yet Saburo, the youngest as well as the most logical and defiant brother, represents the colour blue. 

This cool-toned versus warm-toned battle is consistent throughout the film when later on, most of those who are in the “morally right” and “correct” are wearing blue or something cool-coloured, such as Tango, Hidetora’s main advisor and later follower of Saburo. Interestingly enough, the two other clans that are unrelated to the Ichimonji family affair and are more active bystanders are represented by white and black, which are not colours but shades. This shows their detached nature from the main story and how they are simply observing from the sidelines without getting mixed up in their colour war.

Hidetora’s initial silver-yellow outfit slowly becomes white and flowing as Ran progresses, symbolising the spiralling nature of his mental state, as well as grief and death. It’s almost ghost-like whenever Hidetora walks or stumbles as though he’s no longer living yet still haunting his own body. In the scene after the Third Castle was destroyed, Hidetora quietly struggles out of the burnt, arrow and ammunition-filled castle where both Taro and Jiro’s army are waiting outside, weapons ready to attack if Hidetora made any dangerous moves. Yet they move aside as Hidetora walks through them like he is Moses parting the Red Sea. He’s pale as ash and sickly looking like a corpse, yet they do not attack him. Hidetora has truly lost everything, and as he walks out of the castle gates and into the storm ahead of him, his bright, dynamic white outfit shines through the dust and fog. It symbolises death.

To even further explain this point, another prominent character who ultimately dies after being stricken with so much grief is Kaede. Her family was killed and their land was stolen by Hidetora, so her entire plot is to take revenge on Hidetora and the entire clan of Ichimonji. She starts off wearing a pale dark blue-silver, a colour of “logic,” and ends with her wearing a white, flowing dress. White symbolising death is also very common in East Asian cultures, and I believe this sort of ghostly-white appearance is intentional by Kurosawa, as in another film he directed called Dreams, there too is a character dressed in white symbolising death.

Symbolism is by far one of the most important things in the film as it encapsulates both colour and space. Kurosawa expertly foreshadows the end of the film through the fool, Kyoami. He’s the foil to Hidetora, starting off illogical and idiotic then revealing himself as more knowledgeable and intelligent. In the beginning, Kyoami is a stereotypical jester character with the jester's privilege, which is the right of a jester to talk and mock freely without being punished for it. He’s protected by this privilege, just like how Hidetora was protected by his title of Great Lord and his reputation. Kyoami is loyal to Hidetora, unlike Hidetora’s loyalty to his family. There are later instances where these two are compared. 

One example of a comparison of the lord and jester in the film is a scene at the very start where Hidetora requests Kyoami to make a joke. He does an act where he looks off into the distance, almost unconsciously, following something in the distance, which makes everyone else follow his gaze. Everyone else sees nothing, and then Kyoami bursts out with a comedic joke, causing almost everyone to laugh. Saburo is the only one to not find Kyoami humorous and even taunts him in front of everyone, showing more of Saburo’s rationality. Then, later on in Ran, as Hidetora slowly succumbs to his madness, grief, and guilt, he does the exact same thing Kyoami does: he looks off into the distance while everyone follows his eyes. Except, this time, he starts screaming instead of laughing, his fears eating at his bones, and falls back. He is accompanied by Kyoami, the fool, who witnesses his former Great Lord fall from his honour, and this comparison of the two really shows Kurosawa’s incredible symbolism.

These two scenes create an implication that Hidetora is now the fool, no longer respectable and has fallen from grace. The fact that Kyoami watches this happen with a sensible and intelligent mind is a complete flip from the beginning of the film.

Another scene that was especially significant in the way Kurosawa uses symbolism in Ran is in the final scene when Saburo gets killed right after he and Hidetora reconcile. During Saburo’s death, there are four people total in the scene: Hidetora, Tango, Kyoami, and of course, Saburo himself. They surround his corpse as they all sob for their fallen friend and family. However, the important thing here is not exactly Saburo’s death, but the number of people there were during it. Four is an unlucky number in Japanese culture. The reason for this is due to its secondary pronunciation, which, instead of “yon,” it’s pronounced as “shi.” This change in pronunciation, which is prevalent in both Japanese and Chinese languages, symbolises death, hence why it’s an unlucky number. “Shi,” with a subtle tonal shift, can sound exactly like the word death. 

Ran is a film that I can analyse for aeons about, how Kurosawa masterfully uses colouring lighting in his set designs, the way symbolism connects space and foreshadowing, and overall the dramatic, almost ironic, tragedy of a beautiful piece of work. I would recommend all of Kurosawa’s films to anyone who enjoys Shakespearean tragedies and desires a more unfortunate yet realistic slice of life.

2023 Tarkovsky Prize 2nd Place: Elena Sasu

REBELS OF THE NEON GOD: Existing Without Living

by Elena Sasu

Rebels of the Neon God, a Taiwanese film written and directed by Ming-liang Tsai, follows the lives of several young men and women as they traverse the monotony and loneliness of their everyday lives in Taipei. Hsiao-Kang attends a cram school, living with his parents and seemingly isolated from others his age. Ah Tze and Ah Ping have a close friendship revolving around arcade games and thievery, yet part ways every night to return home to empty apartments. Ah Kuei shifts between inclusion in Ah Tze and Ah Ping’s friendship and being cast aside by Ah Tze during their romantic relationship. Ming-liang Tsai utilizes sharp setting contrasts, interpersonal relationships, and character motivations to showcase the deep unhappiness and unfulfillment of a life without purpose or connection.

The Taipei explored in Rebels of the Neon God is a large and bustling city, full of life and energy. In the day, cars and mopeds battle for domination of the busy streets. Night-time brings bright neon lights and crowds of people at restaurants and skating rinks. Regardless, the characters never seem to be swept up into this tide of vitality and vibrancy, maintaining a somber air throughout most scenes. As soon as Hsiao-Kang or Ah Tze enter into their private spaces and shut the door behind them, the viewer is overcome with an atmosphere of despair. The camera frequently pans to the water flooding Ah Tze’s apartment, receding and then slowly seeping back up, a feeling of helplessness setting in when he gives up trying to clear the drain and just accepts that he’ll have to wade through water to even reach his bed. Smooth camera transitions between characters as they lay curled up on a bed or grudgingly go through the motions of hated everyday responsibilities highlight their shared depression. Although they adopt a cheery facade when around each other, the camera strips them of this mask, chronicling their private fatigue and despondency. Throughout the film, dialogue takes a backseat as the scenery and cinematography convey the constantly shifting mood. Ming-liang Tsai capitalizes upon the vivid color and atmosphere of the city, artfully creating high contrast with the silence and blandness of lives that seem completely removed from their surroundings. It is made abundantly clear that this disconnect is an underlying cause of their melancholy reality.

Rebels of the Neon God is full of complex and emotional relationships, often characterized by a lack of communication or mutual understanding. Although they live together, Hsiao-Kang and his father have a very distant and superficial relationship. Initially, this isn’t due to lack of trying on his father’s behalf. An early scene shows him trying to bond with his son, suggesting they go see a movie together. When they buy fruit to eat at the market, he wordlessly shovels half of his onto his son’s plate. These actions are touching, but the scene turns sorrowful as Hsiao-Kang remains silent, not willing to form a connection. This coldness between them makes it especially strangethat Hsiao-Kang is willing to abandon everything to seek revenge for his father. Theirrelationship takes a turn for the worse when Hsiao-Kang drops out of cram school,culminating in his father locking him out of the house. His life spirals downwards as he gets cut off from his family, wandering the streets of Taipei alone and unnoticed.

Another relationship central to the film is the romance, if it can even be called that, between Ah Tze and Ah Kuei. When they meet, they initially behave like carefree teens, laughing and exploring and drinking a little too much. Frustration grows as she clearly desires a committed relationship from him, but his emotional unavailability leaves her feeling used and unimportant. The viewer is constantly faced with scenes of Ah Tze abandoning Ah Kuei, from standing her up on a date to repeatedly leaving her after they’ve slept together. As the camera pans out from her sleeping figure to the emptiness of an unfamiliar room, we know the misery we will see on her face when she awakes. Yet, she keeps returning to him, despite the fact that he is clearly not willing or able to give her the love that she deserves. In a way, their relationship is plagued by similar issues to the relationship between Hsiao-Kang and his father. Resentment and frustration are allowed to build as they do anything but talk about their emotions or the problems they’re facing. Any level of communication would be beneficial, but instead they struggle forwards alone, pushing away everyone around them. Again and again, these failed relationships highlight the theme of complete disconnect between these characters and the world around them. 

Rebels of the Neon God masterfully explores the futility of a life lacking purpose. Although some characters attend school or have jobs, none are following their passions, and each day only drains them further. The only instance of anyone showing any drive is during Hsiao-Kang’s quest for vengeance. When Ah Tze shatters the side mirror of his father’s car, he is seemingly possessed with a desire for retribution. It starts off with a quiet sort of anger, the scenes imbued with a sense of creepiness as Hsiao-Kang obsessively stalks Ah Tze throughout the city, constantly appearing in the corner of the camera frame like a ghost. This obsession is all-consuming, and yet Hsiao-Kang’s face doesn’t betray a single shred of emotion until he succeeds in his revenge. As Ah Tze discovers his vandalized moped, scratched and covered in brightly colored spray paint, Hsiao-Kang watches from above. He is overcome with glee, jumping up and down on his bed while grinning and cackling like a madman. Revenge gives him a goal to achieve, and allows him to finally exert some element of control over his own life. Regardless, as soon as his convoluted mission is over, he is back to square one. Just like everyone else, his narrative is predominantly devoid of purpose and meaning, overwhelmed by the sheer tedium of his daily routine.

The ending of Rebels of the Neon God is unsatisfying. There is no grand finale, no heartfelt resolution. As the wins and losses even out, no character truly ends up in a better place than where they started. Hsiao-Kang succeeds in exacting his revenge, but at the cost of his family and potentially even his future. Ah Tze and Ah Kuei may find happiness as a couple, but Ah Tze’s and Ah Ping’s criminal activity has caught up to them. They are all still in Taipei, stuck in the endless drudgery of a life without any sort of fulfillment. Through sharp setting contrasts, interpersonal relationships, and character motivations, Ming-liang Tsai creates an almost tangible sense of despair and depression caused by a lack of purpose and connection. If I had to summarize the message of this movie, I would call upon the words of Oscar Wilde: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Rebels of the Neon God is so compelling and evocative because it feeds upon what I believe is a commonly held fear — that we will be so busy battling through our lives that we will forget to live them.

2023 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Hannah Wissotzky

VIENDO ROJA—On VOLVER

by Hannah Wissotzky

I entered this world screaming, lungs strained, tiny fists punching the air, legs struggling for purchase. That was the last time I was afforded such an excess of emotion. I was born a woman, mystified as men were afforded the leeway of boys long after the title had expired. My education beyond that of common Arithmetic and English encouraged silence and fragility. I made myself as small as possible in an effort to assuage my guilt over existing in a world that seemingly didn’t want me. Maybe they were right because deep within me is madness; if I were to ‘lose control’ of my temper, my appetite, my sexuality, my feelings, my ambitions, my secrets, my fantasies, my mind; the world would have a force to reckon with, something uncontrollable, god forbid.

That is "womanhood," a balancing act between expectation and reality, a battle orchestrated to distract from the war. The movie Volver by Pedro Almodóvar is an ode to that. It focuses on a group of women who tackle sexual abuse, death, revenge, parental abandonment, superstition, and trauma, delving into the female experience in all of its bloody glory. Crimson, a color prevalent in women's lives discovered as early as nine, smeared across crisp sheets or white lace underwear, stark in contrast. In this movie, red is spilled, worn, splattered, cleaned, and celebrated. It is seen in almost every scene, from the worn flowery tea set, checkered floor tiles, lined edge of an apron, block-type text in the opening credits to the bright eyelet patterned knit sweater worn. It is more than a dominant wavelength of approximately 625–740 nanometres. It reflects the range of emotions and abuses depicted in this story.

Raimunda, the main character, can be seen cleaning bright ruby blood off a knife in a poignant and awkwardly long clip contrasted with a parallel scene cleaning the same knife of food remnants sans blood later in the movie. This moment is crucial as it represents Raimunda’s feminine rage, contained, methodic, measured, equivalent to the strokes of a sponge against the edge of a knife, her wrongdoing tucked casually in the freezer, her boyfriend Paco’s dead body. Rather than crying over him, Raimunda is composed, actively working to conceal his death. She wipes up his blood and throws away the stained paper towels in the trash bin. Thrilling, suspenseful music provides the backdrop, granting a sense of foreboding, traditional in horror films. Referencing Spanish culture, red depicts, either the honoring or rejection/supression of death. Raimundas response to Paco’s death is grossly dissimilar to the first scene, in which we see a long pan of women cleaning and sweeping in a cemetery to honor those who have passed; cheery Spanish music playing in the background as woman place strikingly red marigolds on the graves.

Death decorates the hands of the woman in Volver. Retribution is the culprit, the ending a happy one, its nonsensicalness as stark as the red decorating the story. The fear of being painted an angry woman, a label akin to insanity in society, keeps the freedom these women possess entrapped in the pixels of the screen. Yet I refuse to believe the right to raise my voice and own my anger is asking too much; there isn’t even a body hidden in my freezer, allegedly.

Review: LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

by Lucy Johns, Art and Film mentor

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is a sprawling 19th century novel of a film. it creates a familiar world in meticulous physical detail, develops a few paradigm characters an audience wants to know more about at every turn of their cosmopolitan lives, shimmers with cultural references for the educated commentator. It even lodges in the great European tradition of political subversion so veiled that censors beguiled by the story should not notice the challenge. It is, in short, an irresistible, unforgettable and timeless cinematic achievement.

Through what must have been heroic maneuvers to secure financing and space for his vision, director Marcel Carné built an immense Boulevard to frame his story of a woman so beautiful that men’s entire lives warp around their desire for her. The Boulevard signifies the era when such public spaces were new in Paris, circa 1830, exploding with street life reminiscent of but much bigger than its medieval antecedents. Great crowds, a constant flow of coaches and horsemen, blocks of sideshows throng the scene. One of the attractions is a completely naked woman to be viewed for only a few centimes. That she is immersed in a barrel of water, showing only her face, neck and sculptural shoulders, is unknown until the gullible are inside the peep show. A handsome aspiring actor makes the rounds of little theaters, pushing for a place with operatic flair and unflagging ambition. A sinister gangster plies his trade in theft, fencing, perhaps a murder here and there. A mime, so disrespected he performs on stage outside, not meriting the price of admission, slumps in his shapeless white garments, observing the surges of people through heavily painted eyes. These are the characters we will follow for the rest of the film. The woman, now clothed in a fetching dress, attracts the actor, who woes her with poetry and unmistakable lust. She brushes him off with magnetic charm, then enters the gangster’s storefront, apparently familiar, where he bores her with philosophical tirades explaining his misanthropic life and proclaiming indifference to love. She leaves, he follows, they pause to listen to a barker promoting a play. A fat gentleman sidles up to her, the stereotype distraction, while the gangster picks his pocket. He bawls accusations at the woman, attracting a gendarme who shouts for a witness. The mime awakens. His pantomime of the woman, the victim, the pickpocket and the crime entrances the crowd and relieves the woman of suspicion. She tosses him a rose. His fate is sealed.

The mime Baptiste is Jean-Louis Barrault, one of the greatest of the 20th century and surely the best such performance ever in film. The beauty Garance is Arletty, whose affair with a German officer during the Nazi occupation of Paris must’ve been a factor in Carne’s ability to get this film made in the middle of World War II. (It also earned her a prison term for collaboration after the War.)

Garance’s lovers - respectively the menacing crook, the histrionic actor and later an insufferable Count of the realm - play their roles to perfection. None is able to capture her love although sex is readily available.

This predicament of unrequited love is a pervasive theme of French films, the female object of desire whose body is compliant but whose heart is closely guarded. “Les Enfants” has deeper reverberations, however. Baptiste, who tells Garance of constant beatings by his father during childhood, escapes incessant pain in dreams and then in the wordless anguish his art projects. Art saves lives seemingly doomed to helpless failure. Did this theme influence Ingmar Bergman, whose Alexander in “Fanny and Alexander” is also going to be saved by artistic pursuit? Garance, beautiful, free-spirited, radiating joie de vivre, seems to be France itself, acquiescent but not conquered by German rule. Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” reprises this French archetype, acquiescent but not conquered by her German husband.

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is classical film-making, The camera is still nearly always, filming activity and conversation from a respectful distance. No hovering countable seconds over faces here, so annoyingly prevalent in contemporary movies. It also makes clever use of an ancient dramatic strategy, the play within the play, wherein to catch the conscience of the king. Many scenes occur on stages of theaters full of rapt patrons, an homage to theater as a social force. Garance’s aspiring actor rises to play Othello, where he can strangle the beloved he thinks he’s lost as a foil for the beloved he can’t lose because he never had her. Baptiste, too frightened to embrace Garance in real life when she waits patiently, rises to murder in a play to get some clothes that will let him follow his beloved into a ball. The crowds that began the film, so full of possibilities, end it by overwhelming any lovers who thought they might beat the odds.

Life, not love, is the paradise that “Les Enfants” must embrace. The film is not so much romantic as defiant for a time when no one could know the outcome of Nazi conquest of most of Europe. Such defiance keeps civilization going when power seems out of reach. This message resonates as deeply 70 years later, here in the United States, as it must have in France when “Les Enfants du Paradis” was made.

2001 Tarkovsky Prize 3rd Place: Alexandra Hontalas-Adams

SYMBOLISM IN ANDREI RUBLEV

by Alexandra Hontalas-Adams

Andrei Rublev was an icon painter and saint, who lived in Russia during the fourteen hundreds. Though in Italy the Renaissance was flowering, this was a time the Russians were stumbling through the dark ages suffering from cruel and savage war lords. Rublev had a unique view on what Christianity was based on and how it started.. He believed that the crucifixion of Christ was something like a well staged ad for Christianity. If thrown into modern times, Andrei Rublev would be more at home with the Unitarian church then with his native Russian Orthodox church.

The production of this film was stopped many times by the then communist government of Russia. It took almost ten years to make. The Russian government would not show it for many reasons, one of which was that they were suspicious of something they couldn’t understand. They were right to be nervous because the content of this film examines the true meaning of art and realistically shows many aspects of life in this bloody period of Russian history. Especially in the relationship between war lords, and in the struggle of the peasants who are horribly punished for clinging to their pagan ways by the quickly growing and harsh Russian Orthadox world. In this world joy is the work of the devil and famine common place. This was not the Russia that the communist government wanted to be portrayed. They wanted to clean their slate of the blood and pain and forge a new Russia, where brotherhood was second nature, and class did not matter. They were trying to wash away the social barriers that had made life a dark and never ending catastrophe. This film, in their point of view, was like opening a long festering wound.

This is one of the few films that has as many layers as an onion, so that each time you see it you notice a very different batch of fresh ideas and themes.

One beautifully illustrated example of symbolism is in the prologue of the film. The first image is one of a primitive hot air balloon against a white cathedral. As people prepare for the balloon to be sent up, you see people on horses riding toward them, menacing, and armed.  We follow the man that we gather is going to fly on this balloon. As the man runs through a corridor we see a black horse through a doorway trotting away form the threatening men. One of the most stunning dolly shots that stays in your mind forever, is one that moves down from the window view,  past perfectly placed boats, to the ground where the threatening men have reached the balloon. In our first bitter taste of the cruel and blunt brutality, the man holding the balloon’s rope, has his eyes put out. Slowly floating above the cathedral the man calls down to the followers as he pushes away from the white wall of saints that are carved on the cathedral wall.  Although it is a great image it is easy to overlook because of its subtlety. Then we are flying with the man who laughs merrily thinking he has escaped his Christian pursuers. The sound is prefect—breathing— as air escapes the balloon.  You see earth and water in the landscape blend together and the sky is reflected in the water. This is a thread that is woven it all Tarkovsky’s films. He enjoys playing with the idea of earth, water, sky, and fire.  The balloon loses air and falls down to the ground.

In this scene Tarkovsky remains true to reality. The flying man does not speak noble last words or die praying. Instead he is afraid and calls for his companions. Then the truly unforgettable image of this prologue appears: the same black horse seen near the beginning has fallen, then slowly rises up, and trots away while strange, eerie music plays, giving it an unreal quality.  What does it mean? Does the horse symbolize all the grief he has, now leaving him as he dies?  Does it symbolize his life slipping away?  Does it symbolize his soul? Or does it symbolize him living on in memory?  Symbolism is in the eyes of the beholder, and you must answer it as you will.

The horse is one of the symbols that is used throughout this film. Fallen horses, rising horses, dying horses, horses throwing off Tartars, horses galloping, and finally horses peacefully standing in the rain for no apparent reason. Many people ask, why horses? The film is epic, like some endless journey, and the horse seems an appropriate symbol to move its themes forward.

In one of the early scenes our main character is seen leaving a cathedral to go off with his friends. The birds are singing and you hear the sound of animals. It starts to rain, and the three companions seek shelter with a group of peasants that are being entertained by a lively jester playing a drum and dancing.  When the three monks enter all is silence. The jester places a cup on his head. Why, who knows? The monks sit in the back of the shed and the camera moves all the way around the shed at the ragged clothes, and starved faces. The same other worldly music is played, because Andre had been in a monastery his whole life this would have been the first time he has seen people that suffer and have less then he even has. When we go back to the monks, one named Kirill has gone. Then outside a pack of peaceful horses, flee as a group of horsemen ride to the shed, fling open the door, and arrest the jester. The jester comes out bare chested, in the rain, and they knock him unconscious and ride off. Now because this is the first time that Andre has seen the church police in action, it is very important. For although many may not be aware of it,  the church at this time thought that jesters, who the people loved and who gave them laughter in a cold gray world, were sent by the devil  and needed to be punished and tortured as criminals. Kirill, one of Rublev’s friends,  returns from outside and hurries his fellow monk out ignoring their questions.  We learn later in the film, it is he who has betrayed the jester.

The next segment dogs are used as important symbols.  The episode starts with an  alarming scene, in which Kirill walks by a large crowd of people watching a man being tortured.  Kirill goes to a famous icon painter and urges him to come to their monastery and ask him to be his assistant. At the monastery you see Kirill washing his hands and lighting a torch although it is day. You see the fire reflected in the water, more of the mixing of the elements theme that Tarkovsky loves so dearly. We hear dogs barking, as Kirill hears that there is a messenger. He runs outside. It is dead of winter—you can see the monks emotions in their breath that comes out in clouds. Filmmakers have tried to capture this effect by having people smoking in their movie, but by using their snowy breath, it accomplishes this much more effectively. The message is from the icon painter who sends for Andrei Rublev to help him paint a cathedral.  Kirill is furious. He feels betrayed. He says that he will leave the monastery, go out it to the real world. The monks in black garb (sharply contrasting with the white snow) try to stop him, but he does not listen and angrily leaves the monastery.  Kirill’s dog runs after him, but Kirill beats him savagely, and leaves him for dead.  What is this trying to say? That we like to take things out on our loved ones? That sometimes the ones who are there for us pay for their loyalty?  The image of the bloody dog laying in the snow is unforgettable.

Then in the scene between Andrei, his young assistant, and the other icon painter each person is seen connected to the earth.  For example, Andre is tracing roots with his finger, the assistant has mud on his face to cure bee stings , and the other icon  painter has ants crawling on his bare feet.  In the end the young assistant finds a dead bird and lifts its wing.  These symbols suggest that you most be connected with the earth to become a great artist. 

This next scene deals perfectly with Andrei’s feelings toward religion. It shows what looks like an Easter pageant, in which a man playing Jesus is crucified, with the voice over of Andrei.  Andrei proposes that maybe those who crucified him, loved him. As the poor victim walks to the hill in the snow, the terrain looks like dripping blood. While he is nailed up on the cross there are horses in the background prancing—one of the few times they look happy.  

This next segment is light hearted, but at the same time seriously symbolic.  Andre leaves his traveling companions to investigate some pagans celebrating Midsummer’s Night, dancing and performing strange ceremonies.  Doves fall from the trees, and the pagans play music. One of the more comical images in the film is Andrei’s robe catching on fire.   He watches a couple making love, escapes capture and then at dawn returns to his friends who could never understand what he saw. This is very well symbolized in the image of one of the boats that was uses in a pagan ceremony crashing into one of the monk’s boats.

In “The Last Judgment” sequence time has passed and Andrei is supposed to be painting a cathedral depicting the last judgment. Andre thinks he can not paint this subject matter because he does not believe in scaring people into submission . We see him with one of his friends who wishes him to do the last judgment. They stand in a field of flowers by a road which divides.  As the friend argues that Andrei should paint what he is told, a rider on a black horse appears in the distance, coming toward them.   Andre says that he must as his duty not paint the last judgment.  At that moment the rider rides past them, and vanishes up the other road.  The rider becomes a symbol for Andrei resolve, and the road the two directions Andrei must choose from.

Back in the cathedral, Andrei decides that he will paint a great feast.  You see the princess  splashing him with milk. He tells her that it is sacrilegious to spill milk. The royal children are spoiled and run through the unpainted cathedral screaming and being brats. The lord of the city’s head man is speaking to the masons who say that they are going to go work for the lord’s brother, who he hates.

What follows is one of the most brutal scenes in the film.  The masons, who are clad in white (symbolizing their innocence or purity)  are moving through the forest and come a upon the lord and his henchmen. The lord jabs out the nearest  mason’s eyes, and his men chase the screaming masons wildly through the forest. The lord’s men leave the blinded masons stumbling through the trees screaming and weeping in pain. One young boy who was left unharmed sees a flask of milk– the milk flows in to the nearby stream.

Does this represent their souls, going back into the earth? For we know that they work by their hands and must see to perform their trade, and so will die. Or is Tarkovsy just trying to mystify us?  To leave us with questions?

In the same way you see Andrei angrily splashing black paint on to the pure white walls of the cathedral when he hears about the assault.  A young woman walks in and is very distressed at the paint and, crying, tries to rub it off.   What does that splash of paint mean to her?  It’s a bit like all the symbolism in the film.  You know it’s important, but it’s frustrating because it isn’t easy to interpret or understand.  You think about it long after the film is over. 

Another shining example of symbolic imagery is a scene in which three monks stand under a tree in the rain.  Three figures, a tree, the rain.  Is this another visual connect to the elements.  Earth, water, nature?

In “The Raid,” the theme of pointless violence and death is played out. The jealous prince invades his brother’s city by joining his forces with those of the Tartars. More imagery with horses! As the prince tells the Tartar prince his plan, his horse starts getting nervous, and kicking. When the Tartars start to come down to the town by bridge one of the horses bucks the Tartar off into the river. And more symbolic acts to come! The lord tells of having to kiss his brother as a sign of friendship, then in a flash back we see this meeting, the brothers hug and kiss but then we see their feet for a brief moment.  One presses his foot on top of the other’s shoe. Later this image of pressing down is used when the prince pushes his brother’s headman’s face in the snow with his foot. One of the more startling images is a cow in flames and the owner screaming hysterically and very confused. You also see the realistic fog of war. A lot of time is spent waiting: for walls to be broken, for the other side to attack, for a cathedral door to be rammed open.  One of the key images is of a bewildered horse falling down the stairs and being killed by a spear, silently. Does the horse represent the innocent victim, or the people of the city? Maybe Russia itself? No matter what it represents, this is one of the unforgettable images that stay with you.

An image that will be embedded in my mind forever is that of Andrei’s assistant, shot by an arrow,  falling in a stream with a cloud of milk around him. This trail of milk was used earlier when the masons were blinded.  What does it mean? It occurs before or after violence. Does the milk represent the soul slipping away?   Or of what we first we take as a baby from our mother’s breast  being given back to the earth?

Inside the cathedral you see people in terror, praying.  After the Tartars have broken through the door, they subject a bystander to torture in hopes of pumping him for information as to where the gold is kept.  After he does not tell them what they want to know, they pour hot lead down his throat and tie him to a horse to be torn apart. The horse refuses to move till it has been whipped many times.  Is this yet another symbol? Among the dead you see a young mad girl, braiding a dead woman’s hair. This image is odd and alarming because it seems so out of place.

In the last episode, “The Bell,“  we lose Andrei and are introduced to a new character—a boy who is given the task to make a bell for a cathedral. This was a Herculean task under the best of circumstances, but it was unheard of for a teenager to undertake it. In one image as he is digging the casting pit he finds a root and follows to its source, a nearby tree. He falls a sleep under it.  Is this meant to show that because his dead father was a bell caster he is finding his roots?  

Andrei is not totally absent form this segment.  He is in the background of many key moments. Watching the process of the bell making is amazing. The mass of people needed and the enormous amount of time it takes is extraordinary. Near the end film the two artists, Andrei and the boy stand together in a bleak landscape.  Andrei reaffirms his faith.

Watching Andrei Rublev, you can do one of these three things:

• Ignore the symbolism and just pay attention to the bare plot.

• Ignore the disturbing images and try to twist it into the bright positive film it is not.

• Simply take it in, confusing though it may be, and try to understand and note the symbols the best you can, and give the film its due.

This film deals with themes and ideas, not through wordy monologues and dialogue, but symbols that tell a story of their own.  Many filmmakers are not so enlightened. Tarkovsky uses symbols to create an unearthly state of reality.  He views images as important when they look very dramatic and he lavishes them on this film like sugared violets on a cake. It’s important for him to find the prefect place to put them and match them with the prefect atmosphere, otherwise the effect would be lost.  But do we interpret them correctly? Does the horse represent the people of Russia? What does milk symbolize?  What do all those roads and doorways mean? We can never find out what Tarkovsky thought it symbolized, or the inner working of his mind.  But we can guess and search for a theory that rings true.

2001 Tarkovsky Prize 2nd Place: Stella Lochman

IMAGES IN TARKOVSKY’S ANDREI RUBLEV

by Stella Lochman

The images in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev may seem convoluted or unclear to the untrained eye. After first viewing the film a person feels as if they had just awoken from a dream where their mind was bombarded with more images than they could ever make sense of. But very much like a dream, after letting it settle into the mind everything begins to make sense.

It becomes clear that Tarkovsky wanted to divulge relationships between pictures and events with new and organic images. Tarkovsky believed that deliberately leaving his images open-ended would allow their meanings to continue to grow in the mind of the viewer, and refused to limit imagination with easy explanations that would manipulate the viewer. Tarkovsky had said, “What I’m interested in is not symbols, but images. An image has an unlimited number of possible interpretations.” Tarkovsky was using what is called poetic reasoning. “In my view poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama.“

With that in mind, one can go over the recurring images in the film.

The first one that comes to mind is that of birds. The concept of flying has been haunting human minds for centuries now, but never in the same haunting way as in Andrei Rublev. The opening scene is of a man betraying all human laws and flying. Alone this could be a fairly simple image, but when you parallel it with the other images of birds in the film—including a constant rain of feathers inside a cathedral, and a disfigured swan, and any number of falling white birds—the idea of this man flying takes on a whole new level, particularly the fact that he fails. The birds in this film represent something pagan, or ritualistic. The fact that this man fails to fly could represent the downfall of all that is pagan. There is also a chicken that appears above the boy, the bell maker’s son, in the last sequence called “the Bell.” The bird is framed in a black window over the boy’s shoulder right before then men come to take him away. Though this chicken is nothing pagan, it’s docile attitude might represent something else: the end of this boy’s life on the farm, and the beginning of something big.

Another prominent symbol in Andrei Rublev is snow. Not only does the element give the film making a very “black on white” style, but it also symbolizes martyrdom of some kind. This is pure Tarkovsky to relate snow with martyrdom, a very unlikely match. Yet several times in the film people and things are seen eating snow. The first time snow is eaten is by Jesus Christ himself minutes before being crucified. The next thing to eat snow is one of the monk’s dogs, right before the dog fight scene in the “Charity” section. Minutes later the dog is attack by a Tartar’s dog. And finally snow is eaten in the Charity scene again. The deaf mute girl is shoveling handfuls of it into her mouth only minutes before being carried away on horseback by the Tartars.

Finally, there is the symbol that Andrei Rublev is famous for, the horses. Hundreds of horses of all colors and builds are seen through out the film. Tarkovsky makes a special point in his “poetic reasoning” to give each scene with a horse image a separate meaning. This first thing that’s important is the color of the horse. White horses are used in much different circumstances than black ones. Black horses bring up darker, more immoral ideals—all of the Tartars ride dark horses—where as white horses give the sense of purity. The most poignant example of the color difference is in the Crucifixion scene where in the front with the peasantry are six black horses, and alone at the top of the hill with Christ on the cross is a single white horse.

An extremely dramatic use of horses in the film is to associate them with the violence of man. During the Raid sequence, where a town is attacked and its inhabitants massacred, countless horses are slaughtered, the most stunning being, of course, the black horse that falls down a flight of stairs and then is stabbed to death with a lance. This single image stays in the mind long after leaving the film, and its meaning makes the viewer contemplate everything about life that seems unfair and horrible. There are also scenes where the horses regain their strength, as if coming to life again, and others where they buck their riders off. What all of this “horse business” comes down to is that Tarkovsky is able to change the meaning of his symbols in the running narrative of the film, while juxtaposing the images as well.

Andrei Rublev’s imagery and tone is summed up in the epilogue when the film transforms from black and white into color and scans over the real Andrei Rublev’s surviving work. What is amazing about this extraordinary sequence is that all of the images in the film reappear in this ten-minute scene. All of Tarkovsky’s imagery is paralleled in the actual work of Rublev. Two artists, hundreds of years apart, are working together to create an unforgettable dream. A dream one can always get lost in.

2001 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Daniel Kleinman

CLEAR SYMBOLS IN THE CONFUSING IMAGERY OF ANDREI RUBLEV

by Daniel Kleinman

Throughout his professional career Andrei Tarkovsky would deny the presence of symbolism in his films. He preferred to call it imagery. It may not be easy to spot and when it can be, it is often very complex, but the film is indeed rife with symbols. Some, such as the use of horses, are so multifaceted in the context of the whole film it is nearly impossible to decipher them as a whole, though on a scene-by-scene basis they become much clearer. Other symbols, such as roads, doorways, etc. have such broad connotations that discussion of them is equally difficult. There are, however, several clear themes which are illustrated by the symbolism which accompanies them. One of the most interesting and consistent throughout the film is the presence of birds. Throughout Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky masterfully uses many types of birds to reveal beautiful and insightful meanings and enhance the film in general.

Rublev’s portrayal of a white bird as an emblem in one of his paintings, (which are featured in color at the end of the film), served, I predict, as the perfect inspiration for the use of this symbol. Though this bird symbol, particularly white birds, does not morph into various meanings throughout the film like the symbols of horses do, it does carry numerous related connotations that reveal themselves more prominently in specific scenes than in others. Chickens and roosters, for example, do not consistently carry the same themes as the other birds discussed here, though they definitely do have specific meaning and specific purposes, the clearest example being that of the rooster in the window when “The Bell” sequence first begins.

The first major scene featuring the imagery of birds is during “Theophanes the Greek.” Andrei and Foma, his apprentice, run across Theophanes in the forest while Andrei criticizes Foma’s faith and character. Theophanes promptly agrees and reinforces what Andrei says when he tells Foma that, “He should be beaten every Saturday like a dog.” At this point Foma comes across a dead white bird, presumably a goose. He stares at it for a while, and then removes a beetle from it with a stick. The scene ends with Foma examining the bird’s lifeless wing. In this scene the bird represents Foma’s faith. Foma has never heard such an interpretation of his own faith and character from someone as prominent as Theophanes the Greek, and those harsh comments lead Foma to reexamine and improve his faith, symbolized in his removal of the beetle and examination of the wing.

The next major scene featuring the symbolism of birds is “The Holiday.” Four or five birds are seen falling from the dark trees as Rublev treks through the forest towards the Pagan rituals. He knows that sacrilege and sin is there waiting for him, but his curiosity pushes him forward. The falling birds shouldn’t be interpreted as a lack of faith of the Pagans, as they had no faith to begin with. Rather, the birds should be interpreted as the crumbling of the strict form that Rublev’s faith expresses itself in. Though he won’t be truly awakened to his true understanding of his own faith until the end of the film, the birds here symbolize the beginning of the end for his severely limited “Monk’s form” of Christianity.

 In case the audience has not picked up on the constant theme of birds and their symbolism of faith and Christianity they are reminded very clearly when the stonemason remarks twice how the carvings of the Prince’s church are like the song of birds, light and beautiful.

In the most dramatic scene featuring the symbolism of birds, two large geese are seen flying/falling down from the Cathedral roof into a huge fire and total chaos below in “The Raid.” These birds symbolize the Prince’s loss of faith as well as a general assault on Christianity and God Himself, as we can be led to believe by the preceding shot of the remorseful and regretful Prince with his men stripping the gold from the top of the church.

In an interesting and insightful scene, towards the beginning of “The Bell” a bird is seen flying across the screen, staying level and not losing altitude. Below it the bell casters are digging the casting pit. Here the bird symbolizes not a loss of faith but rather a progression of it because people are coming together in unity to glorify God.

The last, momentary shot of a bird, aside from the bird on the emblem featured in the color sequence, is the most difficult to decipher. Also in “The Bell” Kirill and Andrei take refuge under a tree in a storm, and Kirill is holding a small black bird. If one is to look at the film in terms of black and white carrying their common connotations of bad and good, respectively, then the small black bird could symbolize Kirill’s vanity and betrayal, which have fueled his life for as long as we, the audience, have seen him. These weaknesses caused him to leave the monastery, and they also caused him to come back to Andrei, indirectly. At this point in the film, however, though vanity and betrayal remain a major part of his history, Kirill now has them under control, hence the black bird he is holding.

Tarkovsky paints a myriad of emotions in Andrei Rublev.  The pictures are so rich and so complex that the term imagery may be more appropriate to use than the term symbolism. These birds, however, remain clearly symbolic.  They reflect the faith and character of the people, and they come together as major symbols not only in this film but in all of Tarkovsky’s works: the enduring nature of Mother Russia, the Russian people, and the faith that Tarkovsky so strongly believed in.

Review: THE WORLD OF APU

By Lucy Johns, Art and Film mentor

When Apu wakes long after his new bride is up from their humble bed in Calcutta – a couple of tables spread with a thin pad - his hand emerges from under the pillow holding a hairpin. With this featherweight image held on screen for several seconds, the viewer knows Apu has cleaved to his beautiful wife as tightly as her voluminous hair is bound with filamentous pins.

The viewer also knows a master is at work with the film The World of Apu. Satyajit Ray’s last in his trilogy on the early life of an Indian orphan seeking freedom and artistic fulfillment barely hints that this quest mirrors the struggle of the entire country to throw off British rule. The story focuses entirely on Apu’s confrontation with the small events that define and shatter and rejuvenate the soul of every individual life. He pawns precious books to pay his rent because he would rather starve and write than work the menial jobs from which he recoils. Exhilarated by a little food and companionship, he shouts poetry into the night and expounds, in the middle of train tracks, his vision of a novel. He’s going somewhere. The promise of arrival is signaled by his first success: a short story accepted.

His first stop on the road of life is utterly unplanned. Apu accompanies his friend to a wedding in the country where he is drafted to become the groom after the promised one appears insane. Overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, he is soon overwhelmed by love and then by grief when the exquisite Arana dies in childbirth. Refusing any contact with the living baby, he wanders in spiritual and geographic wilderness for five years, scattering the fragile pages of his neglected novel and working only to save money to leave the country. When his friend finds and berates him for abandoning his son, Apu responds as he did when the same friend begged him to marry the girl who will otherwise be cursed by the stigma of aborted marriage. He is not that conventional person, he will not be a father any more than he thought he could be a husband. But he cannot resist the pull of an elemental human tie. His son is a killer of birds and caster of stones, furious at his own orphanhood. His pout bears a searing resemblance to his mother’s. The boy ultimately succumbs to the fantasy of reunion with his father in Calcutta, to whom his “friend” will take him on his shoulders. The film ends with Apu beaming for the first time in many years while the face above his slowly relaxes into its own journey, about to start.

It is not easy to explain how the nobility of the central character and the profoundly sustaining simplicity of Indian culture are indelibly imprinted by this film. The physical beauty of the young couple is an element. Minor characters, each captured in only a few words and seconds on screen, look at Apu and murmur about gods. The crowd in the Calcutta apartment complex reaches to touch Arana. The aural beauty of Ravi Shankar’s sitar in the background, punctuated by the simplest noises – train whistles, village songs, babies crying – casts it own spell. The acting is so eloquent it may overlie some native capacity to project deep emotion unbidden by a script. Eye-watering scenes abound: the friend pronounces Apu’s manuscript “wonderful, just wonderful”; Arana’s mother affirms a lifetime knowledge of Apu after a few minutes of contact; a man in thrall to appalling drudgery silently appraises Apu as unfit for that work, perhaps for this life. The camera sweeps over Indian landscapes and pathways and water courses and work objects and household furnishings with no color to distract from their elemental forms. The film tells a universal story in completely mundane settings with a beauty that elevates it to a realm of pure enchantment.
It is odd that doing so virtually denatures the film’s locale. There is nothing particularly “Indian” in its imagery or symbols…nothing a Western viewer hasn’t seen before except perhaps the painted face of a Brahmin bride. Ray has so absorbed – perhaps the India of his time had so absorbed - European notions of beauty that he presents his native land only in their terms. The World of Apu dazzles with a classical European aesthetic.

It honors the assumption that frames 2,000 years of artistic endeavor:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Review: FANNY AND ALEXANDER

by Lucy Johns, Art and Film mentor

“Fanny and Alexander,” Ingmar Bergman’s final film, delights not only for its artistry but also for its revelations about the great director’s frame of mind. The consummate explorer of angst affirms here that evil can be punished and fears vanquished. The result is a film more affectionate than analytical, more hopeful than tormented. In the context of Bergman’s body of work, marked by ever more inventive agonizing over the human condition, this shift is an unexpected joy.

The transformation means a new theme, a new dramatic focus, and a new directness. Rather than transmuting his doubts and questions into characters, Bergman delves behind character to explore its origins in the family. In “Fanny and Alexander,” family is the lead and family dynamics is the story. The film conjures scenes of goodness and evil notable for the director’s lack of ironic distance. It radiates a reconciliation with women, typically portrayed by Bergman as the force behind most of man’s anxieties. These explorations wrap around a traditional Bergman assumption: that salvation lies in the creation of illusion. Theater, puppets, magic, even deranged people who see and feel more than normal ones do, can save the most wounded victim. All this in three hours structured almost as a play that echoes “Hamlet” at many points.

“Fanny and Alexander” divides into two long acts. The first follows a boisterous Swedish family celebrating Christmas a century ago in the sumptuous home of grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren, one of Sweden’s greatest actors). Helena is beautiful, rich, and empathetic, unencumbered by class snobbery (the servants eat and play with the family) or ethnic prejudice (an elderly Jew is Helena’s treasured companion in her widowhood). Her three sons embody familiar Bergman crises beneath the brilliant surface. Their financial, sexual, and existential dilemmas are presented, however, with some welcome warmth and humor. Each son is sustained by a much younger wife who shares his anguish and tolerates his avoidance strategy – alcohol, sex, theater - with old-world feminine grace. Fanny and Alexander are energetic siblings in the swirl of humanity filling the house. When their father collapses while playing Hamlet’s ghost, the stage is set for the next act. A life of color and glamour darkened only by typical existential conflicts descends into a hell created by their mother’s remarriage to the local bishop.

Alexander detests this cleric from the first moment. The boy intuits a polished hypocrite, played to perfection by Jan Malmsjö. Alexander and Fanny shrink from his unctuous voice, controlling hand, and barely concealed malice. Alexander spins tales of escape and felonies that are heard by his stepfather as lies, a transgression subject to severe discipline. He gets a horrific beating. The scene evokes inspired film-making. Only female faces are shown: the bishop’s mother, complacent; his sister, complicit; the tattle-tale servant, fearful; and Fanny, powerless. Only the wallops of a willow wand are heard. Alexander is not shown and makes no sound. His repentance, coerced by torture, is smugly accepted as evidence that violence can teach morality. The conflict between these males goes beyond Oedipal. The young Alexander doesn’t so much challenge his father’s usurper as he embodies an innocence that evil, camouflaged in religious rectitude, is determined to destroy.

 The use of sound during the beating is one of several scenes where fortissimo noise nails emotional identification to the visuals. A village creek roars, portending catastrophe. Four great draft horses thunder to the rescue over cobbled streets – not quite the Lone Ranger and Silver, but suited for the purpose and time. Screams resound through a silent house, blasting children out of bed to witness uninhibited grief. The crack of elastic branch on bare flesh signifies fearsome brutality. Sound imbues imagery with a power that marks a master at work.

The resolution of the central drama between a boy and his male nemesis is not the only struggle overcome in “Fanny and Alexander.” Several women in the film suggest that Bergman has surmounted some primal male phobias patent in his previous work. An independent grandmother, a redeemed mother, a devoted sister, a ribald servant who yearns to control her life all transcend the patriarchal stereotypes that haunt his films. Grandmother Helena presides over a household whose tolerance and rituals are represented as the only reliable solace there is. Alexander’s uncle affirms this in a long monologue that veers towards maudlin but still seems heartfelt. Alexander’s grandmother and mother murmur happily, “It looks like we’re in charge now.” These scenes convey a peace that feels real for their author. No longer a threat, the women in “Fanny and Alexander” are merely fascinating. The Alexander who grew up and brought so many unhappy females to life on the screen here presents women as beneficent as they are complex. If they signal an evolution of Bergman’s consciousness, they may explain how he produced this masterpiece of indelible, and not at all predictable, humanity.

Review: SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR

by Lucy Johns, SF Art and Film mentor

Scandinavia has a proud artistic and philosophical tradition accentuating the negative. Kierkegaard (Denmark) published “The Concept of Dread” in 1844, introducing “angst” (existential dread) into philosophical discourse. Ibsen’s plays (Norway), Munch’s paintings (Norway), Lagerkvist’s parables (Sweden), Bergman’s films (Sweden) – all grapple with the meaning of life, the nature of sin, how account for suffering if god exists, or if he doesn’t *then* what. Swedish director Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Story” is a worthy addition to this creative exploitation of irremediable melancholy. “Songs” is unique, however, for its mordant wit. Andersson exhibits a talent for scenes where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He sustains this unsettling duality for an entire arresting film.

“Songs” covers a range of mundane human predicaments through a string of short stories where numerous characters suffer personal catastrophes. It opens with a desperate businessman pleading with a partner visible only as a pair of feet black against a phosphorescent tanning bed. Their firm has to close, whatever tragedies might result. The first casualty is a weeping employee clutching at the businessman as he marches down an endless hallway lined with doors open a crack to witness the misery, then closing one after the other on the hapless clerk out of a job. A foreign worker can’t find a contact in the firm’s building. When he exits in confusion, he is assaulted by thugs who mock his Swedish and beat him senseless as a line of white-collar workers watches from a bus stop across the street. Next up: a distraught storekeeper who has set fire to his own shop argues with impassive insurance inspectors about valuables he can’t document and they can’t see. This bathetic scene introduces a cinematic flourish that recurs throughout the film: a busy background tableau. The merchant whines while a crowd of office workers struggles down the street flagellating themselves like their medieval ancestors. Is his despair comparable to the Black Death? Don’t be ridiculous, the director suggests. [Bergman also showed flagellants (“The Seventh Seal”). A strong cultural reference in Sweden, it seems. You think you have problems? Just remember *that*.] Further stories ensue. Some end abruptly, some continue later. All share the endemic despair and tragi-comic directorial commentary so marked in this film.

“Songs” disposes mercilessly of patriotism, superstition, and religion as strategies to keep fear at bay. A famous general sits on a bedpan in a nursing home while visiting military brass  celebrate his 100th birthday. “My regards to Goëring,” he barks, raising a brisk Nazi salute. This is Andersson’s response to a character stuck in a grid-locked taxi who invokes history and tradition as lifelines to sustain sanity. Uh-huh, grunts the director: Here’s our history. (The Swedes pursued “neutrality” with Germany during WWII, one reason they were not attacked or occupied, as Norway and Denmark were.) An august Economic Council meets to pronounce on the country’s future. While an aging expert fumbles through his papers for an answer, his colleagues pass a crystal ball from hand to hand. When the group storms out of the room in a panic while the Chairman intones how important it is not to panic, a gypsy fortune teller remains at the table, lace tablecloth spread on the table before her. The most provocative symbolism mocks religion. A gum-chewing bishop sought for spiritual comfort discourses on housing prices. A replica of Christ in an exhibition hall of commercial crucifixes swings rhythmically from its cross by one hand while a salesman fumbles for a nail to attach the other. Andersson doesn’t stop at Christianity. A huge zoom out depicts a human sacrifice of “the bloom of youth” as dozens of church and state leaders officiate. Religion, invented by man for solace and explanation, revels in murder. 

Sex, a more fashionable source of respite for modern man, is in this film yet another occasion for torment.  Only women are eager for it. The available men are preoccupied or totally passive. This treatment is reminiscent of early Bergman: woman as temptress, beyond the comprehension of mere males who need and annoy females in equal measure.

“Songs” shows only a moment of redemption from the incessant disasters that can be hilarious to onlookers: a man already sympathetic from other scenes cradles his lover blowing into a recorder while he plays the keys. The image is sweet, the flute’s music a moment of calm in the cascade of imbroglios so inventively mined for commingled dread and ridicule by the director. (Andersson also wrote the script.)

“Songs” might well have degenerated into farce à la Monty Python were it not for Andersson’s remarkable cinematic skill. Almost all the film’s stories were shot in a warehouse meticulously transformed for every change of scene. This knack for design verges on genius when we see a vast airport corridor lined with immobile ticket agents who watch a dozen doors pour forth panting passengers straining to get away from it all while hauling towering piles of baggage they can’t leave behind. Many scenes repeat compositional touches introduced early on: the long receding perspective, the background action. The film’s color palette is drained and bleak: light in Scandinavia is pale at best and anyway absent half the year. A static camera films the few outdoor vignettes to stress the enormity of space compared to the puny actors in it. Every shot proclaims the absurdity of existence and the futility of protest.

Andersson’s sensibility and eye produce a film so rife with images and references that a review is bound to neglect important features (e.g. the role of the sick and the dead as they interact with the living). In this he recalls Bergman and Fellini. That he has failed to find their fame with American audiences may be a mark of his unremitting pessimism. If there isn’t any sex to relieve it, we don’t want to know.

2011 Tarkovsky Prize 2nd Place: Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

HOPE IN LA DOLCE VITA

By Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

John Gardner writes in The Art of Fiction that people shouldn’t write if what they are portraying is completely hopeless. “If there is bad to be said, he [the artist] should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.” La Dolce Vita is a film about the decadent life that many of the Italians of that time led, about what happens when people have too much money and idleness. Although many awful things occur in the film, La Dolce Vita is portrayed in a way that is not hopeless.

An example of this is the scene when Marcello and Emma are fighting in Marcello’s car. At first Emma won’t get back into the car, but then she won’t get out: “‘Where are you going, stupid? Come here,’ [says Marcello.] ‘No,’ [says Emma.] … ‘Get out of this car!’ [says Marcello.] ‘No!’ [says Emma.]” Marcello wants to be rid of Emma’s “aggressive, sticky, maternal love,” but he keeps coming back to her anyway; he leaves her on the side of the road, then comes back in the morning and ends up in bed with her. It is obvious that their love is unhealthy, but the scene is constructed hilariously. By the end of the scene, the viewer is not overcome with the anguish of Marcello and Emma’s relationship, although the sadness in the scene is clearly felt.

Marcello is a writer at heart, but he is too obsessed with “the sweet life” to realize it or to become a writer. The scene at the very center of the movie where he is working on his book is the one scene where he is trying to write for himself, putting his talents to use—but he writes hardly anything. Marcello is wasting the only time he has given himself to be a writer, but the scene is also hopeful: at least there is a brief interval where he tries to do what he is meant to do. He compares the serving girl, Paola, to an angel: in fact, the whole scene is a kind of heaven, like the eye of a hurricane. Even though Marcello writes next to nothing and goes back to his regular life fast, there has been one moment of truth for him.

Then at the end of the movie, Paola shows up again. She’s gesturing to Marcello across an estuary, making typing motions, reminding him of his true calling. But the wind is too strong; he can’t hear her. He is too far off the path of his writing to be able to interpret her signs. But after he turns away, Paola smiles. The movie ends like this, with a long close up of the little angel smiling. It ends with a remembrance of the small, good, hopeful time when Marcello was trying to be himself. Paola is still smiling after him, smiling in the face of how sad it is that he can’t see what he should be doing.

John Gardner wrote also that “every writer should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might be persuaded towards life or death.” This is not a movie that will leave you walking away wishing that you had never watched it. Although it may not be a story of bad becoming good, there are reminders in it that your own “sweet life” is there, if you are able to see it.

2011 Tarkovsky Prize 3rd Place: Midori Chen

EPISODES IN LA DOLCE VITA

by Midori Chen

While Marcello’s many episodes with different people at different places may not seem to be in order of particular importance, each story arc seems to have the plot sequence of 1.) The Encounter, 2.) The High, and finally 3.) The Tragedy. Each Encounter offers the hope of a new life for Marcello, each High convinces him that the life is perfect for him, and each Tragedy sends Marcello’s hopes crumbling down, until, at last, he hits rock bottom at the ending party, with the eye of nature looking up at him, and Marcello being too blind to recognize the girl, and most importantly, his writing, which might have saved him.

The first principal episode is Marcello’s meeting with Maddalena at the nightclub. He sees her by chance, which would be The Encounter. The High would be when they went to the house of a prostitute and proceeds to make love. When Marcello returns home and finds Emma on the ground, having overdosed, his panicked professions of eternal love is The Tragedy.

The arrival of American actress Sylvia marks the beginning of the “second episode,” and his talk with Sylvia on the top of St. Peter’s dome would be the first time they’ve “met.” There are ups and downs in the events following, but mainly, The High would be the party Sylvia dances at, and the overarching Tragedy would be when the sun rises, and the water in the Trevi Fountain gets turned off; it effectively broke the movie-esque spell of love and romance Marcello and Sylvia were in, prompting them to leave.

The third episode is scattered throughout the film, but mainly centers around Marcello’s relationship with the wealthy intellectual Steiner. The Encounter is at a church, where Steiner plays the organ for Marcello. He later invites Marcello to the gathering at his house, where they listen to sounds of nature recorded on tape—a homage to the fact that this is all being portrayed in a movie—natural scenes put into manmade recorders and distributed. While it wasn’t the most “high,” the party would count as the second step. The Tragedy is, obviously, the suicide of Steiner after he killed his two children, because he didn’t wish for them to experience the ugly side of the world. Marcello was deeply disturbed at his best friend’s suicide, but goes to pick up Steiner’s wife while paparazzi swarm around them.

Between the parts of the Steiner episode, the Madonna-sighting would be the fourth. Marcello never actually “meets” the children, but the audience does, and The High swiftly follows The Encounter in the rain, as the children run around, pointing at empty places, claiming they see the Madonna, and the crowd follows them in an uproar, wanting the blessings of the Virgin Mary to themselves, regardless of their religious teachings, ultimately representing human selfishness. They even stripped the tree that was said to have sheltered the Madonna with its branches. Emma, Marcello’s lover, did so as well, and prayed that she be given Marcello’s sole affection, because she felt him drawing away from him. The Tragedy of the immigrant child being trampled to death after being brought all this way for a blessing from the Madonna ends this episode, with the funeral held at dawn.

The fifth episode is centered around Marcello’s father. They quickly Encounter at the nightclub where the audience first saw Marcello, and The High takes place at the Cha-Cha-Cha Club, as a request of Marcello’s dad. There they encounter Fanny, the father’s female companion of the night, then return to Fanny’s house. Marcello’s father gets sick, however, and requests to be taken to the train station, where he could take the earliest train and be home by ten. The Tragedy occurs when Marcello tries to get him to stay, because they never spent any time together, but his father leaves anyway, in a drunken stupor.

The party at the castle of the aristocrats (the sixth episode) and later the party at the beach house (the seventh episode) do not have particularly clear Encounters, Highs, and Tragedies, though the Encounter could be counted as the audience’s first meetings with the different characters. The Highs, however, are hard to decide, for separate reasons. The sixth episode because while the party was a high itself, it’s hard to say whether the wedding proposal from Maddalena is the High (and her silence subsequently the Tragedy), or the ghost-hunt at the abandoned mansion, along with Marcello’s night with the other woman the High (and their cold parting the Tragedy).

The seventh episode was basically a High entirely in itself, but it’s hard to determined whether it’s the High from the audience’s point of view, or Marcello’s point of view. The audience would say the entire party and the strip tease was the High of that episode, but for Marcello, it would probably be when he was encouraging the drunken orgy from the partygoers. The Tragedy that ends the movie overall, though, is the death of the fish-beast on the beach, and how it stared even in its death. This scene mirrors the opening sequence of the statue of Jesus moving over the city, something manmade watching from above, and the fish from nature at its finest—the ocean—ending everything by watching from below. It gives the movie sequences a sense of symmetry, and ultimately combines the idea of being watched over.

One thing that definitely stood out is the girl Marcello met at the cafe on the beach. He said she was beautiful, and asked why she smiled in response. Later, she appears at the end, and her smiling face closes the movie. While each episode demonstrates an alternative life that is presented to Marcello, the Tragedy in each also marks the darker side of each life, such as the perfect life of Steiner that ended with the death of almost his entire family. The girl—the odd one out of the sequence—represents the ability Marcello possesses to free himself from this fruitless search for a better life—his writing—and her last smile, something pitying and understanding, marks Marcello’s lost into the dark world.

2011 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Mykel Mogg

CHOICE IN LA DOLCE VITA

By Mykel Mogg

La Dolce Vita is about choice. Throughout the film, radically different ideas on each theme are shown. It is mostly left up to the viewer to decide what they take away from it. For example, one of the themes explored is monogamy versus promiscuity. Marcello is trapped in an unhealthy monogamous relationship that shows us the stifling nature of the Italian woman. She is constantly feeding him, taking care of him, and scolding him, much like a mother. When we see the alternative of loveless promiscuity, it is not anywhere near appealing.

Another thing Fellini does this with is the rich and extravagant versus poor and humble. We can see the deep pathetic boredom of the rich in most of the movie's party scenes, but especially the ghost hunt in the mansion. Instead of hunting for game, they are hunting for ghosts of the past because they are no longer relevant in the present. It's like nothing is sacred to them- it has all been trampled on. When Marcello expresses his admiration for Steiner, he talks about the clash of security and materialism versus spirituality. When Steiner commits suicide it seems that he chose spirituality; he couldn't make his children live in the cruelty of the real world.

The film doesn't show the poor life to be somehow morally superior to the rich one. This is perfectly represented with the scene about the prostitute's house. The woman herself is kind and welcoming (probably only because of the money), but they don't really find what they're looking for in her basement. They want an escape from the angst-ridden ennui of having too much money, and end up finding someone who is less human because of her need for money.

A strong motif of religious imagery runs throughout the movie. It pits pagan images against Christian images. Christianity is shown in the helicopter- jesus, being imposed from above and not communicating with the people down below. In the episode where the children “see” the Madonna, it is portrayed as extremely manipulative. Paganism is shown in Sylvia, with a connection to animals and childish delight for life. She embraces the media, and in turn they give her “offerings.” This version of Paganism is portrayed as stupid and naive- she can't escape an abusive relationship, come up with her own answers to questions or even stay on one train of thought for more than thirty seconds.

Another idea that the images of religion bring up is celebrity. The media exploits religion the same way they do famous people in the Madonna scene. The crowd acts in a mob-like way- trying to get a handful of the tree before anyone else. They are also shown raising celebrities to the level of gods- the wild dance where they spin Sylvia, the baptism in the fountain, the Paparazzi constantly following them around to document their every move. Fellini asks us- Have gods become mere celebrities in our world today? Or are celebrities the new gods?

Steiner is the most important person in the movie besides Marcello. To Marcello, he represents the ideal life. He has a loving family, an artistic lifestyle, and he encourages Marcello to pursue serious writing. When he kills himself, Marcello seems to lose his drive for finding meaning in life. This brings up the conflict of whether it's good to idolize people or not- after that, Marcello has no ideal life to strive for, only money.

Marcello ends up choosing riches, celebrity, and promiscuity. We disapprove of his life choices, but see why he made them- the other options are not glorified. The girl at the end is the life he could have chosen- humbleness, simplicity, art, and spirituality- waving goodbye to him as he walks away.

La Dolce Vita is ultimately a film that questions everything. Fellini pits different ideas against each other in a critical and non-dogmatic way, ultimately leaving moral judgments up to each individual viewer. Although it is not a literally realistic film, it perfectly captures the experience of living in a confusing universe where there is no absolute morality to rely on- in short, the modern world. The story points out the flaws in everything without providing an easy way out. It’s a call, a challenge to each person watching to try to find their own way of living.