Black wings: Faust and Fantasia

Terrestrial life is a drama, directed from above. Or it is in the medieval world of Murnau's Faust. His Nosferatu was set in the open air, in the depopulated backwoods of Europe; his Faust unfolds in large and detailed but clearly artificial sets. There is expressionist distortion and supernatural realism: the winding steps in the German village are impossibly steep, the flowers, fields and girls impossibly pretty. This teeming human life is someone's dream -- that of Faust himself, caught in the sickness of his temptations, hypnotised by beauty, dreaming himself as perpetually young.

I caught a screening of Faust on a recent trip to the Melbourne Arts Festival; it came with a new live score by Phillip Johnston. Someone detected a hint of Robert Johnson blues guitar during the crossroads scene; the new libretto kept coming back to a theme about enjoying life while you can, because the plague is imminent. As they say, it's a film shot in darkness and light, not black and white, made with astonishing perfectionism and a painterly eye. And can you detect Murnau's own alleged solitude and aloofness in the doomed Faust, struggling to make meaningful human contact, or in Mephisto himself, keeping up his end of the bargain only to have the bland and beautiful angel over-rule him in the end with the universe's ruling word, "love"? (Yes, the house wins.)

The great critic Robin Wood has said that sexuality is the source of evil in Murnau. And it is here, through Mephisto's smirking seduction of Gretchen's aunt Marthe as little more than a time-killing prank, and through the pursuit of Gretchen by Faust that will take two lives and ruin a third (Faust's). But evil, also, is about the manipulation of events. Thomas Elsaesser in Weimar Cinema and After, on Nosferatu: "Not unlike Nosferatu himself, mastermind but also enmeshed in the events, the majority of the characters are at once 'inside' the fiction and also standing apart from it." Similarly, Mephisto sets up an earthly drama, and then steps into it.

And so the most famous shot might still be the early one (above) of the giant Mephisto looming over the medieval village, his black wings casting a long shadow over the streets and houses. It's also an image of the plague, of death sweeping in from the east. And it was imitated more than ten years later at the beginning of the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence in Disney's Fantasia -- a sequence that gave us a lively Halloween night of Satanic revellers vanquished by the sound of church bells and the peaceful light of day. "A picture of the struggle between the profane and the sacred," as Fantasia's narrator says, and it's still impressive, as most of that strange, ambitious Disney project continues to be. But Walt's devil has no human qualities, no charm, no cunning -- he's all monster, a horned, greedy Moloch. And he retreats without much complaint when the morning arrives and we see and hear a religious pilgrimage set to "Ave Maria". It's about a co-dependency between light and dark, not an opposition. In Murnau's film, the devil puts up more of a fight.

Atrocity exhibition: The Passion of the Christ

Jonathan Rosenbaum, from an essay on film during the Bush years:

Given the cultural remoteness of most Americans from the everyday lives and fates of innocent Iraqi citizens, it’s hard to shake off the suspicion that Bush’s indefensible position on this subject [torture] may be typical rather than eccentric — that a good many Americans may not really mind if innocent Iraqis undergo torture, just as long as the facts of such injustices aren’t shoved in their faces. Given the overall willingness of the American press to accommodate this desire for avoiding the facts, the process by which torture becomes a box office staple may indeed not be too difficult to understand. After all, it’s been demonstrated repeatedly by the TV series 24 – launched around the same time that Bush became President and still popular today – that government-sanctioned torture continues to be dramaturgically sound and therefore saleable even if it remains questionable on practical as well as ethical grounds.

This may help to account for how Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew with English subtitles, managed to come in third among the top-grossing releases of 2004, just behind Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2 and ahead of Meet the Fockers and The Incredibles -- how, in short, the only feature among the top ten not made chiefly for kids and teenagers offered a veritable orgy of cruelty and suffering, complete with slow motion and masochistic point-of-view shots. Despite the title, I assumed this drama about the last 12 hours of Jesus’s life would include something about his teachings, at least in flashback. But the Sermon on the Mount was reduced to two sound bites, and miracles and good works barely got a glance. The charges of anti-Semitism and homophobia hurled at the movie seemed too narrow; its general disgust for humanity was so unrelenting that the military-sounding drums at the end seemed to be welcoming the apocalypse (rather like the mass slaughter following the Mexican rebel’s torture in The Wild Bunch).

According to the trade magazine Boxoffice, on 30 March 2008, The Passion of the Christ in fact placed 11th in its list of “all-time domestic blockbusters,” on the heels of (in descending order) Titanic (1997), Star Wars (1977), Shrek 2(2004), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestial (1982), Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), Spider-Man (2002), Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and Spider-Man 2 (2004). It’s a sobering thought that six of these came out during Bush’s eight years and the only other films on the list that didn’t qualify as fodder for kids were made during previous decades. But this infantilism can be ascribed to the preferences of the film industry as much as those of the audience, and this audience was plainly as Bushwhacked as the movies it attended. In more ways than one, its mind was elsewhere.

The drained world: M Night Shyamalan and The Happening

Science, knowledge, learning … all that stuff is useless in the face of the slow, passive threat, the art-directed apocalypse, in M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. This is a strangely gentle, inert and suspense-less horror film – a horror film without any genuine menace, all effect and no cause. Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and others run from nothing in particular, just a plague of unattributed deaths, a suicide contagion, in a drained and introverted world. What is Shyamalan getting at? Maybe this. In its open-endedness – among the possible causes invoked are planetary payback, terrorists and “the government” – this thing might be meta-comment about the impossibility of making a straight-forward disaster movie in a world of so many real threats (war, terror, climate, nukes in Asia, now the economy) where even traditional movie monsters are routinely read as modern-anxiety metaphors. Zombies are really consumers and War of the Worlds is really about al-Qaeda. So Shyamalan gives us just the metaphor without the monster (or the sizzle without the steak). Which is in keeping with how he's been working all along, presenting horror's structures as symbolic maps for stories that are really about troubled relationships. In Signs, the Shyamalan film that this most resembles, the aliens became a hypothetical threat to direct Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) towards a mystic-religious message about the power of love. So it is here, only with the threat even further backgrounded, as the passing disaster acts as couples therapy for Elliot and Alma.

You might see that as colossally narcissistic as well as deeply conservative. But as an auteur, he's been doggedly persistent, and not just in his cool perfectionism. I’ve written before about Shyamalan’s obsession with big-city crime. It gets yet another airing here: as Elliot flees Philadelphia, there’s a quick shot of a newspaper headline about soaring murder rates – “Killadelphia”. So, regardless of any world-destroying toxic threat, you’re already better off in the country, in small groups, away from the bulk of humanity. Which is where Elliot and Alma end up -- “We’re in a small town, nothing can happen to us here,” he says. Eventually we reach a remote country house that could be a scene from 100 years ago or more, where a “Mrs Jones” gives the small girl who travels with the pair a lesson in decent, old-fashioned manners. The past is safer.

And knowledge is useless? This marks Shyamalan out once again as a man with a mystical bent. Elliot’s maths teacher friend believes in percentages and winds up dead; a girl who is getting confused repeats “calculus … calculus” like a malfunctioning robot. Why rely on numbers and logic? Trust the man who talks to the wind, the trees, the spirits. The only person with any valuable learning here is the guy who communicates with plants – a fellow mystic. This lets Shyamalan make vengeful, all-powerful nature a new version of God’s mysteriousness – as an expert “explains” late in the film, “It’s an act of nature and we’ll never fully understand it”.

Atrocity exhibition: Pasolini's Salo

Excellent review here by Michael Atkinson of the re-issued Salo. In short: it's a film that needs to exist but that you never want to see. Context is everything. I saw this film ten years ago after it had been banned from New Zealand for some 20 years. There was a full house for one Auckland screening. So, would anyone have lined up to see this grim and ugly spectacle in dehumanisation were it not for its reputation? Second: would we tolerate any of it were it not for the new context that Pasolini added, its brilliant re-situation as a critique of Italian-German fascism?

Pasolini said: "The entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-Fascist 'dissociation' from its 'crimes against humanity'. Curval, Blangis, Durcet, the Bishop -- Sade's characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.

"This does not mean that I make all that explicit in the film. No, I repeat again, I have not added a single word to what the characters in Sade have to say nor have I added a single detail to the acts they commit. The only points of reference to the 20th century are the way they dress, comport themselves, and the houses in which they live."

The years of magickal thinking: The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol 2.

"For example, when an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain magic words as he does so. The Peruvian Indians moulded images of fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul."
-- James Frazer, The Golden Bough

"What is a Magickal Operation? It may be defined as any event in nature which is brought to pass by Will."
-- Aleister Crowley

"It's a film about the Love Generation, but seen in depth -- like the Fourth Dimension . . . There's an invisible war going on. It's of Miltonic proportions and it's a war between the forces of life and death, love and hate. The film Lucifer Rising is a prophecy."
-- Kenneth Anger, 1967

"I want a dream lover/So I don't have to dream alone."
-- The Parris Sisters, after Bobby Darin

The imaginative realm that Vol 1’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome unfolded in was described as "the Abbey of Thelema, on the evening of the ‘sunset’ of Crowleyanity", like a psychedelic twilight of the pagan gods. But the films on Vol 2 push Kenneth Anger’s interest in all things Crowleyan to another level – quite literally. Inauguration occured within its own enclosed world, but in Scorpio Rising, Invocation of My Demon Brother and Lucifer Rising, Anger shows how magick "works" – the bridges and tunnels between its private, imaginative space and what we take as everyday reality. And to really get that, you have to adjust your thinking about what magick is. When we hear about reconstructions of pre-Christian belief systems, and see recovered amulets and charms, we hear of the selfish basics: spells to achieve this or protect against that, for love affairs or piles of gold. It’s not like that here: the magick that came out of the occult revival of the late 19th century was suffused, maybe unintentionally, with centuries of Christianity, so it came with a utopian, world-changing ethos. Crowley’s own Book of the Law was a gospel of the new age, before that term got debased. Magick as the unselfish advancement of evolution is where Anger is coming from in these films – Lucifer Rising especially.

In Scorpio Rising, early 60s pop songs are used for irony or other kinds of comment. It was always funny – I remember laughing the first time I heard "I'm at the point of no return/and for me there'll be no turning back" against that found footage of Palm Sunday, or the pre-Lynch use of "Blue Velvet" against footage of a biker dressing in his ritual garb. The dense editing of Scorpio Rising – this reality influencing that one, this gesture causing that action – was entirely magickal and ended in a kind of cataclysm that was also a symbolic start, a death that equals a birth. In Invocation, that editing became the dominant tactic and Anger’s own performance of a Crowley ritual in San Francisco in 1967 was very much at the centre of it. The film can still seem weird and startling, but flick the soundtrack, as this Fantoma DVD lets you, from Mick Jagger’s abrasive Moog score to the Velvet Underground-meets-Sun Ra raga-jazz of Bobby Beausoleil’s Magick Powerhouse of Oz and the mood changes completely. And that’s an insight into Anger’s mastery of film – how well he understood the effects that could be achieved through a soundtrack.

Lucifer Rising is about human and divine scales, human and divine time. The private pageant (pictured above) is a ritual that wakes old gods, bringing simultaneous reactions across different levels of reality. It’s Anger’s masterpiece, a tranquil and triumphant religious film that ends with a new age image as daring and simple and original as any ever conceived: those pink flying saucers hovering over the Egyptian pyramids. That’s an image of hope – just like the proposed ending of an earlier version, in which a crowd of hippies kneeled at the San Andreas Fault, praying for "a liberating earthquake" (shades of Zabriskie Point) – and altruistic generosity. If what’s happening in this film is being done for the betterment of humanity, then so is Anger’s own making of the film. I’d say we owe him.

The other films here are smaller. Kustom Kar Kommandos is a fragment of a film that would do for hot rods what Scorpio Rising did for motorcycles, but it’s reduced to a three-minute short that, more than anything else in Anger’s body of work, shows what they mean what they say he anticipated the music video. The song was "Dream Lover" by the Parris Sisters – now it's another song with unexpected occult resonances, about the creation and control of a doppelganger or golem or some other creature. The last film, The Man We Want to Hang, is a straight-forward filming of an exhibition of Crowley paintings in London in 1998. The best way to take this is as the mirror of a lost Anger film from the 1950s – his document of Crowley’s murals in the Abbey of Thelema, Sicily, made for British television. The leering close-ups of Crowley's ugly and beautiful revived gods and transformed humans reminds us once again of Anger's imaginative reconstruction of the Abbey’s goings-on – at once devoted and debauched – in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Which is where we came in.