Kinski Watch II: A Time To Live And A Time To Die (Douglas Sirk, 1958)

100 minutes into the film and we're on. Klaus Kinski's first and only scene in Douglas Sirk's A Time To Live And A Time To Die. As a Gestapo Lieutenant handing John Gavin's Ernst Graeber the ashes of his wife's dead father. A cold and mildly menacing performance executed with the unglamorous but reliable efficiency of a VW motor. In this scene, like in the entire movie, Sirk avoids having to show us explicitly any Nazi insignia, so Kinski has to wear a somewhat militaristic uniform with a few emblems that could have been on a Nazi uniform but can not be specifically linked to it (except for the SS sign on his collar).

The movie as a whole suffers from the unfortunate alliance of Sirk and Universal Studios at a time when it was apparently inconceivable to shoot a serious film about war without having to water it down with a senseless Hollywood romance. While it is laudable that Sirk tried to show that Germans were human beings (even at that time!) that suffered under the circumstances too, the script uses the setting to set up a rather boring romance between the two leads. Any respectable Hollywood sob stuff needs some obstacles that the lovers need to overcome before they can consummate their relationship, and Gestapo, concentration camps, air raids and food shortage supply more than enough of it. And really, the movie doesn't even attempt to look seriously at the reality of living in a German city during the late years of World War II. Everything has to be presented through the prism of the love story central to the narrative.

It is interesting to see, however, how much quicker stories were told 50 years ago. And how much more screewriters used plot to reveal characters, instead of having them sit around and give on-the-nose speeches. The first encounter of our two love-birds plays out over a few scenes, and at the end we have a very good sense of who these people are, and how they relate to each other. And we can move on to the next plot point. You would be hard-pressed to find an original movie that tells story that efficiently today.

Kinski Watch I: Ludwig II - Glanz und Ende eines Königs (Helmut Käutner, 1955)

I will watch every film Klaus Kinski has starred in. As far as possible. His compulsive character paired with his disregard of any quality standarts for the movies he appeared in ("I only do it for the cash and never read the scripts!" he exclaimed numerous times in interviews) makes it nearly impossible to compile an exhaustive filmography, and some of his early work, especially the movies that only show him in bit parts (in some of them he is uncredited), is unavaiable. IMDB claims that Kinski's catalogue encompasses 135 titles. I think that it's realistic that I will watch at least 110 of them. And I shall begin with Ludwig II - Glanz und Ende eines Königs, a tear-jerker set in 19th century Germany at the court of the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Kinski stars as Prinz Otto von Bayern, Ludwig's schizophrenic brother. He has three scenes, and appears for the first time 49 minutes into the film.

One of the first German films to be shot in Technicolor, Ludwig II retells a few anecdotes about the art lover (and gay man, but it's never hinted at in the film) King Ludwig. We get his bromance with Richard Wagner that ends in a lofty break-up, his struggle to keep Bavaria a neutral and independent state, his various love interests (chief among them, of course, his impossible love to Sissi), and his descent into (presumably) madness. Kinski's character Prinz Otto doesn't interfere in much of this, except that his first forray into clinical insanity happens minutes before Ludwig was supposed to receive Frederick III to whose unified German "Reich" Bavaria had just adhered. In a fit of typically German atrabiliousness, Ludwig refuses to welcome the new emperor, fires his entire cabinet and retreats to his shadowy chambers where he ponders his gloomy destiny. O.W. Fischer, German superstar of his time who plays Ludwig with all the excessive pathos he could possibly muster up, has nothing on Kinski, who portrays Prinz Otto first with a sort of beaming authority, and later with his unmatched creepy intensity. He makes the most out of his three appearances and his performance is a laudable exception in a film overcharged with kitsch and faux romanticism ("Look at the clouds!", Ludwig tells Sissi one night, "So close together and yet so far apart!").

Which is not to say that director Helmut Käutner is completely clueless. He simply can't escape the "Heimat-Film" tropes that prevailed at the time in post-war West German cinema. But we get a "walk and talk" tracking shot that would put Thomas Schlamme to shame and some nicely staged conversation scenes. When a sitting character stands up, the camera tracks back, anticipating the new geometry of the shot and allowing the character to fill the screen without having his head cut off. Contemporary directors could learn something from that: we don't need a new shot everytime an actor moves as little as his pinky finger. The scene when Ludwig, in another instance of comically German romantic-existentialism, leads his fiance Sofia (Sissi's sister) to the empty opera to show her how lonely it is as a king (while the orchestra intonates some schmaltzy Wagner, no less) is again nicely shot and makes good use of Käutner's apparent love for deep focus. On the other hand, we get one of the most atrocious green-screen shots I have ever seen in my life when Ludwig and Sissy ride their horses through the night. And the exchanges between Ludwig and Wagner are particularly insufferable. Furthermore, Käutner's obsession to use fades to guide us into every single new scene gets redundant very fast.

The script bathes in historic references that must seem ironic to the contemporary viewer, for example when Wagner exclaims that he will die an "unappreciated genius" (sic!) without finishing his Ring der Niebelungen, or when one of Ludwig's underlings, exasperated with the amout of money the King is willing to spend on Wagner's productions, snorts "Parsifal! Can you fathom what that's supposed to mean?" But other than smiling down on figures too entangled in their time to see the broader picture, the script doesn't achieve much. It doesn't work as a character study of King Ludwig II either. Flat and clicheed, he simply rumbles quotes that were supposed to warm up the hearts of the German postwar Bürgertum: pacifism, German culture, pseudo-poetic declarations love, devout nature. Other than that: romantic despair. "We get to share our misfortune", Sissi tells Ludwig after he suggested suicide as a way to solve their impossible situation. It pretty much sums up the film's attitude toward Ludwig's life as a whole.

Not much to see here (especially not if one looks for Kinski), but if one meets the film on its own terms, a good time is still to be had.

Notes from the Fringes: Oswaldo de Oliveira (1931-1990)

I have only seen two of Oswaldo de Oliveira's movies, Bare Behind Bars (1980) and Amazon Jail (1982), and I do not intend to watch any more. Aside from the fact that most of de Oliveira's work seems to be unavailable to English speakers, the entertainment factor of his movies is, in retrospect, not as great as one would think. Although the combination of virtually no plot, a lot of female nudity, horrifyingly hideous sets, subterraneous performances and dilettantish camera work sounds like the perfect mix for a lot of laughs and head shaking, the head shaking ultimately outweighs the laughs, and especially with the unbelievably bad Bare Behind Bars, it gets very difficult to tolerate it to the end. Granted, the sexploitation genre is not famous for its artistic value and insightful creativity, but de Oliveira seems to be an especially ungifted representative of the genre, wholly unaware of the intricacies of storytelling, or commonsense rules of camera movement, editing, and even genre tropes. And what I could gather about his view of femininity is not very original either.

Bare Behind Bars and Amazon Jail are basically the same movie. Both feature female captives that are being sold to sex craving criminals, both follow a more or less unrealistic escape plot that involves a surprising amount of nudity, and both end in a fugitive-like sequence with the ungainly women shooting their way to liberty, only to be brought back to their prison in the end. Obviously, both films exist solely for the purpose of showing as much sex as possible, and where Amazon Jail at least attempts to justify the constant fornication sometimes, Bare Behind Bars doesn't bother with something as nonrelevant as plausibility, and frequently cross-cuts between as much as three simultaneous sex scenes that are not explained in advance or posthumously.

Sexploitation movies are, of course, not the perfect arena for progressive feminist thinking, but judging from these two offerings, de Oliveira seems to be a particularly fervent opponent of female liberties. Not only does he relish in imprisoning and torturing his female characters, but their escapes always end in a clusterfuck of epic proportions. They are also baselessly mean and sadistic, belligerent towards men (in Bare Behind Bars, one of the fugitives cuts off the penis of a man she encounters), bitchy to one another, and, let's be honest for a second, simply sluts (Bare Behind Bars, again, makes it much more explicit when a disappointed lover of one of the fugitives shoots her after surprising her with another man). All of this is not particularly shocking for the genre, but de Oliveira does not have anything interesting or new to say about all of this. Other than zooming into hairy ladyparts, he does not know what to do with his disdain for women.

De Oliveira is also simply clueless behind the camera. I am willing to forgive his inaptitude as a screenwriter because he masterfully fulfills his self-set goal of showing as much frolicking as possible. The unpleasant nature of his visuals, on the other hand, is a lot harder to bare. The set for Bare Behind Bars has to be one of the worst choice of location I have ever seen, and while the outdoors of Amazon Jail makes for a nicer setting, the hideous interiors and shaky "tracking" shots are simply out of this world.

In the end, although I had a certain amount of fun watching these movies, there are simply too much objectionable facets of de Oliveira's oeuvre to appreciate it indiscriminately.

Yasujiro Ozu - Days of Youth (1929)

I conclude my quest into Ozu's pre-war work with his earliest surviving film, Days of Youth. A relatively light-hearted student comedy, the film follows the rivalry between Watanabe and Yamamoto who compete for the love of the beautiful Chieko. Again, the film is structured in two parts. We first get Watanabe and Yamamoto cramming for their final exams while courting Chieko. The second part takes place at a ski resort where they both spend four days with the student's ski club. They run unexpectedly into Chieko who spends a skiing trip there as well. The courting resumes until they learn that she is engaged to the ski club's leader and is there to undertake wedding arrangements. Watanabe and Yamamoto take the train home and resolve to forget Chieko. Bros before Hoes, one would say today.

In Days of Youth, Ozu's style is still in its infancy, but we can already delineate clearly what elements he would develop later. Most strikingly perhaps, Ozu already relies heavily on parallels, symmetries and narrative circles. The opening pan from right to left over Wasada University is mirrored at the end of the film, when the camera pans from left to right at the exact same spot. Similarly, on a narrative level, Watanabe opens the film by placing a "Room for Rent" sign on his window, and closes the movie in the exact same manner. In between, Ozu employs a battery of repetitions and parallels, most notably during the skiing trip where Ozu uses repetitions to underline the emotional changes of our two main protagonists. The director also uses cuts on action and his signature cut-aways, here still motivated more or less by character point of view. However, his fondness for steam and smoke is already well present and provides us with a first "unmotivated" cut-away. We get a close-up of a steaming tea pot (another motive that will reappear prominently as his career went on). The camera pans up, following the vapors. Cut to a smoking chimney, and the camera follows the movement of the smoke as well. Furthermore, when Ozu doesn't use fade outs to mark the end of a sequence (what he still does a lot in Days of Youth), he uses a number of match-cuts that smooth the transition between scenes.

On a thematic level, Ozu provides a first glimpse into his subsequent exploration of weak masculinity. Although Watanabe and Yamamoto are fairly different in character (the first being a sort of witty bon vivant, and the latter being more of a tortured intellectual), they are both failing at college and unable to attract Chieko's interest. Their rivalry is ultimately meaningless as they will lose Chieko to a man who is only mentioned in passing. Again, the only thing to do for the beaten and emasculated man is to leave and start anew. Chieko's courting by our love-crazed protagonists provides the backdrop for several slapstick sequences. Early on, there is a running gag involving black paint on Yamamoto's hand, gloves and hot chocolate (Ozu's obsession with gloves in this movie foreshadows his fondness for motives of hands and feet later on). At the mountains, he has to chase after his skis which glide ownerless down a slope, while Watanabe enjoys some hot tea with Chieko. Ozu also gives us a first array into the cheating tactics of the student. But as charming as all of these sequences are, they remain rather plain compared with the elaborate cheating scenes in Where Now Are The Dreams of Youth?, or some of the shenanigans in I Was Born, But...

Yet, there are some elements Ozu will either abandon later on, or refine a lot. As already mentioned, in Days of Youth, Ozu fades to black to mark specific time divides. The elliptic nature of the story (we get a lot of intertitles saying "the next day", marking the passing of a significant amount of time, which we don't find a lot in subsequent films) is also something rare in Ozu's oeuvre. In two instances, he even uses a sort of time lapse, which I haven't seen again in his films. Another rarity is his use of handheld camera and the startling point of view shots during the skiing trip. Yamamoto gathers speed while he skis downhill, and Ozu cuts to a point of view shot. The camera glides down, and as Yamamoto loses his balance and falls down, the camera falls down as well and rolls through the snow. Cut to Chieko who looks down on him. Back to Yamamoto's point of view. But the image is blurry. Cut to a shot of Yamamoto laying in the snow, as he wipes snow flakes from his glasses. This bold imagery is atypical in Ozu's catalogue, but we get some remnants of it in later offerings. The swift tracking shots in and out of the apartment door in That Night's Wife, for example, or an arresting point of view shot in The Lady and the Beard: Okajima walks down the street. We cut to his point of view, a tracking shot. The camera movement halts suddenly, and only when we cut to a shot of Okajima do we know why: he has stopped his walk. Good stuff.

Days of Youth is a charming and entertaining offering that gives us a lot to analyze. Second viewing is mandatory.

Yasujiro Ozu - That Night's Wife (1930)

Adapted from the Oscar Shisgall short story From Nine to Nine, That Night's Wife is, in my mind, Ozu's most successful crime thriller. Dragnet Girl might be considered a more ripe offering, but Wife has a visual energy that had me literally glued to the screen for its 65-minute running time. The script by Kogo Noda is also nicely crafted. The film can be divided into two parts: in the first one, Shuji robs an office to get enough money to buy medicine for his critically sick daughter Michiko. We cross cut between Shuji's escape after the robbery and his home where his wife Mayumi takes care of their daughter. The second part takes place almost exclusively inside Shuji's and Mayumi's apartment, where they take a detective hostage so that Shuji can be at his daughter's side until she gets better. Moved by the family's dedication and love for their little one, Detective Kagawa lets Shuji escape but the young father decides that he doesn't want to live a life on the run and prefers to go to prison.

With a relatively light-weight script, Ozu gives us a lot of stylistic arabesques. During the first part, we do not only get one of very few instances of Ozu cross-cutting, but he puts his own spin on it too. His signature cut-aways function here as transitional elements between the two lines of action. In one instance, he cuts from the apartment to the police chasing Shuji. We get a shot of a lamp inside the apartment, a shot of a pot flower, a shot of a streetlamp and some tree leafs, a shot of leaf shadows on a wall, and finally a shot of Shuji crouching in the dark. Later, Ozu links Shuji's escape and his daughter's critical illness by cutting from Shuji's feet, to Michiko's slippers and Mayumi's feet, as she lays sleeping on her daughter's bed. There is also a strong emphasis on hands. When Shuji runs out of the office he just robbed, Ozu tracks in on the imprint of a hand on the closing office door. Later, he cuts from the hands of policemen pointing on a sketch of Tokyo's streets, to the gloved hands of the cab driver who brings Shuji home after the robbery. Cut to the distressed father's face, and cut back to the driver's hands on the stirring wheel. It's a peculiar sequence of images that prepares us for the fact that the cab driver is in reality Detective Kagawa.

Aside from using his bravado editing and cutaways to make narrative points, Ozu experiments a lot with tracking shots. No other Ozu film, I think, has such an articulated camera. The most spectacular example is the way he conveys moments of arresting fear for Shiju and Mayumi. When Kagawa knocks for the first time at their apartment door, Ozu tracks in on the door, dissolves to the the same door seen from Kagawa's perspective, and tracks back at the same speed. It's a startling and singular image in Ozu's catalogue. What distinguishes Ozu from a lot of other directors, however, is that he doesn't use these methods to merely show off his artistic prowess, but that he intersperses them at precise moments in the film to enhance the narrative. Through visual means Ozu makes us feel the couple's panic as they realize that the police is at their door. That's simply great cinema.

Noda's script uses typical Hollywood tropes to delineate characters. He puts Shuji in two impossibly tense situations and watches how he reacts. That's what we call "revealing characters through action". The first situation finds Shiju fleeing from the police. He calls his daughter's doctor to inquire on her condition. Doc tells him that she might not make it through the night and that Shiju should go home immediately and be at her side. But Shiju has to lay low during the night so as to not get caught by the cops. Going home could mean being arrested. What does he do? Through his next choice, we know what type of character he is: he goes home. There, Mayumi holds Kagawa at gun point. Shiju has the possibility to escape. But his daughter cries for him. What does he do? He stays home and takes care his daughter, even though that means taking Kagawa hostage. Factor in the fact that he is willing to commit a serious crime in order to help his daughter, and we have a pretty good idea of who this guy is. And all of that without a single line of dialogue. That is a fairly common Hollywood way to characterize film protagonists while avoiding to turn them into talking heads. Unfortunately, as exemplified recently by The Kids Are All Right, Inception or Jack Goes Boating, it is presently a practice on the verge of extinction.

Yasujiro Ozu - Woman of Tokyo (1933)

When Ryoichi learns from his girlfriend Harue that his sister Chikako is suspected of illegal prostitution, he rejects his girlfriend and violently confronts his sister about it. She admits to it but defends herself by saying that she sacrifices herself to pay for his college education. Ryoichi leaves his sister, roams about the streets of Tokyo and finally commits suicide.

It is interesting to see how, in Woman of Tokyo, Ozu treats masculinity through the prism of feminine hardship. Although it is Chikako who resorts to prostitution it is Ryoichi who is more devastated by it, within the confines of the film. Again we get a relatively weak masculine figure who's final strategy is to disappear. The 47-minute film never elaborates on the reasons for Chikako's choice or what effect her extra-curricular activity has on her and her self-esteem. What we get instead is Ryoichi's reaction to it.

David Bordwell argues that "the sadism of the humiliated Ozu male has seldom been so explicitly critized by a woman", citing Chikako who exclaims that Ryoichi is "stupid" for having committed suicide and who asks him "have all my hardships turned into you slapping me?" when he confronts her about her nightly activities. But Woman of Tokyo is, in my mind, much more a showcase of Ozu's very ambivalent relationship to women. A film in which a man commits suicide because his sister works as a prostitute without digging deeper into the sister's emotional world and her relationship to her brother and her customers is problematic to me. I get the social implications of Chikako's activity and how it could jeopardize the family (especially since she is investigated by the police), but I don't get why Ozu didn't explore his material more instead of turning a feminine plight into a masculine debacle.

Yasujiro Ozu - Passing Fancy (1933)

Ozu's most accomplished pre-war work. From the poignant deconstruction of working-class masculinity over the intricately composed shots and expert editing to the heartfelt performances, Passing Fancy displays everything that's great about Ozu's film making. The story follows the day laborer Kihachi and documents his troubled relationship to his son Tomio and his unrequited love to the young Harue. The story reaches two memorable climaxes. The first one is a violent fight between Kihachi and Tomio after the son confronts his father that all he does is drink and chase after women. The second one occurs when Tomio gets catarrh and Kihachi contemplates the possibility of his son dying. Both climaxes propel the movie into a different direction, thus reinforcing the episodic nature of the script.

At no point is the movie arbitrary or unfocused however. Kihachi's masculinity is scrutinized on several levels: as a father figure, as a lover, and as a provider. Needless to say that Kihachi's characterization is incredibly precise. I was struck by how much Kihachi is defined through body language. His mischievous grin when apologizing, his constant scratching and scrubbing, his reliance on violence, his frequent wardrobe changes are all inherent to his being. His posturing masks the fact that his life is not very successful. He can't seduce Harue and she falls for his best friend Jiro. He is illiterate. He is a lazy worker and thus broke. The relationship to his son is superficial at best. Amazingly however, he has an unspoiled positive attitude towards life. He accepts his condition as it is. His status in society prevents him from shaping his environment. Instead, all he can do is adapt to the changing realities. A joke crucial to the plot underlines this philosophy: why do we have five fingers?, asks Tomio. Because otherwise a hand wouldn't fit into a glove.

As it is almost customary in pre-war Ozu films, the patriarch has to leave the family in order to improve everyone's condition. But contrary to An Inn In Tokyo or Story of Floating Weeds, the film doesn't end here. We get a scene with Kahichi on a boat on his way to Hokkaido where he hopes to find work. He tells the joke of the glove to a group of men who travel with him, but one of them beats him to the punchline. He then finds a piece of paper with some calligraphy from his son, and he realizes that he misses him too much to leave him. He jumps from the boat and vows to return to Tokyo to find his son. It is interesting that from all father figures Ozu could have chosen from it is Kihachi who gets to come back to his family to start anew. Is Ozu's fondness for this type of bon vivant responsible for that, or the fact that Kihachi finally realizes that he loves his son? In other instances the fathers in question already had acted out of love for their children, but had to sacrifice even that because it wasn't enough to help their families. Here, Kihachi is more or less oblivious to his son and is reformed when he is on his way to another city.

Stylistically, Passing Fancy is astonishing. Two things struck me particularly. Ozu's sharp editing, and his shot compositions using deep focus. He experiments a lot with objects, or drapes, or sometimes people blocking some of the left or right frame, thus refining the geometry of the shot. What would later translates into Ozu's obsession with bottles and glasses in the foreground of the shot, is rendered here in relatively simple lines and angles and his use of wide-angle, deep-focus shots. His editing is superb as well. His disorienting technique is rarefied even more. We sometimes get title cards for dialogue without us knowing who is talking until the third dialogue card. Ozu simply jumps from cutaway to cutaway until he makes up his mind to show us who is actually speaking. In one scene, Tomio is drawing and we get a volley of cutaways. It is impossible to make out if they are point of view shots from Tomio's perspective or unmotivated by character, as it was customary for him to do in Tokyo Chorus already. The cuts on action are grafted as well. A lot of Kihachi's physical shenanigans actually serve as transaction between difference scenes. For example, he shakes out his shirt in one scenes, and hangs it on the wall in the next unrelated scene. Ozu thus creates a pictorial unity rarely achieved in his previous work.