There’s a moment in the film where George (Colin Firth)—an English professor—lectures about a book written by Aldous Huxley. In the hands of another director and another actor, this would have been a misguidedly rousing moment. George talks about fear and love and aging, all the themes that, in another film, would be seized on to convey a heart-warming, trite, and hollow message about homosexuals. In the hands of Tom Ford, though, there’s nothing falsely rousing about this speech. Like the whole film, it perfectly indicates the character at this place in time, without overreaching into a half-heated political statement that would come out stale and, ultimately, cynical. It’s a well-thought move for a film that manages to deftly unite form with content while maintaining its uniquely cinematic potential.

This is due in no small part to Firth’s George, whose self-consciously dramatic voiceovers, perfectly organized life, and consistently brilliant realization by Firth render a character who can stand on his own legs. Unlike depictions of homosexuals in films like Brokeback Mountain, which were eager to exploit their characters’ own strangeness with overused emotional cues, A Single Man makes no fuss over its gay characters, allowing the personages to speak for themselves. Though George’s hyper-organized lifestyle certainly speaks to the personal compartmentalization experienced by many gay people during the 20^th century, his choices shine through as an expression of his character and not as heavy-handed, metaphorical afterthought.

More important, though, is the style of A Single Man, which doesn’t simply express its content so much as it is its content. Ford is in territory that is laudably far from generic indulgence. The film visibly varies from grainy and dim to bright, nearly Technicolor glimpses of the world–a world that, since the death of his partner Jim (Matthew Goode), surrounds George distantly. George’s neighbors’ overjoyed children play on their lawn in The Wizard of Oz while he watches from his bathroom, straight out of The Conversation. Variations in film stock have been used recently with frequency—one need look no farther than the work of Quentin Tarantino to see how much and to what little end it has been stylistically enlisted. But here, Ford manages to use a strictly filmic mode to explore George’s own psychology.

In an interview following the premiere of A Single Man in Toronto, Ford expressed how astounded everyone was that his film was more than pretty. A good friend of his told him that he’d always thought of Ford as a very beautiful, finely polished box: resplendent from the outside but frighteningly empty inside. Of course there’s something inside, Ford answered. I’m fond of this anecdote not because it unlocks Ford’s project or explains his life’s work, but rather because it serves as an interesting case study in the debate between form and content. When Ford’s friend assumes there’s nothing in the box, it’s because he hasn’t realized that the box’s beautiful style is precisely its content: the “meaning,” if you like, resides in the box’s aesthetic purity. There’s nowhere else to look for clarity in the face of the artwork; the outside of the box is the inside of the box. Form, Susan Sontag famously contended, is content—and though this may not always be true, it certainly is true of Ford’s A Single Man.

Now, on this snowy New Year’s Eve, it’s a better time than ever to reflect back on the year and select our choices for the best cinematic efforts in 2009.

Myself, Peter Warren, Brian Barth, Giampaolo Bianconi, Jake Teresi and Matt Paley all wrote down our Top-10 lists (although Matt, in an uncharacteristically cynical move, declined to offer a full 10).  There were ten films overlapping our choices, and, ranked by frequency, comprise the final top-10 list.

Best Films.

Up (Dir. Pete Doctor) — 5 Votes
The Hurt Locker (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow) — 5 Votes
A Serious Man (Dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen) — 4 Votes
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Dir. Wes Anderson) — 3 Votes
Up In The Air (Dir. Jason Reitman) — 3 Votes
Inglorious Basterds (Dir. Quentin Tarantino) — 2 Votes
Lorna’s Silence (Dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne) — 2 Votes
Where The Wild Things Are (Dir. Spike Jonze) — 2 Votes
The Road (Dir. John Hillcoat) — 2 Votes
Sugar (Dir. Anna Boden) — 2 Votes

———————

Peter Warren’s Picks

Up
Adventureland
Bronson
Coraline
The Hurt Locker
Inglorious Basterds
A Serious Man
Sugar
Tyson
Up In The Air

———————

Giampaolo Bianconi’s Picks

The Road
Police, Adjective
Up
The Limits of Control
Summer Hours
Beaches of Agnes
24 City
Lorna’s Silence
Two Lovers
2012

———————

Brian Barth’s Picks

A Serious Man
The Road
Up in the Air
Crank 2: High Voltage
Sugar
The Princess and the Frog
The Hurt Locker
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Girlfriend Experience
An Education

———————

Matt Paley’s Picks

Up
A Serious Man
A Single Man
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Bright Star
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Lorna’s Silence
Where The Wild Things Are
The Hurt Locker

———————

Jake Teresi’s Picks

Up
The Hurt Locker
A Serious Man
Adventureland
Funny People
Avatar
The Cove
Food, Inc.
An Education
Precious

———————

Adam Hirsch’s Picks

The Hurt Locker
Up
Where The Wild Things Are
Fantastic Mr. Fox
White Ribbon
Tetro
In The Loop
Star Trek
Up In The Air
Inglorious Basterds

———————

]]> http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/the-best-of-2009/feed/ 1 http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/reviews/on-watching-hitler-die-2/ http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/reviews/on-watching-hitler-die-2/#comments Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Giampaolo Bianconi http://sainteliotandco.com/?p=293

“Facts can be so misleading,” says the S.S. colonel Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz as a truly devilish take on Claude Rains, towards the beginning of Quentin Tarantino’s new film. He prefers to stick to rumors, in a sense, to dreams: the collective dreams and whispers that form rumor, eventually codified into some kind of historical record, to be proven or proved apocryphal. By the end of the film, as the colonel discusses the terms of his heroic surrender over the radio, he makes sure to emphasize that when the history of Operation Kino is written, he will be recorded to have been a crucial member from the beginning (Operation Kino is the name given to a successful plot to kill the German high command). Before Tarantino, Ronald Reagan was the last person to exhibit such a preference for the Hollywood version of history.


It’s this kind of history that let’s us watch Hitler die – and we’re supposed to rally around it, it’s gladiatorial and makes me nauseous. It’s too easy to write it off as spectacle, as boyhood fantasy – these things have qualities to them, and the spectacle itself – not only the spectacle of Hitler’s fictional death – has consuming, controlling, coma-inducing tendencies that dull our judgments and fold the audience into “the audience.” Boyhood fantasy – let’s stop beating around the bush – becomes nothing more than rape and murder.
Watching Hitler die isn’t fulfilling, it isn’t cathartic – it’s fascist.

Landa himself is the most unique character in the film, embodying the terrifying urbanity of Nazism. Tarantino chooses not to mine the disconnect between Nazi civilization and Nazi cruelty, and instead uses Landa as an unwitting expression of the Nazi mind. Landa prides himself on his ability to think like a Jew – and, when he cuts a deal at the end of the film, we realize it is Landa who is, in fact, the rat. Landa himself equates Jews with rats, which is nothing new – to do so was a standby of the German propaganda machine. The world remains divided into the very categories the Nazi’s organized for the purposes of control: the shoe is simply on the other foot. This kind of adolescent reversal is the whole premise of Tarantino’s film.

Full of the expected postmodern paradigms, no character in the film exists beyond their mythologies, which we can glean from our own cinematic knowledge of history. They emerge from the darkness before the film, and fade back into it. However, one thing the Basterds never mention – mentioned in practically every other World War Two movie – is women. Isn’t this how GI’s are usually characterized–missing their wives and naming their guns after their girlfriends? In one scene, Brad Pitt sticks his finger into a woman’s fresh bullet wound, as a form of torture to make sure she’s telling the truth. For all extensive purposes, he fucks her wound, with the same sadism we see, in a brief cutaway, when Joseph Goebbels is fucking his French translator. Later in the film, Landa takes his only on screen victim – the same woman – he cruelly strangles her. The handsome German private Frederic Zoller, irritated that Shoshanna Dreyfus continually rejects his advances, yells at her in the projection booth. “I’m not the kind of man you tell to go away,” he tells her. He only locks the door when he thinks she’ll finally fuck him. All the men of the film exhibit the same sadism, the same murderous joy that keeps their killing sexually charged, be they Basterd or Nazi.

Inglourious Basterds has been most associated, in the press, with “wish fulfillment.” Wish fulfillment also characterizes the way in which Tarantino expects his audience to approach the film: as a kind of frat boy revisionism, in which Jews man up, fight back, kick ass, and end the War. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly, Tarantino explained his vexation with other World War II movies: “When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?”

In a sense, Tarantino is correct: it is frustrating. But for Tarantino, there’s a point when the frustration becomes murderous. Thus his creation of the Basterds, lead by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), and comprised of Jewish psychopaths who, we’re lead to believe, traipse across occupied France and kill Nazis. The Baserds are two things – most clearly, they’re an exculpatory device, designed to rid us of our guilt. As we watch the Basterds, we can relax into our thick seats and be comforted that there is some other glittering celluloid past in which “we” got it right. Tarantino is looking to use the cinema as a powerful tool – which the cinema is – to rewrite history, the right way. It’s unsurprising that so much of the plot hinges on movie theatres, film critics, and nitrate film. But beyond these fanboy odes to the very real force of film, there’s very little more than the same male fantasies characteristic of fascism itself. Video games have been doing this for a while now, and as the logic of the film unfolds – logic that J Hoberman described as that of “an alternate universe: The Movies” – is really the logic of a video game or the Columbine massacre.

It was inevitably to Columbine that my thoughts turned when, in the film’s holocaustic finale, two of the Basterds fire blindly from the balcony of a Parisian cinema into the crowd of Nazi luminaries below. Tarantino shows us their faces, stretched taut with smiles as terrifying as the Nazi laughs that permeate the film. Bloodthirsty and righteous, the Basterds shots are meant to be our shots–the shots we should have taken, the shots that should have killed Hitler. The same thoughts must cross the mind of any killer, shooting at the formless mass (without any identity other that identity appellated by the killer) and Tarantino thinks that because they’re Nazis, it’s not only okay but necessitated. “Why would they condemn me? I was too brutal to the Nazis?” he told Jeffery Goldberg.

Yes. This is what Tarantino can’t quite wrap his head around, and it’s the reason why no discussion of the technique of Inglourious Basterds will ever account for its inexcusable moral ignorance. This isn’t about the offended bourgeoisie intellectuals versus the pedal to the metal, git ‘r done tough guys: it’s about enemies of fascism versus fascists. To eliminate the Reich, the Basterds must literally don the Nazi uniform, which affords them the cruelty of the Nazi’s themselves (beyond this, a member of the Basterds is himself a Nazi, another is an Austrian emigre to the United States). “I’m more than just a uniform,” Fredrick tells Shosanna. “Not to me,” she responds. What the film looks to

take from Nazi Germany is its very humanity, which not only requires our respect but makes them like us. It’s simple displacement. It starts with shooting Hitler and it ends with youtube videos of Saddam Hussein’s execution, with spirited defenses of waterboarding. Tarantino, unfortunately, chosen to simultaneously distance “our“ righteousness from “their” evil – ignoring how much of us is in them, how much of them is in us. It encourages us only give up our own humanity because the enemy, it seems, has already surrendered theirs. But the oppressed have a doubly hard challenge, not only to preserve their own humanity but to save the humanity of their oppressors.