Science is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painleve
I often say Jacques Cousteau when I mean to say Jean Cocteau. Making matters more confusing is the missing link between them — French marine biologist Jean Painleve — whose underwater cinema predates Cousteau's by decades and, whose body of work, like Cocteau's, is dedicated to exploring life on "the other side." Except that Cocteau entered mysterious realms in his films through mirrors, telephones and radios; Painleve, through the sea and micro-photography.

Painleve pioneered, not only wildlife films, but popular wildlife films. A good example is his entertaining movie about crustaceans, photographed in studio-bright black-and-white, one of 23 included in the recently released, three-disc Criterion set "Science is Fiction." We watch the intrigues of sea creatures who disguise themselves in algae and sponges, as the narrator enthusiastically mixes fact with poetic observation — comparing the crustaceans to ballerinas, "Japanese warriors" and "praying buddhas."

Anthropomorphism dominates, but Painleve also focuses on traits that set his subjects apart. Among sea horses, for example, it is the female who produces the eggs and the male who gives birth. Painleve spent sleepless nights behind the camera, even installing an electrical shock mechanism on his hat should he nod off while waiting for one pregnant papa to pop. The footage of baby sea horses bursting out of the convulsing male's pouch was worth the wait: "The Sea Horse" (1933) was Painleve's most popular movie; he even spun off a jewelry line.

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“The sea horse was for me a splendid way of promoting the kindness and virtue of the father while at the same time underlining the necessity of the mother. In other words, I wanted to re-establish the balance between male and female.”— Jean Painleve

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The care Painleve took in choosing music for his films also was ahead of its time. He had Darius Milhaud score "The Sea Horse"; Painleve wrote his own music for "Sea Urchins" (1954), a symphony of banging pots and pans in tribute, he said, to Edgar Varese but with a mambo bar thrown in "so as not to be taken too seriously"; and "The Vampire" (1945) is set to a couple of Duke Ellington songs.





"The Vampire" is classic Painleve in the way it fixes on an odd attribute of an exotic animal — the vampire bat's affinity for the blood of other animals — and draws out a comparison to humans. “When I was finishing the film," Painleve said, "I noticed how the vampire bat extends its wing before going to sleep. I thought it looked like the Nazi heil-Hitler salute.” Painleve also taps fictional cinema here, coupling footage of the vampire bat with scenes from "Nosferatu."

It was that penchant for playful presentation, and fetishism of the bizarre, that sent some of Painleve's fellow scientists storming out of his screenings, denying the validity of his work. But Painleve, like his subjects, was a strange breed. He was a scientist crossed with an artist.
— Becky

A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

DIRECTOR: Takashi Nomura
WRITERS: Shuichi Nagahara, Nobuo Yamada, Shinji Fujiwara
CAST: Jo Shishido, Jerry Fujio, Chitose Kobayashi
MUSIC: Harumi Ibe
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shigeyoshi Mine
COUNTRY: Japan
GENRE: Noir, Action, Crime
MISCELLANY: 84m; with subtitles; on DVD

When Quentin Tarantino fused the samurai movie and the spaghetti western in "Kill Bill" in 2003, he was carrying on a great cinematic tradition that reached its apex with Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" in 1961, a samurai movie patterned after the western, film noir and a Dashiell Hammett detective novel and, in turn, the blueprint for the breakout spaghetti western "Fistful of Dollars." Similar cross-pollination shaped "A Colt Is My Passport," a Japanese gangster film indebted to noir, with a spaghetti-western-style soundtrack as vital to the story as Ennio Morricone's scores were to Sergio Leone's films, infusing scenes with the emotion absent from hardboiled faces.

One of those hardboiled faces belongs to Jo Shishido, whose chipmunk-cheeked mug might be as emblematic of gangster cinema as the jowls of Edward G. Robinson. Here, the actor famous for his outsider Yakuza roles plays a double-crossed killer named Kamimura, hired by a gang to assassinate a rival. It is thrilling to watch the ever-cool Shishido take on the Yakuza system, and easy to forget that Kamimura is a cold-blooded killer himself as we become invested in his struggle to reach air or sea, beyond the gang's reach. This free agent is at least preferable to the detestable, entrenched Yakuza leaders, who are relentless in their pursuit of power.

The film's east-west dichotomy runs frequently into a philosophical clash between Fate and Free Will, and the schizophrenia is particularly sharp in the scene in which two characters taken hostage at an airport watch their plane lift off in one direction as their captors drive them off in another, but soon recoup the car using the second brake they had the foresight to install.



Perhaps the most traditionally noirish setting is a seaside hotel, where Mina, a sad-eyed maid, wards off the groping hands of the trucker and sailor lodgers. She feels stuck in Yokohama because her gangster ex-boyfriend will not permit her to leave. Mina introduces Kamimura to the barge crews, whose docks are the only place where the Yakuza cannot gain solid footing. As Kamimura and a gangster stand on a barge and make a deal in which it is unclear who has the advantage, the men rock with the waves.

This all leads to a stunning showdown in a dusty landfill evocative of westerns, where Kamimura seeks to foil Fate by manipulating time itself. He uses a few guns, too.



Kamimura tells Mina that as a child he would have starved had he not learned to fight. He's still fighting to survive, but the cynicism that keeps him alive coexists with a childlike wonder, in the way the flight of a bird or an insect holds his attention and coaxes the shadow of a smile just before he is about to kill, or be killed.
— Becky


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Intentions of Murder (1964)

DIRECTOR: Shohei Imamura
WRITERS: Shohei Imamura, Shinji Fujiwara, Keiji Hasbebe
CAST: Masumi Hurukawa, Ko Nishimura, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sinsaku Himeda
COUNTRY: Japan
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 150m; with subtitles; on DVD

Sadako is told to beware the family curse, and it's true she finds herself paying for the transgressions of one of her ancestors.

Yet if Sadako is cursed, it's by the living, not the dead. By her husband, who betrays her, beats her, belittles her, and bosses her around. By her mother-in-law and her son Masaru, who also lord over her, calling her fat and lazy. By her husband's myopic mistress, who hypocritically stalks her with a camera in the hopes of capturing an indiscretion. By the thief who breaks into her home and rapes her, then decides he loves her and shows it by forcing himself on her again and again.

After the first assault, Sadako considers her options. Reporting the crime is ruled out; the shame would be unbearable. Suicide appears the honorable thing to do, but first she cleans the house. Soon, she's devouring a plate of cold food, deferring her death until she sees her child again. Sadako's feeble suicide attempts are portrayed with a gentle, life-affirming humor. Eventually, self-destruction turns to self-preservation.

After the assault, Sadako recalls a scene from her youth, when a suitor called up to her bedroom window. That she opened the window strikes her as important in retrospect. Though never spoken, there is a sense Sadako blames herself for the rape, and her passivity dares the viewer to blame her, too. Many characters mistake Sadako's humility for lack of intelligence, but the director discerns this meek woman's wisdom, and her will to live. It is hard to believe that a man made "Intentions of Murder," so sensitive and nuanced is the portrait of the heroine.

There is ever a thin line between fantasy and reality; does Sadako cease at a certain point to be a victim by making the rapist her lover? Imamura is not explicit, but takes pains to reveal Sadako's thoughts, through reflective voiceovers and striking images. When she meditates on the dead, a shirt hanging on a clothesline dances in the breeze. One of the most memorable images, evocative of Maya Deren's "Meshes" — Sadako's frightened face reflected in the surface of an iron wielded by the thief — is repeated when her husband forces himself on her. Another haunting image, the corpse of Masaru's pet mouse, eaten hollow by its cage companion, re-emerges in the child's murals. We get a glimpse of how this domestic drama is being processed by the boy through the lurid scenes he draws all over the home's sliding screens. Throughout the film, violent subterranean episodes show up in this way, as ripples on the surface of the family's life.

I left "Intentions of Murder" caring deeply for Sadako. Imamura's long-suffering heroine, like Fellini's Cabiria, is one of cinema's great survivors.
— Becky

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Breathless | A Bout De Souffle (1960)

DIRECTOR: Jean Luc-Godard
COUNTRY: France
WRITERS: Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut
EDITING: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
CAST: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg
GENRE: Crime, romance, new wave
MISCELLANY: 90m; in French with subtitles

Upon its release in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" must have seemed, especially to American viewers, to be a truly revolutionary piece of filmmaking. Here was a work that was somewhat experimental in style, yet simultaneously traditional in narrative. Godard had taken the American gangster movie and reinvented it, turning the conventions of the genre on their head, while still managing to pay loving homage to it. The film, influenced by the gritty works of Sam Fuller and John Huston, itself became widely influential, and is regarded as the most seminal, accessible film in the New Wave canon.

The hard-boiled anti-hero, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is a chain-smoking car thief who worships Humphrey Bogart and swaggers through the film with sunglasses on and a Trilby hat pulled insolently down over his brow. The obsession with the cynical, sardonic Bogart is an appropriate one, as Bogart and his noir dwelling tough guys are the natural precursors to Michel's laid-back killer. Michel nonchalantly plugs a policeman early in the film with the same indifference he seems to show throughout the film. As he admits to us at the start of the picture, setting the irreverent tone: "So, I'm a son of a bitch. After all, it's gotta be done. It has to." Although neither Michel or his flighty American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg) are particularly likable characters, we find ourselves, if not exactly rooting for them, strangely fascinated by their lives, which are alternately gripping and mundane. As Patricia puts it, "I'd like to know what’s behind that face of yours." Whether there is, in actuality, anything more to Michel than what he has cultivated from movies and popular culture is open to debate. Whether the two are fleeing the cops or engaging in existential banter in Patricia's apartment, there is something perversely hypnotizing about this unlikely duo. While watching them, I was reminded somewhat of the blank-faced honeymoon killers in "Badlands" (1973) — neither are exceptionally sympathetic leads, yet we are never less than enthralled with their performances.

When Patricia ultimately betrays Michel, tipping the police off to his whereabouts, she does so with the same cool indifference with which she rejects his repeated amorous advances in her apartment. When Michel is gunned down by the police, instead of the expected deathbed soliloquy, Belmondo rather anti-climactically revisits his “sour apples” series of facial expressions, after exhaling one final time from his ubiquitous cigarette.

Though they are both somewhat shallow, callous individuals, there is a playful, winning quality to their interactions with each other, and the script, also by Godard from a treatment by Francois Truffaut, is full of knowing asides and witty bits of repartee that help paint a more sympathetic, well-rounded portrait of the doomed young lovers.

The real innovations of "Breathless," however, lie not in the performances but in the look of the film itself. Godard utilizes natural sound and hand-held camera to give the film a gritty, cinema verite feel, and this off-the-cuff, freewheeling style provides a unique contrast to the hip dialogue and groundbreaking jump cuts, the latter of which enraged cinema purists and critics upon the film's release, but would become commonplace in the years to come. These seemingly arbitrary quick edits were appropriated, far less effectively, by Dennis Hopper in "Easy Rider" (1969). Coincidentally, or not, the director of photography on "Easy Rider" is Laszlo Kovacs, Michel's alias in "Breathless." This is only one of several film culture references in "Breathless." In addition to the above mentioned homage to Bogart, the camera lingers over a Jack Palance movie poster, Michel and Patricia watch "Westbound" (1959), Patricia hangs a poster of an August Renoir painting in her apartment (Renoir's filmmaker son Jean was an acknowledged influence on Godard), and a girl on the street attempts (unsuccessfully) to sell Michel a copy of Cahiers du Cinema, a film magazine for which Godard, and many of the other New Wave auteurs, wrote for before becoming filmmakers. Also, Godard himself has a cameo in the film as an informant, and the director Jean-Pierre Melville plays a famous writer being interviewed by Seberg.

Godard's use of natural sound reaches its almost absurd peak during the scenes in Patricia's apartment, in which the wailing sirens wafting in through the open window actually drown out the characters' dialogue. Rather than being a distraction that takes the viewer out of the moment, the use of natural sound here, and throughout the film, only heighten the realism. After all, in real life, in a bustling metropolis like Paris, one certainly would have to cope with the intrusive sounds of the city. At the same time, Godard utilizes several iris shots, whose glaring artificiality reminds us that this is a film. In one scene, Patricia peeks at Michel through a rolled up poster, and the camera switches to a peephole-style lens. Both Michel and Patricia talk to the camera, breaking down the so-called "fourth wall" that separates the audience from the actors. This device would become cliched and overused in time, but in 1960, it must have seemed positively revolutionary. Godard utilizes these techniques in several of his other films, including "Bande a Parte" (1964), in which Anna Karina often flashes a look or an exclamation at the audience. That film also takes the genre-reflexivity of "Breathless" to the ultimate degree when the three main characters wonder what a minute of silence would sound like, and then proceed to sit for a minute in complete silence — Godard even mutes the ambient audio.

To complete the almost documentary-style feel of "Breathless," passing extras often stare directly into the camera or at the actors. Also, characters sometimes interrupt and talk over each other — this overlapping dialogue would be quite influential on Robert Altman, whose films almost always employ it to some degree, most famously in "M*A*S*H" (1970). Godard also inserts several stylistic flourishes that might seem gimmicky and forced on paper, but that work perfectly within the context and tone of the film. As the police bear down on Michel, a neon sign in a window informs us that "the net tightens around Michel."

These scenes only serve to heighten the self-referential, knowing tone of "Breathless." The film is, in many ways, a tribute to film itself — Godard's valentine to cinema. The fact that the film influenced and inspired a generation of directors is cinema's valentine to Godard, and to "Breathless."
— Theo Wulff
Contact: beshef2000@yahoo.com

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MASHUP | Lolita (1962) & Death Proof (2007)

Director: Stanley Kubrick; 152m.

Director: Quentin Tarantino; 114m.

Humbert Humbert eyes the rearview mirror.

Open road.

Has he lost rival Clare Quilty at last? He looks again, and before the smile hits his lips he sees fast approaching in the distance an anachronism. A white 1970 Dodge Challenger filled with three angry women who have lost their bead on Stuntman Mike.

Stuntman crashed an earlier scene of "Lolita" to make roadkill of Charlotte Haze and to slide a finger along her daughter's bare feet. The "Death Proof" girls roar after him into 1950s roadside America with blood in their eyes. Only instead of their hotrod stalker, they find the enchanted hunter, the professor of pedophilia, and their sister of the broken-hearted glasses, who has been much maligned for manipulating the manipulator.

If Quilty is Humbert's alter ego, then the "Death Proof" chicks are Dolores Haze doppelgangers, hunted enchanters, chanting: "Please don't dead-end; please don't dead-end; please don't dead-end."

They cruise into a cinematic time warp, dogged as karma, and shift gears. True they abandoned their friend in the cheerleader outfit, as collateral to the chuckling redneck, but to make amends they've got to muscle the king of jailbait off of the highway.

"I'm the horniest (expletive) on the road!" Kim shrieks, stealing old Humbert's thunder. "Boo-yah, bitch!"
— Becky

The Craven Sluck (1967)

DIRECTOR: Mike Kuchar
WRITER: Mike Kuchar
COUNTRY: U.S.
CAST: Floraine Connors, Bob Cowan, George Kuchar, Donna Kerness, Bocko the dog
GENRE: comedy, short, independent, sci-fi?
MISCELLANY: bw; 20m; on DVD as bonus material with "Sins of the Fleshapoids"

Screw "Sex in the City" and "Desperate Housewives." I'd rather watch "The Craven Sluck."

It's the hair on the soap opera. The STD in the seven-year itch. It sends up domestic drivel with its cardboard cutout parody, trashing the petty intrigues that are glamorized in pricier productions.

Meet Adele, a bombed-out shell of a Marilyn Monroe. Her hair is a tousled bed of bleached straw. Her enormous chest pops out of a shirt that grips her body as tightly as she clings to her waning youth. Her footwear of choice for walking the dog: high heels. She ham-glams it up for the camera in lingerie, striking poses that radiate sexual frustration.

Adele's husband makes her "ashamed of her torso" and fails to notice her "womanly charms." When we meet Brunswick, he sends a fist out of The Wall Street Journal, checking his watch. "When will that peroxided WOMAN face up to the responsibilities of being a WIFE?" he wonders, perhaps drawing a distinction.

His inattentiveness cannot satisfy Adele's appetite for adoration, so after her failed suicide attempt, rendered comedic by its lameness and Brunswick's blind, blundering foil, she finds Morton, a leather-pants-clad cad with a bad bowl cut.

In a stroke of casting ingenuity, Morton's wife, Florence, is a man in a skirt and a wig. Literally. Was she always that way? Or did Morton's infidelity redefine her? Or is Morton in the closet?

Florence seems to be faking an injury to milk some sympathy from Mort, who kicks her around when she moves to change the channel on a violent TV program he's watching. He reconciles by serving her toilet water in a teacup. Then leaves the apartment and hooks up with the first woman he sees.

When confronted with Morton's marital status, Adele seems unable to connect the dots that she's married, too.

But Floraine Connors plays the boiling-over sexpot to perfection; her silly smile and misguided adventures endear her to us. Morton's wife and Adele's husband both are played by Bob Cowan, to hilarious effect.

It's all set to a soundtrack scraped off the cheesy easy-listening platters that no one bought at the yard sale. And a surprise sci-fi ending puts the story in perspective.

"Craven" is not striving to be good. It's not (exactly) striving to be bad, either. But it does chop its subject matter down to size with its utter lack of sympathy and subtlety.

When Adele and Morton embrace, for example, the camera cuts away. We know it's not intended as an understatement, because it cuts away to a dog crapping and lingers awhile as it smells its feces. The message seems to be that poop is more interesting.

— Becky

REPLAY | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
These are the transcendent moments, whether they fall on Freytag's Pyramid or merely are pithy asides, that you relive in your imagination or rehash in post-film autopsies over coffee. You replay them countless times. You recap them for your friends. But revisiting never captures the essence of the original.

Director: Sergio Leone; 161m.

In a movie that contains so many memorable scenes, there is a small moment that gives me chills. Of course it pales next to so much majesty, but it goes a long way toward establishing a connection with the two sympathetic title characters. It also foreshadows one of the most iconic moments in the film, the scene where Eastwood offers a soldier his dying puff.

As Tuco and his priest brother come to blows in the mission, the audience sees that "Blondie" has witnessed at least some of the exchange. He slips outside and waits for Tuco with the carriage. When Tuco joins him, boasting of his brother's generosity and their close relationship, his braggadocio meets terse replies. Blondie knows he's lying, but allows his "friend" to save face.

"My belly's full," Tuco gloats. "...Even a tramp like me, no matter what happens, I know there's a brother somewhere who will never refuse me a bowl of soup."

Actually, Tuco is alone. So is Blondie. They form an alliance around their common interests that is as fragile and fleeting as smoke rings. It requires Blondie to withhold the location of the gold; otherwise, Tuco probably would kill him. Still, the men have some history working together, in a bounty scheme that required the utmost trust of Tuco in Blondie — and in the wide, cruel expanse of the civilization-dotted wilderness, that's something.

"Well," Blondie says after Tuco's wounded bravado winds down, "after a meal, there's nothing like a good cigar."

He takes the cigar out of his mouth and passes it to Tuco. Tuco accepts. The gesture is given weight as the men glance at each other, as if to make sure the underlying message is understood. The camera lingers on Tuco as he smokes and a grin of what looks to be satisfaction spreads slowly across his face.
— Becky

Nightmare in Wax (1969)

DIRECTOR: Bud Townsend
COUNTRY: U.S.
WRITER: Rex Carlton
COMPANY: Paragon International Pictures
CAST: Cameron Mitchell, Anne Helm, Berry Kroeger
GENRE: Horror
MISCELLANY: English; color; 91m; VCI Home Video -VHS
AKA: Crimes in the Wax Museum

There were some images here that really bowled me over. One was of Paragon Studio starlet Marie Morgan wearing a bikini and talking on a bulky white telephone. Behind her there is a floral-patterned beach umbrella that encompasses the whole of the frame. She must be poolside as far as logic would have it, but I can't help but think that the shot was an interior. Perhaps it's the way the umbrella filters the light. Perhaps it's an indoor pool; but then why an umbrella at all? Most likely there was a practical reason for the filmmakers to shoot it this way. These questions certainly don't need to be answered. What matters here is the immediate, jaw-dropping, antennae-raising ability of such an image.

Just before this, in a flashback sequence, there is a bit of a "Dark Passage" moment with a face-bandaged Cameron Mitchell as Bogart. But if "Dark Passage" is Hollywood Surrealism, then what corner of cinema niching does "Nightmare in Wax" encompass? Here, there is color, and that really makes this image what it is. Again, as with the floral print umbrella, the color blue is undeniably all over. The wall of the hospital room may be blue, but I doubt the blinds actually are; but they actually are here in this scene, in this print. Throughout the whole film, blue is an overpowering presence. Black exists, and often there are shots in the backroom studio of the wax museum that have just black as background, where over-lit characters stand out trapped in stark zero space, which I am always fond of; like falling through "Heaven and Earth Magic." So I don't think the blue is the print quality or a lab error, I think it's some kind of an aesthetic choice. There are also many cuts-to-black that are cuts-to-blue and always you see the glorious splice.

What stands out here, too, in this hospital scene, is the blocking. At one point, Anne Helm appears to leave the room, out normal stage left, and then she pops up in the foreground, almost Melies-style, and actually appears to startle Mitchell. In the next shot, you see a smashed clay head on the floor and when Mitchell crawls into frame, it has this totally jarring effect. It's something like the hotel hallway in Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet." It's a space you can't quite understand at first glance.

This kind of thing happens throughout. During a second phone conversation between Mitchell and Helm, I had to rewind to figure out to which character a certain closeup was associated with. And I turned out to be wrong in my initial guess. I also had to rewatch a kind of too long sequence of studio head Max Black in his car. First off, the shot outside of the car is great and looks like it was taken with a pinhole camera. Then there is a series of pan shots inside the car of Black sitting in his back seat that is really disorienting. It's as if Black's limo is actually four limos, which face each other, and he is seated in the back seat of them all. All the chase scenes have this effect, too. You never really know where the characters are in the space you initially accept them to inhabit.

Time also is violated often in "Nightmare in Wax." As is the case with the way the Gary Lewis-sounding T-Bones seem to end their song three times. Or the way Max Black responds to the artistry of one of Mitchell's wax heads; "It's fabulous, Vince," and then a few lines later, "It's fabulous, Vince," as if this was an alternate take of that line inserted in the editing process to shape the pacing of the scene.

The theme here might be blue or the theme here might be this is a labyrinth. Either one is probably not true. "Nightmare in Wax" is what you are looking for if you are looking for some unforgettable images and some truly disorienting editing and blocking. I know I often am.

— Carl