Director Lars von Trier calls his new film Melancholia “a beautiful movie about the end of the world”; judging from the trailer released last week and embedded below, he may be quite right. Opening in Denmark next month (and likely to be screened at Cannes as well), Melancholia stars Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling in a story about two sisters who faced with the possible destruction of the planet must come to terms with the end of life as we know it. A recent post at SlashFilm quotes von Trier on the structure of the film: “In Melancholia I start with the end. Because what is interesting is not what happens but how it happens! So we begin by seeing the world being crushed, then we can tell the story afterwards. … In this way you don’t have to sit and form theories about what will happen, but can delve down into some other levels and become interested in the pictures and the universe — that’s what I imagine.”
For me, von Trier’s previous films have run the gamut from the unwatchable (Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves) to the brilliant (Europa, The Idiots and Dogville); the trailer itself, both chilling and beautifully lush, suggests it will likely be the latter. Magnolia Pictures will distribute the film in the U.S.; the official Web page for Melancholia is here. Posted online by von Trier’s Zentropa Films last Friday, the trailer, as I mentioned, is disturbing but sublime:
Three little maids from school are they: Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy
After the darker entries this week, a little piece of candy for Friday. The Criterion Collection has just released Mike Leigh’s 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, which has been out of print for years and covers the inspiration, composition, rehearsal and production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic 1885 operetta The Mikado. Leigh’s film is a remarkably detailed, lush and beautifully photographed (by long-time Leigh collaborator Dick Pope) portrait of not only Victorian England and two of England’s most beloved artists, but also the rewarding and often difficult partnership of theatrical collaboration and theatre work itself. Of all the many films about back-stage life, Topsy-Turvy rings most true to me, largely because of scenes like the below — a peek into W.S. Gilbert’s rehearsal room. If it were not for the period costumes, the dynamics of his rehearsal room remain the same as ours: difficult and often tedious work, leavened (in the best of circumstances) by wit and discovery. (There is a parallel scene in the film that depicts Sullivan’s rehearsals with the orchestra; that scene can be found below as well.) Playwright Gilbert is confident as his own director, in the days which immediately preceded the emergence of that particular specialization.
Jim Broadbent is wonderful as Gilbert; indeed, the entire cast (with Allan Corduner as Sullivan, Timothy Spall as Richard Temple and Martin Savage as George Grossmith) throws itself into the film with abandon. When the film was released in 1999, it failed at the box office but won Oscars for costume design and makeup. Though Leigh’s original screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award as well, it lost to Alan Ball’s American Beauty, a film whose adolescent insipidity only becomes more evident with each year. Leigh was robbed. Topsy-Turvy remains on my list of near-perfect films. There is a very good essay about Topsy-Turvy by Amy Taubin at the Criterion site, in which Taubin describes the film’s remarkable conclusion:
The riskiest and most emotionally stunning scenes in Topsy-Turvy come in the last twelve minutes, when what had been a rollicking entertainment metamorphoses into an expression of extreme melancholy and loss. Leigh turns the film over to three women who have seemed, until this point, minor characters: Gilbert’s wife, Kitty, trying one more time to coax her husband to her bed, unravels as she tells him about a dream she had that is transparently about her horror at growing old without having been a mother. Sullivan’s American mistress (Eleanor David) has the opposite problem and tells her lover, in as few words as possible, that once again she’s going to have an abortion. And the D’Oyly Carte company’s alcoholic soubrette, Leonora Braham (Shirley Henderson), playing the role of Yum-Yum (the operetta’s object of desire), is left alone onstage, singing the lovely “The Sun Whose Rays” in a voice that mixes heartbreak and triumph. It’s as if all along there has been an entirely different film taking place beneath the one we’ve been watching.
In the first clip, Gilbert leads his actors through the play:
And in the second, Sullivan leads his orchestra through the music:
The 1976 film Network, written by Paddy Chayevsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, was an early satire of the decay of the news media into just another form of entertainment and cultural manipulation[1] ; it was also, however, a satire of the capitalist corporatized world. Along with Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face in the Crowd, the film was both editorial and prophecy. The first studio to which Chayevsky and producer Howard Gottfried brought the project, United Artists, rejected the film as too controversial; eventually it was produced by MGM, which in the end allowed United Artists to control the international release.
Network carefully traces the threads that bind business, media and government together into a whole, the assumptions of post-capitalism the ideological glue. Towards the end of the film, television personality Howard Beale (Peter Finch) uses his power to stop a significant Saudi Arabian investment in CCA, the multinational corporation which owns the UBS television network on which Beale’s show appears. Infuriated, CCA chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) summons Beale to his presence to present to him the gospel of the New Capitalism and the New World Order. It is hard to believe that such a scene (or such a film) might be made or released today; as the narrator notes, its message may be “very depressing” (certainly United Artists first thought so). Nonetheless, it continues to ring true.
Footnotes
It should be remembered that the most famous scene from the film, the “mad as hell” sequence, is meant to be a frightening example of the ease with which the populace can be manipulated; the character of Max Schumacher (William Holden), the ethical and moral conscience of the film, is terrified by it. [↩]
We speak through him: Hans-Juergen Syberberg's "Hitler: A Film from Germany"
New Yorkers will have a rare opportunity over the next week to see Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s remarkable “German trilogy,” which plays 9-14 September at the Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue. The trilogy is one of the great achievements of world cinema and includes the astonishing 1977 Hitler: A Film from Germany, a legendary seven-hour contemplation of evil, world history and human complicity, which Susan Sontag rightly called “[O]ne of the great works of art of the 20th century and one of the greatest films ever made” in the New York Review of Books. The series also includes the 1972 Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King and the 1974 Karl May. Full schedule information can be found here. In the event that you can’t get to these films, be aware that at least Hitler is available online at Syberberg’s own rather remarkable Web site, and there is a DVD available at the Superfluities Reduxbookstore. (The other two films in the trilogy are also available from Facets.)
If you’re at Anthology Film Archives on Sunday for the 2.00pm showing of Hitler, stick around — at 7.30pm, Henry Hill’s “feature-length documentation” of Richard Foreman’s final work at the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre at St. Mark’s Church, Astronome: A Night at the Opera, written with composer John Zorn, will premiere. I was rather lukewarm when I wrote about the 2009 work here, but like all of Foreman’s productions, it will very likely repay a second visit.
Almost three decades after its 1983 screening on NBC, the television film Special Bulletin, from director Edward Zwick and screenwriter Marshall Herskovitz (who would go on to create thirtysomething and My So-Called Life), remains remarkably prescient. Although its plot revolves around an act of nuclear terrorism, this is not as much the center of the film as the role that the media plays in the coverage of world events.
Structured like Orson Welles’ 1938 radio production of The War of the Worlds, the story unfolds in a series of “special bulletins” on the RBS television network; a terrorist group siezes a small tugboat in Charleston, South Carolina, then demands access to RBS cameras. Once they’re provided, the terrorists reveal that they have loaded a small nuclear bomb onto the tugboat and threaten to detonate it unless the U.S. complies with demands for the nuclear triggering devices held at the Charleston naval base.
While the spectre of nuclear terrorism remains as dark as ever 27 years after the production of Special Bulletin, just as incisive is the film’s mordant critique of the media’s role in generating and manipulating fear and apathy amongst its audience, simultaneously sensationalizing and trivializing the story and the issues it raises. The hijacking does become a media event, and both reporters and terrorists are implicated in the growing danger. The cast of the film is composed largely of actors and actresses unknown at the time (David Clennon and David Rasche can be recognized among the group of terrorists; the only “star” is a toupeed Ed Flanders as anchorman John Woodley). There is a dark sense of humor that pervades the film (from beginning to end) as well: watch Woodley squirm as a sensational video graphic is played over his shoulder; and at the end of the film, the newscasts return to an endless diet of trivialized, uncontextualized videos of current events.
Given the 24-hour news cycle of cable and broadcast networks, as well as the deluge of YouTube videos and Twitter feeds, Special Bulletin remains a chilling experience and an acidic satire of mass media — if you see it, you won’t soon forget it. In the year of its premiere, the film won four Emmy Awards (including Outstanding Drama Special), Directors Guild of America and Writers Guild of America prizes for Zwick and Herskovitz, and the Humanitas Prize. It was a pleasure to find this long out-of-print video on Google video; the entire film can be seen above.
