The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

Classic, Production-Code-and-genre-busting production where moral absolutism evaporates in the dry heat of the high desert, where gunsmoke and (then shocking) sprays of technicolor blood obscure the clear path traditionally bordered on one side by the White Hat good un and Black Hat baddie on the other. From the opening credit sequence, this one's special.  

 

A posse approaches. They appear to be soldiery, but appearances deceive. We're soon to find out that they are the 'bad guys', in the guise of the good. In fact, they're quickly established as antiheroic outsiders, just trying to get by in a savage world were the lines between law and outlaw are so much toed sand marking out the verge of an indiscriminate bloodbath.

 

 Our posse peer at a group of ragged frontier chillun, gringo y chicano, playing in the dust. The children laugh and smile, returning to their game: feeding scorpions to an ant's nest, emblematic deadly desert loners brought to heel by the incessant selfless hive. The scene is shocking, and punctuated by posterised stills of the closely cut action, small poses that function to not simply present the credits: the fully-fleshed reality of what we are seeing is flashed briefly into black & white portraiture, small pauses for reflection upon the falsity of the image. Black and white is out the window here. The harsh world of The Wild Bunch is riven by moral ambiguity and devoid of any such sentimental categories as innocence. We are but cruel children at play in the dust.

Technically innovative, with extensive use of slow-motion and novel editing figures to drive home the grim danse mcabre of frontier life, the film is thoroughly well-acted and never drags except for some slightly off-key comedy scenes where bodices slip and moonshine flows etc. The cringe-factor is alleviated, however, by the fact that such scenes, though clumsy, do provide a sense of the happy-go-lucky camraderie of the outlawed posse – but the bonds between them are best demonstrated in tense and brilliantly personal interchanges where the value of a life or the value of an action is weighed rapidly, in grimaces and the gravities of an eyeline match. 

It's a picaresque film with political savvy. Though both 'sides' – outlaw posse and the authorities out to get them – are marked by the same moral ambiguity that renders good and bad just plain ugly, there's a strong anti-State undercurrent at work, a sensibility that fits with the time of its production. There's a sense that the chaotic formative days of the United States are coming to a close, that the organs of power are consolidating, mapped by the ever-growing network of railways, the rise of the automobile and the machine gun. Revolution is in the air, WWI a flood just around the corner of the box canyon whose roar can be heard and felt, but not yet quite understood. This setting is twisted in Peckinpah's hands into a narrative where individuals are shanghai'd into unwitting servitude to these freshly laid down lines, swearing allegiance to the myth that if you make your pot you can somehow jump the loop, more or less understanding only the imperatives of the day: staying alive. There are individuals caught here, but also groups: bands of brothers and, notably, stricken indigenous Mexican and North American communities, all of whose positions and complicities are sensitively handled.

A must-see Western.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

The incredible lightness of buffalo.

From the first scene, this film is possessed by a lightness, the lightness in the earth. A water-buffalo, sleek, sentient and beautiful in the moony twilight that suffuses the greater part of this film sniffs the air, lows and whinnies, breaks from its hitch, and trots into the Thai jungle alive with the whirr and click of invisible insects. It moons and munches in the undegrowth until its human keeper, a figure at home in but not precisely of this realm of megafauna and dense and sleeping vegetable life, calmly summons it forth. There is no urgency of motivation for this beast's escape, nor in its return to the fold, just an everpresence that compels, an immanence that steadily breathes and animates each and every floating moment. This scene is quietly breathtaking and it sets the tone for the gorgeous, ghostly celebration in slow cinema that is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Folds in time: ghostly presences.

Uncle Boonmee is a kindly widowed farmer of tamarinds and honey, who's seen some time in the Thai military in action against the Communists, and now, suffering from a slowly debilitating kidney disease, has begun to see time in a whole new way. Though Buddhism and the Buddhist way of life inflects this film, it is not so much a case of Boonmee recalling his past lives as a kind of record recited, but rather an expression of the way that lives, of others, of dreams, always already in the past, are recalled by consisting in the presently lived. Boonmee's wife manifests at the dinner table – the shock to his visiting sister-in-law and nephew is only momentary, Boonmee unflappable – saying that she doesn't experience human time anymore. She becomes a part of the palliative cohort Boonmee gathers around himself – family, his mostly illegal immigrant Lao farmhands and personal carer – but of course, she has never left. When he asks her where his spirit should look for her when he dies, she answers "ghosts do not attach themselves to places, they attach themselves to people."

Even more surprising is the appearance of Boonmee's sister-in-law's son, who disappeared years ago. He returns as one of the glowing red-eyed simian forms that haunt the margins of the film, at the edge of the human realm, stepping into the moth-harried lamplight at the dinner table in all his Wookie glory. He relates his obsessesion with taking photographs as a boy, until one day he sees a blurry figure in a snap and sets out to find the animal. It turns out to be a Money Ghosts with whom he runs away with, leaving the human realm for a twilit existence. This story is one of many haunting episodes in the film that don't have an obvious connection to the whole – but this is a relief. Without searching anxiously for a coherent map of this suspended collection of narrative soap-bubbles, you always feel fantastically privy to the firelit clearing at the heart of the movie, at the heart of which is love, compassion, and companionship, a light that extends out into the inhuman world of the jungle and the timeless stones but whose horizon is not visible, or obvious, to human eyes. By what I suspect is a thoroughgoing use of shooting day-for-night, the film, like a dream, moves beyond the visible to the sensuous; primary is feeling, and tone.

Our animal selves in other realms.

In the weightlessness of the film, its buoyancy and oneiric alignment of the human and spirit worlds, is a concern with time, lived time, and the recollection of time, as the title might suggest. The idea that the past, past lives, are all present is one such indication of this concern. I also feel that there is an acute concern with the way cinema can spatialise time, can map the presence of time. There's a curious episode that Boonmee narrates while he (of course locating him temporally like this is a difficult to avoid side-effect of descriptive language) is released from life deep in a cave, whose crystalline formations and strata are geology's diagrams of time, a time beyond any humanly phenomenal dimension. He talks of a dream in which he was (again, undesirable temporal positioning) a time-traveller to a future where the authorities have a beam that seeks out past-people, projecting them onto a wall and in doing so revealing them. This cannot avoid comparison to the cinematic apparatus, if only in that it literally projects events that have unfolded and been inscribed in a past-time. While Boonmee narrates, a series of 'stills' (static shots that have been rephotographed by the film camera, that is) depict a group of military and young men interacting with (guiding by a leash, posing for the camera with) patently ape-suit wearing figures. This depiction could be pinned down to an illustration of Boonmee's dream: a future society, and the ape-figures as the past-people, perhaps a visual echo of the monkey ghosts of the other episode. It also resonates with the film's subtle undercurrent of contemporary S E Asian politics and history: illegal immigration, ideological wars in Indochina, guerilla groups (seriously now): an undercurrent that goes some way to anchoring the film in a narrative stream that is not entirely that of dream or the floating, unengaged world.

At the same time, there is an unbroachable disjuncture between the linguistic device of voiceover narration and the succession of static shots, a juxtaposition that recalls Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962).  The suggestion is that we live a dream, and that images and stories are the way our lives, present and past, are preserved, recalled, lived again (the ghost at the dinner table pores over a photo album at one point); the ineffability of our lives and what lies beyond life, and the ineluctability of our engagement with life by way of stories and images, not to mention the ineluctable transformation or negation of life that is death. 

After Boonmee's death and funeral, this is enacted in an even more direct fashion when sister-in-law, daughter, and the family friend monk drag themselves away for dinner and karaoke from the soap-opera in their hotel room only to react, however mildly, to the sight of doubles of themselves remaining passive in front of the telly. Visually, it is a literal (temporal/spatiovisual) bifurcation that seems to replicate the cyclic, resurgent temporality that subtends dream and experience, that is the substance and lifeblood of this singularly beautiful, meditative piece of celluloid. I sat engrossed in a fold in time for its entire length, knowing this was a singular film well-deserving of its Palme d'Or at Cannes 2010.

Fantastic Planet - Traag Adult Time

Yesss! Thanks D.

Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe, 1962)

This isn't my copy, but a cool cover nonetheless. I covet. Mine's the 2006 Penguin with a Corbis stock photo.  I mean it has a figure prostrate (or is it supine) in the dunes, could be a woman, could be a man, the ambiguity is effective. The dunes undulate, the contrast is high, skin like hot burnished metal or grilled silica, great. Figure supine in dunes undulating. Yes, but it's a Corbis stock photo.

I always judge a book by its cover and it looks like this one fits the dark passions that boil in the book. Maybe it's a still from the 1964 Hiroshi Teshigahara film? I've got that lined up to watch.

Again, this book slots nicely into the others that have come across my lap of late. Definite references to Kafka - the protagonist is an entomologist who describes himself and others as insects, and refelcts on the life of insects; he also refers to himself as a mole at one point, cf. Kafka's The Burrow.

A man collecting insects at a remote village enagged in an endless battle against encroaching dunes finds himself trapped, or at least an extended guest, in the titular woman's rotting house at the bottom of a sand pit. A less epic and far more creepy imagination of life at the bottom of the pit of Sarlaac.

Come to mama.

Food and water lowered in on a rope, sand hauled out. Food and water withheld if the Sisyphean task of keeping the hole clear of the rottig house is not worked at. Man plots escape, but what kind of life is he escaping to, if not one analogously absurd? Where some do Sudoku on the Tube, I ponder such questions. 

There's a great sense of desperation in sweat, snot, mucus membranes clotted and caked with sand. Visceral to say the least, there's a peppering of hot, odd Japanese erotica throughout. Suicide is pondered to spite his captors. He tries to catch crows. The sand is figured as a kind of living entity, as the exemplary condition of existence. Atomic, coherent, constantly in flux, dry, wet, all-consuming. It's a great read that delivers always from the fevered insides of the entomologist's subjectivity, not to mention the organs of his rage and desire.

Resonates with Camus' desert obsessions. Cred AJ.

Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand

The Little Island (Richard Williams, 1958)

The Skeleton Dance (Walt Disney, 1929)

Eisenstein called this a "masterpiece of the moving equivalent of music", subsequently theorising his concept of the 'plasmatic' - the metamorphic, protoplasmic possibilities of the image best demonstrated in the graphic animation.

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Been meaning to get around to Badlands for a while now, hearing many an enraptured account of it. It's certainly good, and fits into the books that have been falling into my lap of late – Kafka, Camus, DeLillo's Omega Point. All deal with existential themes, I suppose. (Then again, I'm increasingly aware of the operations of what Deleuze would call 'the dogmatic image of thought' - put simply, the tendency to get an idea in your head and then see it manifest wherever you look). One might ask What doesn't 'deal' with 'existence'? Huh.

Spacek of the gorgeous almond and alien eyes likens Martin Sheen's character Kit to James Dean in one of her naïvely romantic voiceovers, a description echoed (to Kit's pleasure) by the arresting officer. James Dean being that iconic rebel without a cause that, like Camus, was snuffed from lived existence in a car crash.

Badlands was inspired by the 1957 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, but these particulars of course dissolve in the general: the outlaw as emblematic of the American Western frontier pushing, and the outlawed lovers as an intensification of this mythology, the doomed romantic in doomed romance. As such Badlands takes its cue from 1967's Production Code busting Bonnie & Clyde. It also reminds me of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970), the second in his MGM 'trilogy' (Blow Up, 1966, and The Passenger, 1975 - this latter cowritten by structuralist film critic Peter Wollen). There again we have the antiestablishment figures, growing up absurd, a backdrop of overbearing patriarchal authority and, crucially, the American landscape as both a liberating and crushing  space, regarded as beautiful or awesome but wholly indifferent to our regard.

I love Malick's use of the apparatus of media - private presses, Spacek's murdered father's stereopticon - that seem to underline the dreamlife that Spacek and Sheen's characters lead and Kit's need to establish himself in the pantheon of the outlaw, leaving messages from beyond the coffin he seems resigned to nailing together with each dubiously motivated shooting.

Spacek gets the last gaze though. Holding onto the image of Kit as a James Dean rebel, equally spinning out his public image even as he is chained and bound for the electric chair, her regard remains dreamlike and it is as if it were her gaze, doubled and held in counterpoint with her poetic monologues, that built Kit all along, that it is she and not Kit's violet inscription of himself upon the world that carries their story, cradle to the grave.