Wise Blood (1979)

Directed by Jhon Huston. Starring Brad Dourif, Dan Shor, Amy Wright, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ned Beatty. Based on the 1952 novel Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

I feel like Hazel Motes as I try to write about this film – struggling with the God that is Flannery O’Connor. A voice far more commanding than even John Huston’s. I tried to ignore the novel and just approach the film but once you’ve walked the garden path with O’Connor there is no backsliding. Redemption (serenity) comes by way of heeling to the things one cannot change.

In the opening credits Huston’s name is misspelled, purposefully, and it made me wonder if he was going to take additional cheap jabs at southern stereotypes rather than be true to O’Connor’s darkly humorous investigation into the complexities of Southern humanity. While the characters are absurd, they work hard to honestly portray the wild contradictions inherent in living a Christian life. In the south in particular, religion is not a side dish offered up on Sundays but the main dish of life for many. Southern folks have doggedly managed to hold tight to the spiritual as a way of living a meaningful life despite the modern capitalist insistence on consumerism as the meaning of life.

As I watched the film, I was struck by the realization (something that I hadn’t remembered from reading the book) that Hazel Motes is a true loner not so much by choice but by circumstance. He’s lost his family and the only home, albeit a troubled one, that he’s ever known. He’s a soldier that apparently has returned from action, though of what nature is not clear. Still, this experience with the world sets him up for some serious potential for disillusionment. 

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” You can never go home boys! But, who you are is shaped by who raised you up – the wise blood that courses through your veins compels you. In some respect, you never leave home. After all the internal struggles and external conflicts are said and done, we realize that we are what we are in spite of ourselves. So, you may as well get on out there and do some things you never have done before and if a good car comes your way you won’t need any justification.

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

Directed by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais and Josette Day

“let me pronounce four magic words, that veritable Open Sesame, once upon a time…”

For me, the magic of great filmmaking is its ability to elicit our childlike capacity for enchantment, as Cocteau openly asks from us in the film’s introduction, while simultaneously telling the paradoxical tale of our grown-up obsessions with desire and fear. Cocteau based his magical version of Beauty and the Beast on the 18th-century story by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. He modeled the surrealistic realm of the beast – a place of shadow, romance, and dreams – on Gustave Doré’s illustrations and the diurnal world of Beauty’s familial life of servitude on paintings by Vermeer. As I watched the film, on several occasions I was reminded of scenes from other great films that echo Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast: the somnambulist watching Jane sleep in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920); the image of James Stewart carrying Kim Novak’s limp body in front of the Golden Gate bridge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); the long hotel hallway with billowing red curtains in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). 

In addition to the obvious, the contrast of beauty and ugliness is illustrated in the use of darkness and light, and the duality of our human nature can be read in the juxtaposition of interior and exterior worlds. The opening scene of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast shows a small dog (a “tamed” beast) sleeping indoors, surrounded by three fussing women, who is then very nearly pierced by an arrow carelessly launched through an open window by a couple of silly boys playing outdoors. Later in the film, after she arrives at his castle the beast carries Beauty’s limp body into the bedroom that he has prepared for her. As they move through the threshold of the room, her dress transforms from that of a peasant to a princess. The bedroom appears to reside in a liminal space between interior and exterior where twisting vines surround the bed and the floor appears to be earth. Beauty exists in both the world of her father and the world of the Beast as a prisoner and no matter which world she inhabits there is something or someone that she longs for in the other. She peers into the magic mirror seeking a glimpse not of herself but of the person that she has left behind who is dying as a result of her absence. In the end, Beauty’s kindness frees the Beast from his prison but it seems that Beauty is forever to be ensnared by desire.

La Jetée (1962)

Directed by Chris Marker

“...he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.”

The name Chris Marker crossed my path within the last month. At the time, I did not investigate who he was but filed it away in the to-do-later brain pocket. Tonight, I was scrolling through Criterion Channel recommendations looking for a film to watch and in the “art house classics” section I came across La Jetée. I remembered the name Chris Marker so I decided to give it a whirl. I had no idea!

First off, I noticed that the opening image of the last film that I watched for this project, Stranger Than Paradise, is remarkably similar to this film. Go ahead and take a look at the image that I used on that post and compare it to the one on this post. It’s just too similar to be a mere coincidence. Perhaps also the lone woman in Jarmusch’s New York airport scene is a nod to the lone woman on the observation deck at Orly La Jetee?

Do a quick googling and you’ll learn that this film has been immensely inspirational to many filmmakers that followed – famously Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. It is a film that was made in tribute to another great film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It’s no wonder then that as I watched, I kept thinking of my friend Bob White’s animated sci-fi films. In particular, his 1996 film Terri Lovenote that features a voiceover narration in a voice that sounds similar to the voices of the scientists in La Jetée. I texted Bob immediately to ask him about it. He confirmed his debts, adding that every semester for the past fifty years he has shown this film to his students at Simmons College. I may have to add it to my Intro to Photo class syllabus next semester.