Det sjunde inseglet (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957)

In 1955 Bergman had tried to get The seventh seal funded by Svensk Filmindustri, but nobody was interested. When Bergman was nominated for the Palme d'Or for his Smiles of a Summer Night in 1956 things changed. Bergman borrowed money to travel to Cannes and asked the then chairman of SF to fund The seventh seal.

This time Bergman got a limited budget and not really enough days to shoot the film. This shows. One example: the lit window of the building next to the film studio is visible when soldiers are taking a girl to the place of execution (the story is set during the crusades) and there are quite a few errors in the continuity.
However, these shortcomings don't matter.

The seventh seal is a wonderful film. The story deals with a knight who returns from the Crusades and his servant. They have been away for ten years. The Black Death is raging in Sweden and Death has come for the knight. The knight persuades Death to play a game of chess with him. The Knight knows he will lose but the game buys him some extra time to do a good deed. Death agrees. After the horrors of war the knight is wrestling with the question whether there is a God. His servant is past that stage. He denies the existence of a higher power. They are a contrast to a couple in a troupe of travelling actors who are cheerful christians.
The story tells the gripping tale of the couple and the knight with his servant who are travelling towards the knight's castle. On the way they meet villagers who are in varying degrees terrified by the coming of the Black Death.  There is an impressive scene in which the main characters meet a group of flagellantes who whip themselves to allay the wrath of God who sent the plague because of the sins the people committed.
Later there is a wonderful scene in which the group are having a meal of strawberries and milk. The atmosphere is serene and happy.
They discuss faith. The knight says:

                Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is
like loving someone who is out there in the
darkness but never appears, no matter how
loudly you call.

He is now very close to the moment when he is going to lose the chess match. But he says:

                I shall remember this moment. The silence, the
twilight, the bowls of strawberries and milk,
your faces in the evening light. Mikael
sleeping, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to
remember what we have talked about. I'll carry
this memory between my hands as carefully as
if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh
milk.

Die Austernprinzessin, Ernst Lubitsch, Duitsland 1917

I don't find it easy to watch films in the context of their time or their place in the history of filmmaking in a particular country. What I want is emotion, to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and carried along. The ultimate "suspension of disbelief", so to speak. Besides that, I find it fascinating to read clever texts about films or directors or movements etc. But these texts, although they may help me see things I had not noticed before, only rarely change the emotional impact the film had on me in the first place. To give an example: I have read that Dziga Vertov was doing something completely new when he put his camera somewhere in a street in Russia and recorded what was happening in front of the lens. I can appreciate that intellectually, find it most interesting, but when I watch a KinoPravda film like "Man with a Movie Camera", I am not riveted to the screen during the film. I can see a lot of the techniques the film uses, but, frankly, the film doesn't do anything for me emotionally. "Die Austernprinzessin" is also a case in point. It's an early film by Lubitsch who went on to make fast moving comedies in the U.S.A. later. "Die Austernprinzessin" must have been a very funny film when it was first released in 1919. But I carry my own history of film watching. And that influences my response. Having said that, there are scenes that still work well for me: the outbreak of the foxtrot epidemic is still funny. So are the oystertycoon's daughter's words when her father has promised her a prince for a husband. I wasn't bored during the 60 minutes that the film lasted, but I feel that the passage of time has not been kind to a film like this and that I cannot relate to the general atmosphere of the film which Lubitsch no doubt intended. This is, in the case of "Die Austernprinzessin", due to the emphatic acting. I feel that the degree of histrionic expression in silent films varies from film to film, or director to director. In my experience the silent films of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd have aged more gracefully. Could it be that there are more close ups in Lubitsch´ film and actors/directors like Lubitsch regarded making films too much like making theatre? The close ups are, frankly, embarrassing. They spoil the speed of the action.

Built-in obsolescence in Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1962.

I have a problem with Stanly Kubrick's Lolita (1962):

Recently I saw Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) which is a fascinating film about a dystopian world where teenage gangs roam town and countryside in search of sensation. They find that when they break into property, rape, steal and destroy. One day the main character is caught red-handed, given a prison sentence and subjected to an experimental method to cure him of his violent impulses. The film is based on the book A Clockwork Orange by Antony Burgess, published in 1962. I found the film as interesting as the book.

Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov and published in 1955. Kubrick shot the film in 1962. The film deals with a middle-aged professor of Literature who is infatuated with the fourteen year old daughter of his landlady.  He completely loses it the first time he sees her when she is sunbathing in the garden. The plot follows the relationship between the middle-aged professor who behaves like a complete fool when he starts and continues to have a, sexual, relationship with the teenager. Of course this brings him nothing but trouble. The girl isn't really interested in him at all.

The subject matter of Lolita must have been pretty outrageous in the fifties or the the early sixties. There are greater differences between the book and film in the case of Lolita, than between the book and film in the case of A Clockwork Orange.  Fact is that Lolita is a rather boring film. This is probably because the visual presentation of Lolita is obsolete now.

I suppose that after the sexual revolution starting "with the Beatles' first l.p." in 1964, it was easier to show images that were considered risqué before.  For me, in 2019,  the real story of sexual infatuation and statutory rape is indicated, but it does not hit you like the acts of violence of the gang in A Clockwork Orange do. It does not help that neither James Mason nor Sue Lyon seems to be up to the challenge of playing the professor and the seductive schoolgirl.

Lolita is a film that hasn't aged well.

Ozu, Yasujiro

The camera is about 90 centimetres from the ground as if it is an observer of what is happening in front of it. It doesn't´t move. It doesn't´t zoom in or out. It doesn't pan. Well not when we´re inside anyway. And we´re inside most of the time. In somebody´s house. In an inn. In a restaurant. We, the spectators who are looking through the lens of the camera, are, like the characters, sitting crosslegged on the tatami talking, eating, drinking or just being silent. And nearly everybody is very civilised. There is hardly any shouting. Everybody behaves in a very restrained, calm manner.

Shame (2011) It is a commonplace that one of the dangers of the Internet, for those who spend too much time on it, is that it alienates its users. The idea is that the virtual world of the Internet causes its users to increasingly lose their grip on social reality. A case in point is the proliferation of porn on the Internet. Frequent visits to porn sites may lead to a view of sexuality which may be socially harmful, the most harmful being that they lead to a view of women which is characterized by the idea that they serve to gratify male sexual desires. Director Steve McQueen set himself the difficult task of portraying a sex addict in Shame (2012). The main character is a relatively prosperous, well educated single man in his thirties, Brandon. McQueen concentrates on Brandon’s sex addiction. When he’s not hiring the services of call girls, he’s visiting porn sites, or communicating with women via webcams. He doesn’t only visit porn sites in the privacy of his own home, but he also uses the computer at his workplace and his boss’s time for this purpose. Still, to the outside world i.e. his colleagues at the office, he functions normally. He’s good at his work and is able to keep his addiction a secret so that he is not suspected when the hard disk of his office computer has become polluted by visits to porn sites. A trainee is blamed. To the superficial observer he is a successful professional. However, the way of life Brandon has built up is threatened when his sister, Sissy, comes to visit him uninvited. She is a singer who has a gig in New York and nowhere to stay. She has tried to call Brandon several times, but her brother has refused to answer her calls. This is worrying. It shows the first crack in his armour. And an armour it is. It becomes increasingly clear that Brandon has become so deformed by his addiction that he ignores real emotional needs of both himself and the one person who is close to him. It is impossible for him to sustain a normal brother-sister relationship. He doesn't know how to respond to Sissy’s needs for kindness and brotherly love. Brandon is emotionally impotent. He can’t commit himself. His addiction also causes him to lose sight of accepted social behaviour. When he eyes up a woman in the subway who smiles at him, he does it so unashamedly that the woman is clearly embarrassed. Later in a bar he talks dirty to a completely unknown woman and even touches her up. Clearly he’s losing his grip on social reality. That his emotions are a mess becomes clear when he has a dinner date with a woman from the office whom he is attracted to. The date is disastrous. He is unable to keep the conversation going in a normal way. Clearly he doesn’t know how to court. When they part, the woman clearly expects a kiss, but he can only manage a handshake. The next morning he reacts in the only way he knows by grabbing her and taking her to a hotel where he undresses her and tries to have sex. Then it appears that he is sexually impotent when he is with a woman whom he feels an emotional tie with. On one occasion he feels remorse for his addiction. This is when Sissy switches on his computer which is connected to the webcam of a woman who seems to know Brandon very well and acts out his sexual fantasies. Brandon is furious. However, he throws away all his porn magazines, dvd’s and even his computer. The situation comes to a head when Sissy tries to commit suicide. Brandon finds her with slashed wrists in his bathroom. This triggers something in him and the spectator has the feeling that this might be a turning point in his life. Whether it is, is left for the spectator to judge. The film ends with a scene similar to the one at the beginning. Brandon is in the subway watching the same woman as in the first subway scene. As before he makes for the exit when the woman prepares to leave the train at the next subway station. There the film ends. In the first scene Brandon follows the woman until he loses her in the crowds. Will he this time? It is worrying that there isn’t a character in the film who has a satisfactory emotional relationship with a person of the opposite sex. Sissy is desperate because the man she loves isn’t interested in her. Brandon’s boss has a wife and family, but is openly on the lookout for other sexual experiences. He has sex with Sissy. The girl from work recently left her partner. This makes for a bleak picture of inter human relations in the big city. Shame is a courageous film about an uneasy subject. Much more could be said about it. For instance about the scene in the restaurant with the blundering waiter, or about Sissy's rendering of ‘New York, New York’. Or about the behaviour of the women in the film: what social code do they respond to? Steve McQueen’s choice of Michael Fassbender is perfect. It’s a difficult role to play, but Fassbender pulls it off magnificently. Carey Mulligan also deserves praise for her role as the unstable Sissy.

Language and identity

In how far is a person's identity or character linked to the language that he/she speaks? Suppose you are a person who is fond of using irony in his native tongue. Or let's say you are a person who earns his living with language e.g a teacher. Now you move to a country with a different language, Let's say you're an elderly person. Let's assume you will never be at home in the 'new' language. In the 'new' country people will have a different perception of you, because you are forced to communicate in a different way. Your irony doesn't work because you are not proficient in the new language or the people in the new country are not susceptible to irony. Does that change you? Does the fact that you cannot communicate as you would wish, change you? At any rate you feel that your personality cannot be fully expressed. That probably means that people's perception of your character or identity or personality is different. What exactly is the difference between character, identity and personality? Mmm, food for thought.

Bite Club

I'm reading this so-called ' fantasy book'. It's called Bite Club by Rachel Caine. Apart from the fact that it is a pretty bad book from the point of view of plot and style, there is one thing that is slightly bothering me. In the story there is a character consisting of a brain in a bowl of liquid. This brain is wired up to all sorts of surveillance gadgets in order to spy on the inhabitants of the town where the story is set. To my knowledge the author who first hit upon the idea of a brain in a bowl was Roald Dahl in a short story called William and Mary. Now, should this in any way influence my judgement of the book? Is it plagiarism that the author makes use of the same gimmick as Roald Dahl? Most of the readers of Bite Club, I would imagine, are 11 to 15 year olds who, presumably, have not read Roald Dahl's story. It isn't as if Ms Caine has copied the plot. Just one character. Recycled it, as it were. Mmmm...