Death by Hanging

Oshima, 1968, 114m, Japan

This is a weird, macabre and disturbing film. R, a Korean-Japanese, has been convicted of two murders followed by rape and is about to be hung. The execution fails and his heart refuses to stop beating much after it is supposed to. The movie, starting as a rhetorical question about the morality of capital punishment, quickly slides into a bawdy farce full of gallows humor, often sickly and obscene. The participants in this highly scripted drama are the chaplain (since R is a catholic), the doctor, the public prosecutor, the guards and the officials who have to conduct the operation. The dialogs interlace humor with philosophy, social questions and recent history.

It is a loud, voluble film and the black and white photography within the suffocating confines of the execution chamber, supplemented by the unrestrained ribaldry lays bare the ugliness of the society which makes the situation an acceptable norm. The ritual and rigid formalities surrounding an execution serve to cloak it's very absurdity. The connecting chord of obscenity running through the film expresses the ugliness of killing, all the more if it has state sanction.

The mind of the condemned man is placed under the scanner and examined from all angles to determine the nature of his guilt. The act of killing is examined from a broad perspective. How is the death punishment different from an act of murder? The ring of officials narrate their own participation in multiple executions during the war. And finally R's sister who materializes out of somewhere tries to justify the crime by recalling the Japanese atrocities in Korea. All the while, R is lost in a fit of amnesia, out of which he emerges in gradual hilarious steps, but fails to remember that he is really R, or even if so, the same R that committed the murders.

This is a dark, brooding, outrageous and complex film and is a blend of many themes, centering around the act of killing in all it's generality. It concludes nothing but it's grim and morbid ribaldry leaves one with a sense of revulsion and disgust for the way our world is constituted.

Thanks to Nathanael Hood for introducing me to this unusual movie.

The Lady Vanishes 1938

Hitchcock, 95m

Hitchcock's comedic streak is at it's wittiest in this film. There is a build up of suspense as a lady literally vanishes into thin air and my guess is that Hitchcock must have created the mystery without having devised a solution and then wound it up as best as he could. It is a light and lively movie bubbling with life and mischief, including a pair of cricket crazy comedians and a whole pack of European (the traditional source of the commodity) villains . Most of the action takes place on a moving steam locomotive and that gives ample scope for a  variety of monkey tricks. The strength of the film lies in the freshness and of the script, the sparkling repartee and the youthful romance. It is a package of light entertainment, good enough to kill an idle hour and a half.

After all, Hitchcock was a mere thirty nine and the real wickedness and mastery of medium still a corner or two away. The film was immensely popular when it came out.
Criterion Essay

Last Train Home

Lixin Fan (director), Mandarin Chinese, 2009, 90m

This beautifully colored documentary is a panorama of the landscapes, economy and society of modern China.

It's a film about trains and train journeys. There is something mystic about trains. Cinema has a whole spectrum of trains, mirroring the million moods and seasons of life--the joys, the heartbreaks, the grandeur. Trains are beautiful. Trains can be cruel too.

David Lean loved trains. He gave us magnificent train sequences in  Lawrence of Arabia,  The Bridge on the River Kwai and Dr. Zhivago. The train arriving at Krakow at the beginning of Schindler's List hurtles us backwards in time to the beginning of the end. Another one in the middle of the same film fumes into the death camp, fuming monster-like at it's nostrils. The hero in Bimal Roy's unforgettable Hindi film, Devdas, having lost in love, set's out on a self destructive journey. In Casablanca, the rainy railway station is the venue of eternal separation. The  ghost train in Shoah pulls us back to an unearthly hell, as it heads for the now peaceful village of Treblinka. Trains symbolize death and rebirth, hope and despair, arrival and departure. One of the saddest of trains is at the end of 1935 Anna Karenina, as it disappears into the future after Anna's (Greta Garbo) fatal leap ( Youtube link below).

The train in Lixin Fan's movie slivers through the heart of present day China, exposing voluminous gorges spanned by dizzy bridges, lately mushroomed metropolises with complex loops of  fly-overs  which look no different from those elsewhere, and a thousand year old countryside. A land of breathtaking variety is revealed in the train's serpentine progress.

The train transports Mr and Mrs Zhang, working in a garment factory to their distant village at another extreme of the country on a long journey encompassing many climatic extremes. They are going home for the New Year holiday. This seems like their Christmas time, when everybody wants to be home, and this is the only time in the course or the year that they get to see their two children--sixteen year old daughter Quin and a boy. This has been going on for sixteen years and they have left the village to toil for their children's education. But Quin has other ideas and feels bored in this beautiful farm and goes away to the city to find work, earn money so she can be part of the brave new world of malls, movies and boyfriends.

But the train itself is the most important character and getting a ticket at New Year time is not an easy thing because this is the time when this annual largest population transfer in history--involving 130 million people!--takes place. The film opens at the station and we see the dense sea of humanity canopied under thousands of many hued umbrellas, as people jostle in a reasonably ordered fashion through the check points and barriers. On another occasion, the trains are delayed by many hours or days, and the crowd is left stranded unprovided with food and bedding. It is a harrowing experience. What impresses me is the civilized and disciplined way this situation is handled, with the police playing a gentle but firm role in maintaining order.

Notably this is the China which has emerged from the throes of it's turbulent past. No matter the isms that prevail, what is remarkable is to have achieved a degree of symbiosis within this giga-population. This is certainly very little anarchy here.

The mills churn out jeans for foreigners whose girth is twice that of a Chinese. Poverty unhoused and tattered is still visible on the street.. The family has been torn asunder. People toil for their children. Mini skirts are in. Granny on the farm knows that studies are what matter.

The annual exodus depicted in the film is symbolic of the repeated processes of social experiment and surgery that have marked the last hundred years of it's history. The process of change has been quick and painful. We move from imperfection to imperfection. The train of history is still on the move. Quo vadis?

Clip from Anna Karenina (1935)

Errol Morris First Person: The Smartest Man in the World (2003)

30 minutes, 2003, TV Series

Chris Langan, employed as a security man in a bar, is a heavy, muscular man in his forties. He was physically abused by his stepfather from age four to fourteen, till he was physically strong enough to throw his stepfather out of the house.

He has also come into the limelight as the smartest man in America, with an authenticated IQ between 190 and 210. (Einstein stood around 170, and Darwin at a lowly 130 or so).

Errol Morris interviewed him for half an hour in his TV First Person series. Morris's gift of getting people to talk about themselves candidly is well used in this engrossing interview. He employs the well known technical gadget called the interrotron, which lends an extra dimension of intimacy to the dialog.

Langan did not attend college, having found it a waste of time, but has a great deal of self acquired learning. He is a humble guy, and frankly admits that while there could be others smarter than himself, he has yet to encounter such a person. He thinks society should be run by a kind of intellectual priesthood, people like himself, who can provide a "window on the universe" which the less gifted can share. He says he has encountered hardly anyone with the same depth of understanding of the nature of reality as himself. He endearingly states that people like himself are not intrinsically superior to others, but simply bear more responsibility. "I'm not better than others. After all, I still work in a bar."

He is very much aware of the problems faced by humankind, and believes they can be solved by man becoming a new kind of man, essentially one guided by a concern for the common weal rather than self interest. This is only possible through a logic based religion, which, unlike faith based religions, would leave no room for quibbling. "We have to reach some basis for agreement, otherwise we will end up using what we have for killing each other." We can call the universe the mind of god. God is the principle of consistency, of cohesion, that holds the universe together. "We are all one." We have a piece of this god inside us, in fact are it, and it's possible for an individual to have the whole universe inside his mind. That's what he wants and aims for, anyway.

Society is being run by mediocrities, who also fill universities, so called temples of learning. He is concerned about population explosion and advocates a benign eugenics, wherein people would need state sanction to have children.

He is good natured, humble, pragmatic. He talks neither like a barman, a priest, nor an academic. He is self assured and there is softness and transparency in his expression, on the verge of a smile, exploding into a brief laugh. Whether the God of Logic is going to save the world or not, here is a nice, admirable guy..

The Guardian ranks Morris as number seven among the top forty directors in the world.

Wiki article on Chris Langan

Au Revoir, les Enfants

1987, Louis Malle, 104m, French

This is a ravishingly beautiful film about children in a French boarding school for boys. It is set in the period of WW2, during the German occupation. But above all it is a poetic recreation of a certain stage of childhood, full of adventure and the moisture of life, of the human animal taking shape.

The bunch of children is bursting with energy and the priests who are charged with their education and nurture have a tough time reigning them in. They are kindly and pious teachers, all too ready to wink off most of the foibles children are liable to. It is the age of dawning adolescence and a boarding school may be one of the best environments for the child to develop and round off the sharp edges of personality. It is a potters wheel where the social animal takes shape and the kiln where he finds strength (or crumbles).

They experiment with cigarettes, read forbidden books, fight, tumble over each other, a single bouncing ball of  exploding life force, and wet their beds. There are no secrets in the dormitory universe set in the autumnal French country side surrounded by woods. It's a film with the power to bring back the flavor of that fleeting period of life, replete with games and adventure, when the human plant shoots up to his destination.

But the country is occupied by the enemy and the rumblings of war form the backdrop of the film. The movie is woven around the friendship of Julien and Jean. Jean is a Jew and is being hidden by the school head at the risk and cost of his own life. The world of boisterous innocence suddenly turns dark as the school is visited by the Gestapo, having received information from a dismissed employee, and the film ends on a heart rending note.

This is a film which makes a subdued hence all the more powerful statement about the holocaust. By focusing on a single human life, it projects the enormity of the concentration camps all the more sharply than all the graphic material we have wearied of or become immunized to, or statistical recitations. We are just told at the end where the three Jewish children are being marched to.

RogerEbert
Vincent Canby