Category Archives: Movies

The Film That We Wanted to Live—An Homage to Jean-Luc Godard

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Nana (Anna Karina) weeps for Joan of Arc, and herself. (Vivre sa vie)

“What is difficult is to advance into unknown lands,
to be aware of the danger,
to take risks, to be afraid.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

On the afternoon that Columbia sophomore Phillip Lopate was released from the hospital after a suicide attempt, his brother picked him up, and they immediately headed downtown to catch a terrific double bill at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York’s lower East Side: Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. It was the early 1960s. In those days, films were not available on demand, anywhere, anytime. You had to keep watch for their brief appearance at a local cinema and seize the moment. When the Lopate brothers emerged from the double bill, they weren’t done. “Still movie-hungry after a two-week drought,” Phillip later wrote, “I insisted that we race uptown to see Zazie dans le Metro.… What an orgy! I had gotten suicide out of my system but not cinema.” [i]  

I was born 8 months after Lopate, so I too was an impressionable young man in what he calls the “heroic” age of filmmaking, when we were all falling in love with the revelatory perspectives and styles of world cinema: Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Ray, Fellini, Antonioni, Renoir, Bresson, Truffaut, and so many others. Movies mattered then in a way they no longer do. It always seemed a privilege and a thrill to catch a rare screening at an art house, or in some packed campus room with a 16mm print chugging its way through a portable projector, then talk endlessly about it afterward. 

This week, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the last pioneers of that heroic age, departed this world at age 91. His first film, Breathless (1960), would be a revolutionary turning point in film history, exploding narrative traditions and production practices to open radically fresh understandings of what we expect of cinema, and what cinema expects of us. For the next seven years, Godard would make fifteen extraordinary films which broke old rules—even his own—to explore countless new possibilities. I have five of those films in my library, and yesterday I paid my respects by watching all of them in chronological order, plus some of the commentaries and interviews on the discs. I started at 10 a.m. and finished 14 hours later.  Let me share something of what I saw.

Breathless (1960)

This was Godard’s first work, shot on location in Paris in documentary style, with handheld cameras and available lighting, liberating filmmaking from large crews, unwieldy equipment and stagey sets. It’s both fragmented and frenetic, full of joyous and jazzy energy. It jumps around in time and space, omitting many of the images and sounds thought necessary for visual and aural continuity. For example, when small-time hoodlum Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots a pursuing policeman, we don’t see him aim, or get any realistic sense of the spatial environment. We see a close-up of the gun, we hear a shot, we see the policeman fall. We know a killing just happened, but we don’t quite know how or why. 

Godard’s other fragmenting techniques include music which suddenly starts or stops in ways disconnected from the action on screen. Or diegetic (natural) sounds of street or café suddenly cease, as if we are watching a silent movie. Such devices prevent us from getting so caught up in the narrative flow that we forget we are watching a movie. In a later work, a character would ask, “How did I get into this film?” Godard wanted us to reflect on the differences between art and life, representation and reality. When we are totally enthralled by the narrative flow, lost in the illusion, thinking gets suspended. 

Throughout Godard’s early films, there are numerous references to both high culture—Mozart on a turntable, an art poster on the wall, a book read out loud—and pop culture—music, billboards, cars, newspapers, and, of course, movies. Characters go to the cinema or stroll under marquees displaying a relevant film title. When Belmondo saunters past a poster for Robert Aldrich’s Ten Seconds to Hell, it seems to announce Michel’s own rush toward doom. 

Criterion’s trailer gives a nice sense of the film in a minute and a half:

There is a story, of sorts. Two stories, actually: a crime story, with Michel on the run from the law, and a love story, where he and Patricia (Jean Seberg), a young American in Paris, try to figure out whether they are in love. However, the two stories never quite intertwine. Unlike film noir, the love story doesn’t precipitate the crime story. And the narrative remains subordinate to Godard’s real interest: how do Belmondo and Seberg look while they are doing mostly ordinary things? What do we feel as we watch them? The camera never gets tired of their faces, nor do we. 

Patricia (Jean Seberg): the final close-up gazes back at us. (Vivre sa vie)

But can we ever get beyond the surface to see their inner life? Belmondo does confess his own exhaustion. Mentally, spiritually, he is out of breath. “I’m sick of it all,” he tells his lover. “I’m tired. I want to sleep.” The police oblige by shooting him as he runs down the street. Patricia gets there in time to watch him die. But we’re not sure what’s going on inside her either. In the film’s final shot, she turns to look directly at us (another rule broken!), as if to ask, What do you make of this movie? What do you make of me? Then she turns her face away from the camera, showing us only the back of her head as the film fades to black. 

Had Breathless been made five years earlier, critics and audiences might have dismissed it as a confusing mess. But at the outset of the Sixties, it struck the nerve of the emerging Zeitgeist. It was not only a big hit; it had a lasting effect on the future of cinema. But for his second film, instead of repeating his success in a formulaic way, Godard pushed the boundaries again, choosing a topic so controversial that his film would be banned in France for nearly three years. 

Le Petit Soldat (1960, released 1963)

When Godard made this film, the Algerian struggle for independence was tearing France apart. By 1960 popular opinion was turning against colonialism and the brutality that sustained it, but right-wing French nationalists and Algerian terrorists continued a clandestine war on French soil. I myself was in Paris during a 1961 bomb threat. Police were everywhere. People were on edge, like America today. When Godard finished his film, showing both sides in a poor light, the French government suppressed it. 

While Godard continued the fragmented style of Breathless in his second film, he added a political dimension which would become a signature element in his work. Godard wasn’t sure what his own politics were in the Algerian struggle, and his protagonist Bruno is equally confused. Recruited by the nationalists, he refuses to perform an assassination. He can’t give them a specific reason. He just doesn’t feel like killing. When he’s captured by Algerian terrorists and tortured for information, he resists them as well. “Why didn’t I give them the phone number?” he wonders later. “I can’t recall.”

Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor): Facelessness expresses the depersonalization of torture. (Le Petit Soldat)

The torture scene is very Godardian in its avoidance of emotional effects, allowing us to think even as we watch various waterboarding techniques. There’s no blood, no screaming that we hear, no anguished face (we only see Bruno face down in the bathwater, or covered with a hood). What we do get is Bruno’s strangely dispassionate thoughts, as though there is a part of him they cannot touch: “Torture is so monotonous and sad.… Between torture sessions, we had great political discussion. They said I was an idiot with no ideals.” The most horrifying portions of the sequence are the cutaway shots of a woman in the next room, calmly reading Mao and Marx at her desk while her comrades do their worst behind closed doors. For her, it’s just a boring job. 

In some sense, Le Petit Soldat is about trying to think clearly when confusion reigns. Philosophy was a passion for Godard, and he wasn’t afraid to insert large doses of it into his films. “We do things without conviction,” Bruno laments in a monologue to his lover. “We no longer know where to love.… There’s something more important than ideals—but what? There’s something more important than not being conquered. I wish I knew what, exactly.… Where does speech come from? Maybe people talk endlessly like goldminers, looking for the truth. But instead of digging in rivers, they dig in their own thoughts. They eliminate words of no value, and end up finding one, just one, just one golden one, and already all is silence.”

Vivre sa vie (1962)

This film, Godard said, is about a woman who “sells her body but keeps her soul.” Unable to make ends meet, Nana (Anna Karina), spirals downward into a life of prostitution. But the commodification of her body, while evoking our empathy, is outshone by an expressive presence which burns brightly on the screen. As one critic has noted, “Karina remains one of cinema’s greatest presences.… You don’t watch Karina, or absorb her uncanny relationship with Godard’s camera,” in order to see her fictional character, “but for herself, alive and captured in the filmmaking moment, as in amber.” [ii] It’s no surprise to learn that Godard married her. 

Just before Nana takes up her sad vocation, she spends her last few francs to see Carl Dreyer’s classic silent film about another woman ill-treated by the world of men: The Passion of Joan of Arc. The martyred saint is portrayed by one of cinema’s greatest faces, Renée Falconetti. In a pitch-dark theater, we see Joan’s face, on the verge of tears during her trial, then we see Nana’s face as her own tears flow. In this celebrated scene, the two women become one in their beauty and in their suffering. [iii]

Later in the film we find Nana striking up a conversation in a café with a man at the next table. He turns out not to be her next customer, but a well-known French philosopher (Brice Parain, playing himself). It’s a perfect opportunity for Godard to engage us with some of his key themes.

“We must think, and for thought we need words,” Parain tells Nana. “There’s no other way to think. To communicate, one must speak. That’s our life.… Speaking is almost a resurrection in relation to life. Speaking is a different life from when one does not speak. So to live speaking, one must pass through the death of life without speaking.… From everyday life one rises to a life—let’s call it superior—why not? It’s the thinking life. But the thinking life presupposes that one has killed off a life that’s too mundane, too rudimentary.… I don’t think one can distinguish a thought from the words that express it. A moment of thought can only be grasped through words.”

Nana (Anna Karina) listens to the philosopher. (Vivre sa vie)

For a moment during this discourse, Nana turns to the camera, gazing at the viewer as if to say, “Are you getting this?” When Parain pauses, she asks him, “What do you think about love?” Without answering directly—love being a mystery—he reflects that thinking is performed by embodied, relational beings, each with their own incomplete perspectives. Therefore, in the collective pursuit of truth, error is an inevitable part of the process. “One thinks with the constraints and errors of life,” he tells her. “We must pass through error to arrive at the truth.” 

Masculin féminin (1966)

Among this film’s frequent intertitles, interrupting the narrative to deliver a message, is one that reads: This film could be called “The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Let them understand who will. 

The children of Marx and Coca Cola: Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Madeleine (Chantal Goya), & Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport). (Masculin féminin)

It’s 1965. Not much happens in the way of story. We hang out for 104 minutes with five young people in Paris. They have some good times. They pursue relationships, or fail to. They try out different poses as they figure out how to present themselves to the world. They read, go to the movies, strive to speak interestingly about ideas, the arts, politics, sex, whatever. They are still rather unformed, lacking the depth that comes with age and experience. But they all have their measure of charm. But there is a lostness about them as well. The film’s last line is spoken by a young woman, Madeleine, who is asked about her plans in the wake of a sudden tragic loss. After a long, reflective pause, she can only say, “I’m not sure … I’m not sure.”

Here are all the Godardian touches: disconnected moments rather than a continuous narrative; spontaneous—and sometimes awkward—interviews with the characters, who do not know the questions beforehand; fascination with pop culture (one of the leads, Chantal Goya, was beginning her successful singing career in real life); literary recitations; a mixture of different cinematic styles and camera techniques; and a quirky soundtrack, with random audio interjections by music, street noise, silence, and even gunshots. 

Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays Paul, is 21 years old in the film. That’s how old I was in 1965, so the innocence, the folly, the experiments in self-representation all resonate with me, as does the cultural energy that was in the air. It was an exhilarating time to come of age. As for the painfully archaic gender stereotyping in Masculin féminin, I do hope that’s not exactly the way we were.

I tend not to remember the hard parts, so, much as I love Léaud’s work, I can’t entirely identify with the “Paul” described by critic Claude Mauriac: “the image of the young man for all times—nervous, worried, unhappy, despondent.” I remember being happy. Mauriac, uncle to Godard’s second wife, thought he saw something of the filmmaker himself in Léaud’s character. 

Weekend (1967)

This apocalyptic “comedy” (as many laughs as Dante’s Inferno!) is crammed with multiple layers of meanings, parables, visual jokes, film references, appearances by characters from literature and history, recitations of political, poetical, and philosophical texts, and pretty much no one to like. A heady blend of Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Hieronymus Bosch, Weekend images the unraveling of the social contract and the collapse of Western civilization, all during a weekend in the country.

The opening credits include two separate intertitles, warning the viewer to proceed with caution: 

A FILM ADRIFT IN THE COSMOS

A FILM FOUND IN A DUMP

Corrine and Roland leave Paris for the weekend, with the goal of murdering her mother for the inheritance. Along the way they encounter the worst traffic jam ever, shown car by car in one of the longest tracking shots in film history (a brilliant must-see!). After that they begin to find clusters of wrecked and burning cars, with dead bodies scattered around—an excruciating metaphor for the Vietnam War. 

As their iniquitous quest continues, they encounter various odd characters, including a self-professed son of God (they pester him for some miracles—A big Mercedes sports car? An Yves St. Laurent evening dress? A Miami Beach hotel? Make me a natural blonde?—but such desires are judged too banal, and their wishes are denied); two sanitation workers who face the camera on their lunch break to recite dour texts on oppression and revolution by Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and Friedrich Engels (critics at the time advised going to the lobby for coffee during this interminable interlude); and Emily Brontë and Tom Thumb, wandering whimsically through the forest like characters in Wonderland, incapable of giving useful answers:

Roland:           “Which way is Oinville?”
Emily:             “Poetical information or physical information?”
Roland:           “Which way to Oinville?”
Corrine:           “This way or that way?”
Emily:             “Physics does not yet exist, only individual physical sciences, maybe.”
Roland:           “What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people.”

Frustrated, Roland sets fire to Emily’s 19th-century dress. Corinne watches pensively as Emily is consumed by flames. 

Corrine:           “It’s rotten of us, isn’t it? We have no right to burn even a philosopher.”
Roland:           “Can’t you see they’re only imaginary characters?”
Corrine:           “Why is she crying, then?”
Roland:           “No idea.”

In the end, Corrine and Roland fall into the hands of long-haired guerillas with guns, who survive in the wild as cannibals, cooking and eating the weekend tourist trade. Their motto: “The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome with more horror.” Don’t expect a happy ending. 

Corrine (Mireille Darc) in the hands of the Seine-et-Oise Liberation Front. (Weekend)

Weekend is a hell of a ride. When it had its American release in the fall of 1968, our nation was experiencing its own apocalypse. I found the film cathartically funny and stunningly inventive at the time. But after my recent midnight screening, I was gasping for air, like Dante emerging from the Inferno’s suffocation, desperate to return to the open air beneath the stars. András Bálint Kovács says Godard intended his film to be grueling:  

“In addition to providing a picture of the underlying violence in human relations in society and creating a form that does not let the viewer forget that she is watching a film, Godard’s goal was also to eliminate everything that conventionally provides the viewer with the comfort of watching a film.… Godard wanted the act of watching his film to be as painful as participating in the reality depicted would have been: ‘By Weekend I wanted to represent monsters in a monstrous film—a film that is a monster itself.’” [iv]   

After its French premiere, people thought Godard had gone too far past reality with his imagined chaos and violence. A few months later, 1968 arrived, and the movie suddenly made more sense. When the word “Fin” (The End) comes on after Weekend’s final scene, “de cinema” is added underneath: The End of Cinema. And with that, Godard’s greatest period comes to a close. He would continue to explore and push boundaries without compromise for another 50 years, but for the most part his audience didn’t come with him. His penultimate production was called Goodbye to Language (2014). With regard to accessible cinema, he had been saying goodbye for decades. 

I will always be grateful for what Godard gave us—so many marvelous moments and indelible images. Like countless others, I often borrowed his ideas for my own films (although my characters were more likely to recite from St. John of the Cross than Karl Marx). But after fourteen hours submerged in these five iconic works, I found myself, like Michel in Breathless, exhausted. I just wanted to sleep. 

Perhaps I no longer have the stamina for marathon screenings. But when I finished the fifth film at 2 a.m., I also felt dispirited by the absence of God in Godard. I do believe, as the Psalmist says, that “even if I make my bed in hell,” God is yet there (Psalm 139:7). And I know that part of the spiritual work of repairing the world involves looking at alienation and suffering with unflinching eyes, and finding grace in unexpected places. But while Godard is a reliable guide through the Inferno, and even through much of Purgatorio, he stops well short of Paradiso. For that I need another guide, someone like Robert Bresson, whose films, even the ones about suicide, always leave me in a state of prayer. 

Still, with immense gratitude and respect, if not exactly love, I give Jean-Luc the last word: 

“This wasn’t the film we’d dreamed of. This wasn’t the total film that each of us carried within himself … The film that we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live.” [v]

[i] Phillip Lopate, “Anticipation of La Notte: The ‘Heroic’ Age of Filmmaking,” Against Joie de Vivre (New York: Poseidon Press, 1989), 124.

[ii] Michael Atkinson, “The Lost Girl,” in the booklet for Criterion’s Blu Ray disc (2010), p. 20. The Criterion discs of Godard films are superb.

[iii] In this scene, the only sympathetic priest (played by Antonin Artaud,the avant-garde genius of French theater in the mid-20th century) asks her questions: “How can you still believe you were sent by God?” (“God knows our path,” she replies, “but we understand it only at the end of our road.”) “Are you a child of God?” (“Yes, I am God’s child.”) “And the great victory?” (“It will be my martyrdom.”) “And your deliverance?” (“Death!”). These words could belong to Nana as well.

[iv] András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 336-337.

[v] In Masculin féminin, Paul thinks these words as he watches a film in a movie theater with his friends.

“Don’t Look Up”: Laughing Till It Hurts

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Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DeCaprio) discover a comet in Don’t Look Up. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)

Human narcissism and all that it has wrought, including the destruction of nature, will finally be our downfall. In the end, McKay isn’t doing much more in this movie than yelling at us, but then, we do deserve it.

— Manohla Dargis, “Tick, Tick, Kablooey!”[i]

God is our refuge and our strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, 
though the earth be moved,
and though the mountains be toppled 
Into the depths of the sea.

— Psalm 46:1-2

Spoiler alert: If you want to see Don’t Look Up with innocent eyes, watch the movie before reading this. It is currently streaming on Netflix.

Kierkegaard once told a parable about the human capacity for denial. A fire broke out backstage in a crowded theater before the performance. With the curtains still drawn, the audience was unaware of the danger, so one of the actors stepped out to warn them. But he was dressed as a clown, and the people thought his cries of alarm must be some kind of joke. The louder he shouted “YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!”, the more they laughed and cheered. By the time they realized the peril for themselves, it was too late. 

“I think,” said the Danish philosopher, “that’s just how the world will end—to general applause.” [ii]

One of the most popular current films, Don’t Look Up, is a farce about the extinction of life on our planet. It dresses its message of disaster and death in a comic premise: most of humanity is either too witless, deluded, or self-absorbed to acknowledge the threat. The more ridiculously the characters behave, the more we laugh—at least until the (literally) bitter end.

Like Kierkegaard’s clown, director and co-writer Adam McKay has serious intentions. “I’ve been really terrified about the climate, the collapse of the livable atmosphere,” he told an interviewer. “It seems to be getting faster and faster. Yet for some reason, it’s not penetrating our culture.”[iii] Since climate change is a gradual process stretching far beyond our attention span, McKay has substituted a more instantaneous disaster for our consideration. In the movie, an immense comet is headed straight for planet Earth. In six months, all living things will be destroyed. 

An astronomy professor at Michigan State, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his protégé, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), discover the comet and try to warn the White House and the world. But their pleas for action go largely unheeded, and things go merrily downhill from there. As Manohla Dargis writes, Don’t Look Up is “a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freakout about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.” [iv]

In the Oval Office, Randall and Kate try to get the attention of a distracted President, played by Meryl Streep. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)

During preproduction, the world was struck by a different disaster—the pandemic. The mismanaged Trumpian response, followed by the deadly denialism of the anti-vaxxers, added fuel to the satirical fire. McKay’s parable became as much about COVID as it is about climate change. It was hard to keep the fictional script ahead of the times. McKay said they had to make the film “20% crazier, because reality had played out crazier than the script.” [v]

In most disaster movies, human ingenuity and determination win out in the end, and the world manages to survive. But Don’t Look Up is not so forgiving. Human folly and sin guarantee global extinction. And no matter how much we have been entertained by the stellar cast and amusing scenarios, we are meant to come away unsettled. Complacency is not an option. The theater of Nature is on fire. This is not a drill.

The film has been embraced by the viewing public as well as activists, but many critics have been not only dismissive but contemptuous: “… it’s one joke, told over and over and over again”[vi] … “the attempts at mockery are broad, puerile, and obvious, unintentionally trivializing the issues it seeks to highlight”[vii] … “drowns in its own smugness”[viii] … “its simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing mask the movie’s fundamental position of getting itself talked about while utterly eliding any real sense of politics or political confrontation.”[ix]

David Fear of Rolling Stone is particularly brutal: “… a righteous two-hour lecture masquerading as a satire .…  So caught up in its own hysterical shrieking that it drowns out any laughs, or sense of poignancy, or points it might be trying to make … it’s never able to find a way to crawl out of the tarpit of its own bone-deep despair … it doesn’t mean that one man’s wake-up-sheeple howl into the abyss is funny, or insightful, or even watchable. It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.”[x]

There have been more measured critiques. Some find Don’t Look Up heavy-handed and misanthropic. Most of the characters, they say, are too cartoonishly stupid or corrupt to make us care deeply about their fate. Some think the filmmaker is too cynical about our collective capacity to counteract moral blindness and systemic evil, leaving us discouraged rather than empowered. Others, weighing the effectiveness of the relentlessly over-the-top caricatures, ponder “the question of whether our culture has become too depressing, too absurd, too lamentable to satirize.” [xi]

In a lengthy and sober analysis, Eric Levitz judges the comet scenario to be a misleading metaphor for climate change:

“In the film’s populist, polemical account of the ecological crisis, there is … no need for Americans to tolerate significant disruptions to their existing way of life, no vexing question of global redistribution, no compelling benefits from ongoing carbon-intensive growth, and thus no rational or uncorrupted opponent of timely climate action. Don’t Look Up casts the conflict between minimizing climate risk and maximizing near-term economic growth as one pitting the interests of billionaires against those of everyone else.” [xii]

What I find missing in all this criticism is a sense of genre. The lack of political nuance, psychological depth, or aesthetic rigor is beside the point. This film embraces the method of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, where stock characters “make sport of human foibles and universal complaints while burlesquing the most socially or politically prominent members of a given community.” [xiii]

In the early 20th century, the Commedia model was adapted by Russian “agitprop” theater, “noted for its cardboard characters of perfect virtue and complete evil, and its coarse ridicule.”[xiv]  Agitprop’s aim was not to create great art, but to inspire collective action. In the American 1960s, groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe practiced a similar “guerilla theater,” whose purpose, as stated in a 1967 manifesto by R. G. Davis, was to criticize “prevailing conditions … expressing what you (as a community) all know but no one is saying … truth that may be shocking and honesty that is vulgar to the aesthete … There is a vision in this theater, and … it is to continue … presenting moral plays and to confront hypocrisy in the society.” [xv]

It’s a playful form of politics, using laughter to dethrone the powers of this world by undermining their pretensions to ultimacy. As the Psalmist says, “God is laughing at them; the Lord has them in derision” (Psalm 2:4). Prophetic mockery is the genesis of revolution. It’s liberating and cathartic. But if it remains merely a way to blow off steam, or a refreshing but temporary lightening of spirit, that is not enough. Action must follow. We must become the change we seek. 

Kate and Randall on a mission to warn the world. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)

Millions of people have seen Don’t Look Up. Its content and aims are being widely and passionately discussed. Is it a good movie? How accurate is its central metaphor? Which actors stand out? Is it funny? Given the film’s vast global reach and the urgency of the crisis, these become secondary questions. What I want to know is: Does it make a difference? Can it provoke repentance? Will it produce change?

Every preacher and every liturgist wonders the same things. How do our sermons, images, rituals and stories contribute to the transformational mix? In a podcast conversation about the film, Atlantic writer Spencer Kornhaber addresses this issue:

“I think this quest for movies to deliver a message that changes people’s minds is maybe quixotic. There aren’t a ton of works in history like that. But what they do do is give you a set of images and characters and metaphors and clichés that, when they work, become absorbed into our language. They help us talk about the world in ways that are hopefully progressing our discourse and society.” [xvi]

Of course, a film about global annihilation is a hard sell (and released at Christmas, no less!). The prospect of unimaginable loss opens the door to nihilism and despair. Why bother? Why go on? The director himself describes his film as a place where “absurdist, ridiculous comedy lives right next to sadness … so the trickiest part of the movie was to ramp down that tone in the last 20 minutes.” During a script conference before shooting started, one of the producers asked McKay, “Where’s faith in this movie?” And the director, whose mother was a born-again evangelical, exclaimed, “Oh, you’re right. You’re right!” [xvii]  

The last supper in Michigan. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)

As the comet nears its collision with earth, we see people facing extinction in various ways. Some are praying, some are partying, some are weeping, some are just staring at the sky in disbelief, fear, or hopeless resignation. But in a dining room in East Lansing, Michigan, a small group of friends and family have gathered around a table for a communal last supper. Among them are Randall and Kate. For six months they had tried and failed to awaken humanity to effective action. Now they are back home, choosing neither anger nor despair for their final moments on earth, but gratitude and communion. 

As the food is shared, each of them names something they are grateful for. Then Randall says, “Well, we’re not the most religious here in the Mindy household, but, um, maybe we should say ‘amen?’ Should we do that?”

Most of them are unpracticed in prayer, so this suggestion creates an awkward pause. But Yule, a young Christian skateboarder (Timothée Chalamet), speaks up. “I’ve got this,” he says. Everyone joins hands around the table, and Yule begins to pray:

“Dearest Father, Almighty Creator, we ask for your grace tonight, despite our pride; your forgiveness, despite our doubt. Most of all, Lord, we ask for your love, to soothe us through these dark times. May we face whatever is to come in your divine will with courage and open hearts of acceptance. Amen.” 

Somewhere across the globe, the comet strikes, and an immense tsunami begins to swallow planetary life like the biblical flood. Yes, there is a parodic ark, reserved for the billionaires, bearing them to a justly ironic fate in a galaxy far, far away. But the true ark of the righteous remnant is that Michigan dining room.

In their final minute on earth, the men and women around the table discuss small, ordinary blessings like the store-bought apple pie and the delicious home-brewed coffee. In an inspired ad-lib that had occurred to DiCaprio between takes, Dr. Mindy speaks his last words: 

“Thing of it is, we really did have everything, didn’t we? 
I mean, when you think about it.” 

The simple human beauty of this last supper, more than the script’s many earnest pleadings, makes the film’s best case for preserving the world. It seems no accident that the one who sets the spiritual tone is named Yule, an old word for Christmas. Even at history’s last moment, Love is being made flesh.

Then, as the walls around them begin to disintegrate, the screen goes suddenly dark. The circle of human love has vanished into the Divine Mystery. 

After watching Don’t Look Up, I came across a poem by John Hollander which articulates for me the feeling of this moving finale. “At the New Year” is about the new beginnings that emerge from all the endings—those moments when we feel “every door in the world shutting at once.” Then the poet prays, “let it come at a time like this, not at winter’s / Night,” but “at a golden / Moment just on the edge of harvesting, ‘Yes. Now.’ / … as we go / Quietly on with what we shall be doing, and sing / Thanks for being enabled, again, to begin this instant.” [xviii]

So the apocalypse ends not with a bang, but with a softly spoken thanks for everything. Even when the worst arrives, the answering word is Yes, and the circle of love goes “quietly on with what we shall be doing,” and singing our thanks. Every moment, even the last one, is a gift to be savored. May our own precious moments on this earth be hallowed with gratitude, acceptance, and trust, now and at the hour of our death.

[i] Manohla Dargis, New York Times review of Don’t Look Up (12/23/21): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/movies/dont-look-up-review.html

[ii] Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part 1 (1843).

[iii] Adam McKay, quoted in Frederic and Mary Brussat, film review of Don’t Look Up in Spirituality and Practice (Dec. 21, 2021): https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/reviews/view/29113/dont-look-up

[iv] Dargis, “Tick, Tick, Kablooey!” New York Times review (12/23/21).

[v] McKay, q. in David Sims, “Don’t Look Up is a Primal Scream of a Film,” The Atlantic (12/23/21): https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/12/dont-look-up-adam-mckay-netflix-movie/621104/

[vi] Max Weiss, Baltimore Magazine (12/27/21): https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/movie-review-dont-look-up/

[vii] James Berardinelli, Reel Reviews (12/23/21): https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/don-t-look-up

[viii] Sameen Amer, The News International, Pakistan (1/16/22): https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/925421-in-the-picture

[ix] Richard Brody, “The Crude Demagogy of Don’t Look Up,” The New Yorker (1/6/22): https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-crude-demagogy-of-dont-look-up

[x] David Fear, “‘Don’t Look Up…or You Might See One Bomb of a Movie Hurtling Right Toward You,” Rolling Stone (12/24/21): https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/dont-look-up-review-leonardo-dicaprio-jennifer-lawrence-1268779/

[xi] “Why Are People So Mad About Don’t Look Up?,” The Atlantic podcast (1/14/22): https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2022/01/dont-look-up-satire/621256/

[xii] Eric Levitz, “Don’t Look Up Doesn’t Get the Climate Crisis,” New York Magazine (1/5/22):https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/dont-look-up-climate-metaphor-review.html

[xiii] Michael William Doyle, “Staging the Revolution: Guerilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice, 1965-1968”: https://www.diggers.org/guerrilla_theater.htm

[xiv] Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 303, cited in “Agitprop” (Wikipedia).

[xv] Doyle, “Staging the Revolution …”

[xvi] Spencer Kornhaber, “”Why Are People So Mad …?”

[xvii] Adam McKay, interview in Variety, “Adam McKay on the Ending(s) of Don’t Look Up” (Dec. 2021): https://variety.com/2021/film/news/adam-mckay-dont-look-up-ending-spoilers-1235142363/

[xviii] John Hollander (1929-2013), “At the New Year,” in American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom, eds. Harold Bloom & Jesse Zuba (New York: Library of America, 2006), 442-443.

Love Among the Ruins: Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy”

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Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) on the road to Naples.

Alexander:       “Where are we?”
Katherine:       “Oh, I don’t know exactly.”

— Opening lines of Journey to Italy

 

The first shot of Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film, Journey to Italy, is through the windshield of a speeding Bentley on an open stretch of country road. It is an image of pure velocity, revealing neither origin nor goal, but only the fact of motion. Inhabiting the subjective eye of the camera, we know only that we are rushing forward, out of the past, into the unknown.

Then we see who is inside the car. Alex and Katherine Joyce are Londoners, on their way to Naples to sell a villa inherited from their Uncle Homer. We deduce from their clothes—his tweed jacket and her leopard-skin coat—that they are a couple of means, accustomed to shaping their own story. But the names “Joyce” and “Homer,” invoking the great voyager Ulysses, suggests that their journey will take them beyond the familiar into the land of unknowing. “Where are we?” “Oh, I don’t know exactly.”

For the Joyces, Naples, along with nearby Vesuvius and Pompeii, is radically elsewhere—neither Rome nor Milan, and certainly not London. In the Italian south, modernity has not erased the archaic remnants of mythic memory or silenced the primal voices of earth, sea, and sky. The ancient past is not dead and gone. It speaks through rituals and ruins. It erupts from the depths of history, utters forgotten tongues.

Time slows in the south. The north’s purposeful hurry dissipates beneath the Neapolitan sun. The forward rush of the opening scene is replaced by aimless drift. A firm sense of story—beginning, middle, and end—dissipates into Mediterranean languor. The eventful developments we expect from movie narrative are absent. Like Dante in the dark wood, Alex and Katherine have strayed from the straight road of storytelling. They have lost their way.

The Italian south doesn’t create their malaise; it reveals it. “I’m getting sick of this crazy country,” Alex complains. “It poisons you with laziness. I want to get back home, back to work.” Without the familiar fictions of their London life, the habitual doings and distractions which postpone the honest reckonings of a hungry heart, they find themselves face to face with the alienation, egoism and fatigue of a failing marriage. They hardly know what to say to each other. When they do, the words are often abrasive or wounding.

Rossellini’s leads were actors whose own lives were in emotional disarray. Both Ingrid Bergman (Katherine) and George Sanders (Alex) had recent divorces, and Bergman’s current affair with Rossellini—a scandal at the time—was coming apart. She was tearful on the set. Sanders, recruited precisely for his sour and cynical manner, was also unhappy. With his biggest roles behind him, what was he doing with a largely nonprofessional cast in a low-budget art film?

Rossellini’s practice of handing out dialogue at the last minute kept his actors off balance, so they couldn’t overthink their performance in advance . Trained in the conventions of Hollywood’s highly scripted and plot-driven narratives, Bergman and Sanders often seem at a loss in a film where so little happens. His confusion and her uncertainty infused their roles with authenticity, blurring the line between fiction and documentary.

“All those shots of eyes looking.” —Jacques Rivette

“The film opens a breach and all cinema on pain of death must pass through it.”

— Jacques Rivette on Journey to Italy [i]

Journey is more than the story of a marriage. Its wider theme is the malady of the secular age. Both Alex and Katherine are imprisoned within themselves, unable to connect with each other or the world. To borrow a phrase from Jean-Luc Godard, they are “castaways of the western world, survivors of the shipwreck of modernity.” [ii]  Journey would pave the way for a cinema of alienation, haunted with the ghostly nonbeing of lives “lacking in purpose, in passion, in zest, in a sense of community, in ordinary human responsiveness, in the ability to communicate.…” [iii]

This was a new kind of cinema, born of twentieth-century trauma. After the Holocaust and Hiroshima, it became impossible to limit the art of film to self-contained stories, within which the actors can take action to resolve problems and produce definitive and satisfying conclusions. The damage and disfigurement of humanity, its existential crisis and utter lostness, had to find authentic representation in movies about “nothing.” That is to say, their true subject would not be a narrative but a condition.

French film scholar Antoine de Baecque writes about the impact on filmmakers of the shocking footage shot during the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The idea of “aestheticizing horror” through fictional recreations of the camps seemed obscene at the time. “I could never do that,” said American director Samuel Fuller. “How can you do it better than the Germans?”[iv]  But those terrible images lodged themselves permanently in the psyches of directors like Rossellini, Antonioni, Resnais and Godard. As de Baecque writes:

“These images born of the war, which deeply marked cinema and filmmakers at the time, did a kind of subterranean work, a ‘reworking’ so to speak, subconsciously—since they never actually appear in postwar films—and then resurfaced in films (often ten years later) in definite forms, like traumatic memory that, little by little, had bored its way into the history of cinema. An art form had lost its innocence, and the great auteurs would no longer be making the same kinds of films.” They could only “return to the real by getting out of the studio to film the world.” [v]

Skulls of unknown dead at the cave cemetery of Fontanelle in Naples.

In Journey, the memory of death resurfaces again and again. We see the charnel house skulls in a Naples cemetery, a funeral cortège rounding a corner to block our progress, and the ruins of Pompeii, where a thousand Romans were buried alive by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Even when Alex and Katherine bask in the pleasant Mediterranean sun, the volcano looms behind them as a reminder of mortality.

Sunbathing at Homer’s villa, with Vesuvius in the background.

Two people have lost their way in a world of death. Is there no exit? The spirituality of Naples wants to speak, but Alex has no ears to hear, no curiosity beyond his enclosure of self-absorption. Katherine, however, proves more adventurous. When she drives into Naples from the villa, the film cuts between her “entombment” inside the car and the fecundity of street life all around her—strolling lovers, pregnant women, sidewalk vendors. The contrast between the carefully composed studio shot of Katherine behind the wheel and the cinéma vérité footage of the street creates an unstable mix of fiction and documentary. The wall between herself and a wider reality is starting to crumble.

The polished studio shot of Katherine encased in her car contrasts with the documentary realism of the street scenes around her.

“That’s what God is for, to make our lies truth.”

— Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice

In writing about the novels of Iris Murdoch, theologian Paul S. Fiddes describes the ‘unselving’ of self-enclosed characters. He could be writing about the Joyces as well. Like Murdoch’s protagonists, they “learn, or fail to learn, to be truthful, which means giving attention to what is real around them. At one level … this means noticing people as they actually are, rather than as we want them to be for our convenience. It means delighting in all the contingent details of the world, recognizing the ‘otherness’ of people and things, and living with all the hazards of accident. At the very least the disciples of goodness accept the ‘muddle’ of the world, and at the best they experience its amazing variety as being the Sublime.” [vi]

Katherine’s tourist itinerary of Naples thus becomes something more: a journey into the depths of the past—the cave of an ancient Sibyl, an ossuary of anonymous skulls, galleries of Roman sculpture, the ruins of Pompeii. Here she begins to face what Rose Macaulay called “the ruins of the soul; the shadowy dreams that lurked tenebrously in the cellars of consciousness; in the mysterious corridors and arcades of dreams, the wilderness that stretches not without but within.” [vii] Remnants of a vanished past, signifying the paradoxical dance of time and eternity, interrogate the meaning of her present existence. As we are now, so you shall soon be. What are you doing with the tiny slice of time you’ve been given? When you’re gone, what remains?

In the archaeological museum, the eyes of the past interrogate the modern viewer.

 When Katherine looks at statues, they stare back. Who are you? The “I” of the camera, a third subjectivity, looks at both—at the statue, then at Katherine. In the museum and the other visited sites, the film becomes a documentary of Ingrid Bergman’s face, “a sensory surface on which the sounds and images are imprinted. The film appears to rest entirely on her reactions.” [viii]

When Katherine gazes into the sulphur pits of Vesuvius, where subterranean energies surface into visibility, we are reminded of Dante’s Inferno, the classic template for every descent into the soul’s hidden depths.

Katherine and her guide at the sulphur pits of Vesuvius.

Gustave Doré: Dante and Virgil in the 8th circle of hell.

The crisis point in Journey follows a bitter argument between Katherine and Alex. At the very moment Alex says the fatal word—“divorce”—they are interrupted by Burton, the villa’s property manager, who insists they come immediately to the excavation at Pompeii, where a pair of “bodies” is about to be uncovered.

When Pompeii was buried under six meters of volcanic ash two thousand years ago, its inhabitants died instantly. Their bodies dissolved over time, leaving hollow forms in the hardened ash. During the shooting of Journey to Italy, archaeologists were in the process of injecting plaster into those forms to recreate the ancient “bodies,” and Rossellini was allowed to film the fictional Joyces watching the real uncovering of a buried past.

“You must come!” Burton had told them. “Imagine—to actually see the shape of a man just as he was then, the moment when he was surprised by death.” In fact, what they do see is two people, a couple who took their last breath lying side by side as lovers.

The forms are real plaster, but at the same time they are fictional figures, reimagined into the visible from the empty shapes left behind by the dead. They are, in effect, tangible expressions of nothingness, which might also be said about the hollow and aimless lives of the Joyces. For any viewer, those plaster forms of vanished Pompeiians prompt unsettling meditations on life and death, presence and absence, and our own essential nothingness. I myself contemplated Pompeii’s plaster ghosts almost fifty years ago, and I can still recall the melancholy—and the fascination—those forms evoked in me. As Julian of Norwich put it in the 14th century, without divine love sustaining us in every moment, we would all sink into nonbeing.

Alex and Katherine watch the unearthing of the ancient couple at Pompeii.

What the Joyces behold, as they watch the archaeologists brush away the ash from the plaster forms, is history made visible. Staring into the abyss of time, they are confronted by the smallness and brevity of their own lives. Their own nothingness surfaces into awareness. The falsity of their solipsistic lives, independent of a larger world and ignorant of death, begins to give way.

The image of the ancient lovers is itself a shock, history’s rebuke to their own loveless marriage. Perhaps most terrible of all is the photographic nature of the forms, capturing a single instant of the past and removing it from the flow of time. The Roman lovers are a still image, frozen in a moment with no future. For Katherine and Alex, stuck in a hell of their own making, it displays the horror of an existence which cannot change, a deadness with no exit. They recognize themselves—sans embrace—in the plaster forms.

Katherine recoils and bursts into tears, demanding that they leave the site. As the couple descends a flight of ancient stairs to find their car, Katherine asks her husband, “Is this the way out?” It is another Dantean moment: the way down is the only way up.

Once back in their car, they try to put some distance between themselves and the place which has tried their souls. But the south will not let them go. Passing through the town of Maiori on the Amalfi Coast, they are blocked by a great crowd jamming the central square. It is a procession for San Gennaro, the only Christian festival to claim an annual miracle: the liquefication of the martyred bishop’s dried blood. The persistence of this claim in a skeptical age highlights the archaic strangeness of a region where the past seems so unperturbed by modernity. And in this land of miracles, Journey to Italy reaches its miraculous conclusion.

Unable to drive any further, Katherine and Alex get out their car, the symbol of their isolation from and control over exterior circumstance. Immersed in the teeming crowd, they seem nakedly exposed to the energies all around them. When Katherine is suddenly swept away by a surge of bodies, Alex runs to rescue her. They embrace. Suddenly—miraculously—awakening to a forgotten but genuine bond between them, they confess their folly and profess their love.

The miraculous reconciliation defies expectations.

It’s a Hollywood ending, but one in quotes, because this is a modernist work, where the real and ambiguous world insists on breaking into the neatly scripted story. If the revelations and crisis that preceded this moment only result in a happy ending for the couple, who might then resume their distance from the world if not each other, it is not a true unselving. It would allow the lie of autonomous lives to carry on.

Alex and Katherine embrace as the camera pulls away.

The film’s true miracle is not the “happy ending” of the Joyces’ embrace and the lovely closeup of famous movie stars. Rather, it is their disappearance into the larger world of humanity and history, and through that, into the ultimate mystery of the world, whom we call divine. And this miracle happens when the camera, on a crane, pulls away from the couple to sweep over the crowd. The Joyces are not forgotten, but they are now understood as part of a much larger world. But this world is not anonymous and impersonal. The uniquely personal remains undiminished in this great communion of mortal beings, as the final shot, now at eye level, watches face after face after face pass by, into a collective future that never stops unfolding.

Every age will see a film differently. I’ve watched Journey to Italy many times over the years, but viewing it during the pandemic has touched an existential nerve. Larger realities are breaking into our settled world, and we will never be the same. Our own Vesuvius looms on the horizon.

Film critic Laura Mulvey, in her commentary on the excavation scene, points out that cinema itself, not just particular films, confronts us with our mortality:

“The figures of the excavation are formed by an imprint left by the original. Film too is an imprint.…The presence of the human figure on celluloid is one more layer, one more trace of the past brought to life and preserved.… With the coming of death and the passing of time, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, as well as the passersby in Naples, are now themselves dead, their images fossilized on celluloid, just as the figures of Pompeii were cast in plaster.” [ix]

“Life is so short,” says Katherine among the ruins. And as today’s pandemic spreads its shadow over the earth, and climate change undermines the stability of the physical world, we too have become more conscious of our vulnerability and our brevity, and less able to maintain the illusion of untouched autonomous lives. We can no longer keep death at a safe distance; we dance every day on the razor’s edge between being and nonbeing. Who knows when we, too, will be “surprised by death?”

But in the long run of time, the question of my fate or your fate must give way to a larger perspective. We are all in this together, and—come what may—I believe we will, in the end, be gathered into the great procession of a redeemed humanity, shouting “Glory!” for all eternity. It will no longer be death that takes us by surprise, but grace.

Love among the ruins. “Life is so short.”

 

Journey to Italy (1954) is the third feature in a trilogy of “voyage” films which Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman, who left a successful Hollywood career to make these art films—some of her best work—with the Italian director, with whom she would fall in love. All 3 films involve a transformative journey into an unfamiliar and challenging place—a barren island in Stromboli (1950), the world of the poor in Europe ’51 (1952), and the mysterious south of Italy in Journey. In the U.S., The Criterion Collection has produced a beautifully mastered box set of the Trilogy, with excellent commentaries, to which I am indebted, on the discs and in the booklet. Journey to Italy can be streamed, but (in the U.S. at least), it is available on disc only in the box set, which is definitely worth having if you love film.

 

[i] Cited in James Quandt’s commentary, “Surprised by Death: Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage Trilogy,” on the Criterion disc, 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman (2013). Rivette, along with Godard, Resnais, and Truffaut, would be greatly influenced by this film, and often praised it in their writings.

[ii] Godard is describing his own film, Contempt (1963), which was itself an hommage to Journey to Italy. Cited in Quandt’s commentary.

[iii] This quote from Richard Gilman’s “About Nothing—with Precision,” Theater Arts 46, no. 7 (July 1962), p. 11. Gilman is writing about another Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, who would take the theme of alienation to the limit in films like La Notte (1961), where the alienated couple remains stuck in their private hell, unlike the couple in Journey to Italy. Rossellini regarded Antonioni’s films as too pessimistic, but both filmmakers were dealing with the same modern malady: alienation, drift, and emptiness. Gilman is cited in Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985),

[iv] Cited in Antoine de Baecque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau & Jonathan Magidoff (New York: Columbia University, 2008), 68. Fuller shot footage for the U.S. Army during the liberation of the camp at Falkenau (you can find it on YouTube), but he never tried to recreate the horror in a fictional way. He did show his actors watching documentary footage in Verboten!(1959). The fictional shots pale when intercut with real images of mass death.

[v] Antoine de Baecque, 45.

[vi] Paul S. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 173.

[vii] Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness (1950), cited in Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 231. Macaulay’s character is contemplating the bomb craters and ruined buildings in 1946 London. The remnants of past destruction bear thematic resemblance to Pompeii and evoke similar responses.

[viii] Antoine de Baecque, 65.

[ix] Laura Mulvey is a noted British film theorist. Her richly informative commentary is on the Criterion disc.