Film/ Pasolini: Teorema; Porcile; Salo'

Pasolini- A Proposed Trilogy

Pier Paolo Pasolini made one trilogy- The Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) and intended to make a Trilogy of Death. Salo’ is the only completed film from this intended trilogy. For me, an unintended trilogy shaped itself while viewing Teorema, Porcile and Salo’ at a Pasolini retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

Each film is a masterwork on its own, yet combines with the others in surprising and, perhaps, unexpectedly obvious ways, to create a full and complex vision saturated with Pasolini’s exploration of the nature, boundaries and interpenetrations between the religious and the human. The films also describe an arc of stylistic progression: Teorema is a mythic tale, as pure and stark as an early renaissance mural cycle by Bellini or Carpaccio; Porcile is a time- and world-traveling double story juxtaposing mercantile contemporary sophistication with a 16th century fantastic fable; Salo’ is an anti-tale 3-ring circus from Hell, its cinematic artistry conspicuously inept and fragmented, entirely stylized and utterly without stylishness.


Part One, Teorema

Teorema begins with a desolate and otherworldly rock-strewn landscape seen from high above through a thin scrim of rapidly shifting clouds that look and feel scratchy, harsh and dry. Dividing this wasteland is a jagged line that could be a road; if so, it is a forlorn path toward and from nothing imaginable. Perhaps it expresses division, boundary, a marking of this from that.

Cut to a contemporary documentary-style Interview in which a journalist questions the workers at an Italian factory that has just been “given” to them by the owner: Will it, by default, make them all into bourgeois capitalists? No Comment, the reply. The recollection of this prologue echoes at the end of the film creating a non-existent Epilogue that entirely repositions the premise of the journalist’s question.

Three is a charm: Flash back, now, to the beginning of the mythic tale in its 1960’s setting. The “king” is the factory owner and father. His royal family (the mother, son and daughter) is augmented by the faithful housekeeper, Angelina. Their realm is an exquisite and fully modernized Palladianesque villa with a vast walled garden outside Milan. Though beautifully appointed, it is a sleek and desolate home of icy precision. Even the kitchen is untroubled by any signs of food or use. The sumptuousness is entirely contained in the endless and expensive proportions of smooth polished surfaces.

An unappreciated and imperfectly cherubic messenger of the gods brings a telegram to the gated domain: Arriving Tomorrow, it states. An unexplained and somewhat mysterious attractive, blue-eyed young man arrives the next day and all the pent-up or unacknowledged energies of Eros begin to stir in this household. First Angelina and then the entire family, including the father, succumb to this Adonis’ physical charms. Then, just as suddenly, the messenger arrives with another telegram commanding the mysterious young man to depart the next day.

The royal house is collectively and individually shattered. The divine itself is brought into question: the young man is barely more than a handsome cipher, but one that can intuit and actively respond to the deepest needs of the others.

After the young man’s departure it is again Angelina who is first to respond. She sneaks away from the villa, going home to the countryside. Silently she sits on a bench, eating nothing but nettles, becoming a quasi-pagan proto-saint spectacle for the local peasants who can only understand her gestures in the imagery of the church. She fulfills the faith they invest in her by healing a leprous child and floating in the air.

Eventually she comes down from the sky and beckons an old woman to follow her to an empty excavation site for a new apartment house complex where she buries herself in the soft dark earth. I will not die, she says, signaling for the old woman to shovel more dirt on top of her. Angelina folds herself back into the earth from which she has come and of which she is still a vital part; her separate and temporary individual journey has come to its fulfillment and she reunites with her own earthly essence like a drop of rain falling into the ocean. Streams of tears flow from her eyes not from grief but as the much-needed sustenance for what is yet to come.

The daughter falls into a coma, her right hand clenched as if on the memory of her encounter with the young man, literally trying to hold time still. By refusing to awaken and acknowledge the movement of time, of life, she exists only in the past, trying to make even the future into the past.

The son imagines himself an artist and propels himself out into the world, alone, though obviously generously funded. His stance is a false obsession with futurity and a prideful compensation for what he sees as his shameful recognition of being different, needy and incomplete. He attempts to create a new and perfect world that is little more than attractive formal obfuscation. The illusion of sui-generis expressionistic art cannot hide the reality that all his efforts are guided by the literalized image of the beloved and are an attempt to regain something lost and irrevocably outside himself, not an exploration of anything new. He has not taken in the gift of the divine and therefore cannot create anything from it. Though he convinces himself he is moving fearlessly forward, his gestures are empty and angry.

The mother tries to keep the fire of the divine eternally alive in the present by re-living the act of corporeal love with other young men, picked up randomly on street corners. Her conscious and voluntary degradation ultimately leads her to a decaying and nearly abandoned old church. She understands her dilemma to be religious- a search for meaning that, for her, previously did not exist. She has no illusions about the absence of dimension in her life or the limits of her own capabilities. The encounter with the young man and her subsequent attempts to recreate it simply made her aware of these truths. In honoring that awareness and her own limitation, she at least finds the humility her children lack.

The film’s ultimate scenes with the father are perhaps the most startling, complex and original cinematic evocation of a complete shift in consciousness. The father searches to comprehend the significance and ramifications of his encounter with the young man. He is the only one not entirely enthralled by the idea of revitalization through the erotic aspect, knowing that it alone cannot be the portal to a new dimension. Like Angelina in her very different way, he knows that sacrifice, giving away all that he has gained and achieved- the factory to the workers, his very self to the cosmos- is the only means to achieve an essential freedom from the trappings of persona that limit not only what he sees but how he is seen.

The father enters the train station; where is he going? He sees a beautiful young man, who imagines, as we might, that the older man is looking for sex and cautiously acquiesces to the unspoken request by going into the Men’s Room. But that is not what the father is looking for. He turns away; a young child with its mother wanders by and he kneels down and lovingly smoothes its blond hair and, rising, slowly begins to take off his clothes in the middle of the station.

His action makes him invisible to the outside world. It makes him, for the onlookers, into a “crazy person”. Either way, the result is that he is no longer recognizable, even to himself. The scene shifts abruptly to the wide empty desert terrain where the father, nude as a new-born and equally as defenseless, stumbles across the dusty plain under the searing glare of a harsh noon light, trying to determine a course, a direction, some meaning, anything. He falls into the parched bleached earth and, lifting himself up, screams.

It is significant that no one in the film is evil. The preconceptions and limitations of persona show, except for the father and Angelina, a missing of the message transmitted by the erotic.


Part Two, Porcile

Porcile (Pigpen), the second feature of this proposed trilogy, begins with a view of the same dry, colorless vista that opens and closes Teorema, except that now the rocky landscape is alive, heaving with smoky volcanic activity. A butterfly appears suddenly- a surprising vision of life: colorful, beautiful, and fragile. Equally unexpectedly, a hand darts out trapping the delicate insect and stuffs it into the mouth of a ravenous disheveled young wanderer dressed in the tattered rags of a 16th century European peasant.

Is he the new incarnation of the father from Teorema, reborn in that vast wasteland as a scavenging savage? He hurls boulders at the ground, stalking and killing a gyrating snake, tearing into the warm scaly half-alive flesh with his bare teeth.

Woven into this soon to be far more outlandish fable is the contemporary story of an enigmatic young man, Julian, his crippled father and Julian’s bourgeois fiancée, who coolly and intellectually considers the appropriateness of their intended coupling from a mercantile perspective of increasing profit and multiplying shares.

Porcile is a complex double parable on the theme of blind ruthlessness, seen in two very different environments. The contemporary story is, perhaps, the continuation of what might have happened after the factory of Teorema has been given to the workers. A battle of greed narrows the field to two operators- Julian’s father, a cold buffoon of calculating avarice and entitlement who represents the ostensibly more rarified and retreating modality of bourgeois pretension, and his rival, a jaunty plastic-surgeryed shape-shifter who does whatever is necessary to get what he wants and is aligned with the future, powered by the expedients of science and technology and ornamented with the heartless prejudice of easily distorted data.

These characters are each one side of the same coin and their world is a cold, dead parody of life predicated on the ceaseless flow of product and consumption which is mirrored in the lingering scenes of the huge, bored omnivorous pigs cramped into their compartmented pens, ultimate consumers waiting to be fed until they, in turn, are slaughtered and fed to others.

The 16th century fable centers around the young wanderer who is not just a ravenous scavenger killing and consuming the few living things he encounters, but, it turns out, a cannibal as well. A strange logic and precise rituals, however, guide his actions. When he kills the first of his human victims, a foot soldier straggling behind his troop, he cuts off the dead man’s head and throws it into a smoking orifice in the rocky hillside.

Next we see the cannibal eating the dead man’s roasted flesh, but- miraculously? - at his side, also consuming what would be his own body, is the soldier-victim himself, now regenerated (-from the severed head tossed back into the smoky mouth of Mother Earth?)

The cannibal and his resurrected soldier-victim go on to attack and consume others, always first enacting the ritual of cutting off the head and offering it back into the earth, thus mysteriously increasing the size of their band in direct proportion to the number they kill and consume.

Eventually one would-be victim escapes and makes his way back to the city where troops are marshaled and a trap set to capture the cannibal and his band. In chains and under heavy guard the outlaws are brought to the city to await the word of the court.

In the contemporary story the rival forces Julian’s father to acquiesce to a business partnership leveraged in his favor using the threat of exposure of a questionable but accepted rumor implying perverted bestial sexuality to Julian. The titillating rumor is obviously false yet easier to accept than Julian’s un-bourgeois ways and his maddeningly quixotic impartiality. He could be a figure of redemption, of relief for the others who are trapped in stultifying literal materiality, except that they do not experience their limited reality as suffering. Julian’s fiancée leaves him for a more predictably profitable alliance.

The fable continues as the judges emerge from deep inside the medieval citadel while church bells clang riotously, drowning out the actual words of the sentence they read aloud. The condemnation is the accusation of evil; the punishment: to be taken back into the desolate wilds and tied, each limb attached to a stake driven deep into the earth, their bodies exposed, to be ripped apart and devoured by roaming animals.

The cannibal is unrepentant, accepts his lot and declares his crime: that he killed his father; that he ate human flesh; that he trembles with joy. His followers, though already dead and resurrected, cry tearfully and struggle against their death-sentences in a magical moment of cinematic confusion.

In the film’s ultimate scenes Julian quietly leaves his father’s pristine palatial house, crosses the vast manicured lawn and disappears into the pigpen.

A crowd of peasants arrives at the villa as the party celebrating the business merger of the father and rival is about to begin. They ask to speak not to Julian’s father, the estate’s padrone, but to whomever of the two, father or rival, is strongest. Julian’s father readily and happily concedes his inferiority, declaring himself suddenly overwhelmed by a consuming desire for a cream-puff and lurches out of the room on his crutches, leaving the rival, now partner, to negotiate this unwanted and unseemly interruption.

The peasants, cautious and respectful, barely know how to begin their incomprehensible account. The rival taunts them to be quick and not waste his time. One of them explains that had they not seen “it”, they would never have known: Julian abandoned himself into the pigpen and was consumed entirely, even his clothes, by the huge gluttonous animals. They arrived too late to save him, not even a scrap of clothing could be salvaged to attest to the tragedy.

Not a sole of a shoe, the rival demands? No. Not even a single button, he asks? No, not even a single button, they lament. Then don’t say a word to anyone, the rival commands, happy with the good fortune that yet another inconvenient obstacle has removed itself from his path to success.


Part Three, Salo'

Though all three films hold a line of continuity through detail, ideas and form, Salo’ provides the retrospective arc of trilogy for Teorema and Porcile.

In hindsight Teorema becomes a classic and simple legend of small scale and deep resonance. The earthly horizontal plane of existence and the vertical dimension of psychic depth are united and activated in the characters’ encounter with the divine in its aspect of Eros. Theirs is a world and world-view in which the erotic and the divine are still inextricably linked and alive. The nature of each character’s submission to or rebellion from his/her new awareness is fundamentally a religious experience.

In Porcile the depth dimension has been subverted into the service of the earthly plane of profit and technology. The crippled father and his rival still enjoy the benefit of energies greater than themselves and each retains and maintains a sphere in which to act out that power: the father in culture and history, the rival in commerce and futurity. For both, money underpins it all. In a parody of fevered comedia dell’arte bravura, their interactions are fueled by a sublimated and redirected Eros no longer connected to the divine but banished to the Board Room. Julian has the power derived from depth and interiority but in this thin and brilliant world can find no place where and no one for whom these qualities are credited with value or given room to operate. Being neither for nor against the bourgeois principle he becomes irrelevant and disappears without a trace or sense of loss on the part of the others. They are too consumed with success to take notice or care.

Set in the winter of 1944-45 in a Nazi-occupied northern Italian town of otherwise idyllic beauty, Salo’ is the precinct of unbridled power and corruption of four high government officials. They are called the Masters and derive from Porcile by way of the fable's judges and from the unthinking omnivorous pigs that consume everything (including Julian)- either literally manifested in the animals of the pigpen or metaphorically as the father and rival.

The Masters have assembled a collection of Victims, 18 beautiful adolescent boys and girls, imprisoned, naked, in a rural villa that is a gross and deformed extension of the pleasure palaces of the 18th century. Upon these adolescents the Masters act out their sexualized fantasies of rage, domination and filth. A small band of armed young ruffians, accomplices, supports and enforces the Masters’ authority. Four aging Madams are the Storytellers who take turns in nightly performances meant to ignite the lust of the Masters. The sexual perversions are all predictable and banal and include scatology, humiliation and every form of physical torture and mental anguish.

The actor-Victims seem halfhearted, not really “playing” their parts well, or, as the doomed adolescents, not really taking in their situation as the objects of hatred of the Masters, but how could they, after all? When the Victims start casually turning on one another the viewer’s despair sinks another level. Intermittently scored, the sound of aircraft overhead remind us that theirs is a rapidly shrinking world coming to some kind of apocalyptic end.

The final scenes of Salo’ capture the entire story. Each Master, in turn, watches from a throne placed in a second story window as the others torture the remaining victims to death. It looks like a documentary of the Inquisition, madness and lust disguised and channeled with religious zeal, death and destruction eroticized.

Protecting, or merely “attending” the Master-voyeur are two of the armed guards, themselves just boys. They have the means- their weapons- to overthrow the Masters and put an end to this outrageous tragedy, but they do not see the horror around them, their role is, in a sense, just a job. They don’t share the Master’s tastes but won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

They are bored. One turns the radio dial abruptly changing from the liturgical chant that underscored the last scenes of torture. He finds a smooth, slow dinner dance tune. He asks the other boy-guard, who is slumped in an easy chair, his machine gun splayed across his lap, Do you know how to dance? Not really, he shrugs in reply. Well, let’s try, a little. They carefully set down their weapons and start to dance, awkwardly but not unlike a random couple at a county fair killing time until something better comes along. What’s your girlfriend’s name, one asks? Margherita, the other replies- his mind elsewhere, though nowhere in particular, as death rages in the courtyard below.

The depth dimension in Salo’ is not subverted but gone. The world of Salo’ is a chaotic, capricious nightmare of real tragedy in which there is no possibility of meaning, nor is there the ability, or desire, even, to sustain the search for meaning. Eros is shackled to death; there is no sphere of operation apart from destruction. It is an apocalyptic vision almost entirely devoid of hope for it describes a level of pointlessness, stupidity and cruelty that is impervious to awareness or action. This vision bypasses any position in which the notion of transformation as development could take place. It describes a blackness darker even than the alchemist’s nigredo. That is an abstract principle, not a compromised world in which living beings must try to get by, let alone attempt to fulfill some notion of destiny, character or meaning. It is impossible to imagine that anything could re-generate from this level of corruption without first annihilating itself entirely.

Film/ The Education of Fairies (La educacion de hadas)

"The Education of Fairies" (La educacion de hadas), 2006, by director Jose Luis Cuerda pretends to take place in the present; it is really a wondrous fairy tale. Like all such stories, it offers a warning of the dangers of living in a partial world with a partial view, however beautiful.

Nicolas, a middle-aged toy designer with mercurial sparkle in his eyes, lives in a beautiful and rambling stone casita in the Catalan countryside with his childhood nanny-cum-housekeeper. On a flight to Barcelona he sees Ingrid and her precocious young son, Raul, and instantly falls madly in love with both.

Ingrid, an ornithologist, is conveniently divorced from her son’s now dead father who was a pilot and a Viscount, which makes her the modern equivalent of a princess. She and Nicolas marry and for two years happiness reigns in the secluded domain. Nicolas and Ingrid enjoy a passionate love life and Raul receives a fanciful education on the lives and powers of fairies in his nightly bedtime stories from Nicolas. The stepfather and young boy bond deeply in walks in their own enchanted forest complete with magical trees and a secret hideaway.

Then the magic seems to come undone, the spell broken. Raul will not agree to being adopted by a man with such a common last name. Ingrid wants separate bedrooms, complaining of Nicolas’ snoring, and then threatens a more complete break. But why? He loves her; she loves him; there is no one else. All we know is that Ingrid is a beautiful woman who is about to turn 40 and breaks into tears whenever she looks into the mirror. While waiting for Ingrid to decide, act or explain her withdrawal Nicolas makes too many nervous trips to the local supermarket, where he meets Sezar, the abused checkout clerk.

Sezar, the grandchild of martyred Spanish Republicans, has come to Barcelona from her native Algeria en route to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She is waiting for her final letter of acceptance. Meanwhile she meets a charming street performer who turns out to be a drug dealer. Molested by her ogre boss at the market, beaten up by two thuggish co-horts of her now-jailed ex-boyfriend, she crosses paths with Nicolas who sweeps her into his vintage white Jaguar Roadster and out of this mess.

He takes Sezar to the secret hideaway in the enchanted forest where he tells her his story- more than he has revealed to Ingrid. The lonely child of an unmarried mother, his only romantic attachment prior to Ingrid was with Beatrice, the discarded last girlfriend of his bankrupted and suicided father. Beatrice died pregnant with Nicolas’ unborn child. Even Nicolas’ glamorous car is second-hand from his father; he and Ingrid and Raul live in the house inherited from his dead grandparents. He lives entirely in the imagination trying to obviate and compensate for a lineage of sorrow and neglect. He has made nothing in life but games.

Raul has received another education, more practical and worldly, from interaction with his classmates and their parents. Moreover, like Sezar, he has a fiery past and a sense of the future. The image of his aviator father disintegrating in mid-air for a noble cause feeds his heroic nature and his practical side knows that he will grow up to be the next Viscount Rocca di Castelgrande. He despairs of the unhappiness in his house but will not succumb in sorrow and dreams. He goes to the magic tree in the enchanted forest and discovers Sezar. He mistakes her for one of the fairies he has been trying to contact to fix the obvious and inexplicable problems between his mother and much-loved stepfather.

Raul has been told that fairies have a kind of amnesia and must be re-educated into their prodigious powers. He leaps to the task with gusto and faith, constantly checking Sezar’s mathematical abilities to verify his progress. Raul and Sezar are kindred spirits, alive to the action of life. Sezar is literally physically scarred by an endless litany of life’s cruel tragedies but she has transformed them into stepping-stones out of the past and toward a new future.

She receives the letter of acceptance to the Sorbonne. Before leaving for Paris Sezar confronts Ingrid, who reveals what she has kept from the others. Ingrid has been told, and tests have proven, that she has an incurable, though not cancerous, lesion in her brain- that she could die at any moment, though she appears radiantly healthy. She has decided, alone and unilaterally, that it will be best for Nicolas and her son if she leaves them now, before the envisioned ugliness and pain arrive. Trapped within the powers of her negative imagination, Ingrid is haunted by the vivid specter of that which is not there and blind to the reality and challenge in front of her.

Sezar is not so romantic and points out that any of them could die at any moment and offers Ingrid her philosophy of active determination and joy, suggesting that Ingrid tell Nicolas her buried secret. Sezar has done what she can and rides out of this story and into her destiny on a modest motorbike. The film ends with Ingrid, alone, pacing back and forth on the balcony, undecided about what to do and unknowing of how to decide.

One wishes for a simple, happy ending for all, but it cannot be so. Nicolas and Ingrid cannot confide in each other and with outer lives of independent ease and comfort they lack a means of connection to a larger world and remain characters in an entirely personal, storybook dimension. In that partial sphere even the blessings of love and kindness are not enough to satisfy and set free real people. Sezar has passed many tests in the world and knows she has the strength to desire and choose life. Raul has met his first challenge on the road to adulthood with courage, ingenuity and humility. She and Raul live outside the spell of romantic, beautiful sadness in which Ingrid and Nicolas are still caught.

Irene Jacob as Ingrid and Ricardo Darin as Nicolas are both superb in capturing the haunted anguish of their character’s inability to mature. Victor Valdivia as Raul and Bebe as Sezar give engaging performances filled with life, hope and joy.

Film/ Prater

The Merry-Go-Round is the heart of Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater”, a remarkable exploration of illusion and freedom, technology and desire, costumed as a documentary-style history of Europe’s original Amusement Park, located on the outskirts of Vienna.

As director, writer and cinematographer Ottinger literally becomes the carousel’s watchful center, a playful detective galloping in place to a frenetic calliope score, her gaze is loving and unflinching, as steady and sure as the slow and predictable path of the magic circle. What, she asks, is really going on here?

Each revolution allows the camera to lingeringly snap up new clues in multiple mug shots, accumulating myriad glimmering impressions interwoven, now and then, with vintage footage, tracking back and forth in time, cobbling together a full-scale portrait of the scene of the crime and its cast of characters- the park’s creators, workers, patrons, destroyers and a vast population of mechanical devices and automatons, old and new, that are the go-betweens, ambassador/guides as it were, to this no man’s land between propriety and imagination, brokered in profit.

The story begins with Nikolai Kobelkoff, born horribly deformed to normal parents in Siberia in 1851, without legs and with only one pointed stub of arm projecting from his right shoulder. Despite these impossible physical hardships and crushing societal and family pressures, a kindly schoolteacher teaches him to write by clutching a pen between his chin and arm-stump. Holding a brush in a similar manner, he learned to paint small landscapes; his proficiency eventually developed such that he could thread a needle.

Entrepreneurship is as old as mankind. Genghis Kahn knew that a worthless trinket from China could become a valuable and rare commodity thousands of miles away. So, centuries later, did the first Dutch settlers who “bought” Manhattan. Kobelkoff’s great vision and act of freedom was in seeing a different future for himself. With his hard-won “ordinary” accomplishments he could make himself into a marketable product; what others had tried to hide away he would parade in front of a clamorous public eager to pay for novelty and escape.

He became rich and acclaimed, married, sired numerous normal offspring and opened shop, as it were, in the Prater. The original display at the amusement park, nestled in a former Imperial hunting preserve, was not so unambiguous. In 1896 an entire tribe of Africans, the Ashanti, was transplanted to a corner of the park with all their worldly goods, including animals, housing structures and every commonplace necessity, recreating the illusion of daily life at their homeland village, exposed 24/7 to the amused, bewildered or startled surveillance of paying patrons.

With the addition of a Lilliputian Venice, complete with canals and campanile, the trend toward virtual travel had taken a new turn. The illusion of leaving home without the bother of packing a bag proved irresistible, and still is.

The park itself became extraterritorial to everyday life. Not only an attraction of exotic “otherness”, it was also capable of being a safety valve for the crushing pressures of an increasingly homogenized and complex urban life. It also served as a world of freedom for the roaming imagination, still sufficiently, if barely, disguised in a cloak of convention proper to its place and time. The discord of place and time creates its own kind of value and interest. Technology is always woefully behind or startlingly ahead, threatening to become old before our eyes as we figure out the illusion, even if we acquiesce willingly to its charms.

In Ottinger’s 21st century here and now at the theme park, African men, perhaps tourists, joyously compete in a toss-ball arcade game that animates jostling mechanical racehorses lurching to a bespangled Derby finish line. Multi-generational Middle Eastern families, posing for group portraits a la 1900, dress up in the colorful costumes of European Empires that oppressed their homelands and ancestors not so long ago.

Veruschka von Lehndorff, magnificently, if preposterously, garbed as Barbarella in a form-fitting silver and black body suit and blond wig the size of two roaring lions, wins a cuddly stuffed monkey at the Archery Arcade; her aim is true. Inside the House of Mirrors her steady gaze explores every distortion and permutation of form and meaning as her image and that of the toy monkey’s shape-shift, disappear and meld into one another. Oddly, she is the opposite of the 1920’s well dressed bourgeois city swells whose mimed gestures for the moving camera are so predictable and limited they are barely distinguishable from the legions of automatons repeating their tiny range of motion.

Other modern day characters describe varying degrees of personal fulfillment and satisfaction within the collective rituals of a bygone social existence. One woman recounts the delight of experiencing a freedom of thought, feeling and action brought to birth in the generous expanse of the Prater, a keen contrast to a crowded and constrained childhood. All too soon her practical mother sweeps it all away, forbidding her return to the Suspect Realm, fearfully certain that freedom of any kind will not lead to sensible citizenry or responsible worldly advantage.

In 1945 at the very end of the war retreating Nazis burned the Prater to the ground, unable and unwilling even in defeat to allow the existence of a place where races and classes mixed freely and imagination ran free. It was rebuilt with bumper cars and a space catapult ride. The punching bag with the shape and look of a man’s head is still very popular with gangs of young men proving their power and prowess, one euro at a time. The Prater is inextinguishable.

Film/ The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, a solemn and plangent requiem for an era, opens on a closing note: the last pitiful and nearly profitless train robbery by the James Gang, reduced to little more than a rabble of unreliable petty criminals half-heartedly commanded by the famous brothers, Frank and Jesse. Soon after the gang will disband, the brothers going their separate ways.

Frank is an Old Testament thief, patriarchal and practical, yet humble in a way. He sees the world in front of him and opts for retirement when the gold watches and extra cash of bourgeois travelers no longer outweigh the rustling posse always at heel. It is really a business decision; maybe, he says, he’ll try his hand at selling shoes.

Jesse is not free to make such a sensible decision. Outside the law in entirely different ways, ruthless, fearless and driven by more than profit alone, he is keenly aware of and tortured by his dual nature as animal and man. Brad Pitt majestically portrays Jesse James as an increasingly haggard lion, roaming a shrinking plain, worn down yet ever bristling with intuitive insight, animal ferocity and deep understanding.

After the breakup of the gang and Frank’s departure, Jesse’s isolation allows for the entry of Robert Ford- Bob, 19 years old and devoid of any compelling characteristics beside a narcissistic need to be noticed and a blind willingness to believe in traits he obviously does not possess. In an enclosed garden the wannabe gangster flinches uncontrollably at the sudden appearance of two snakes which are already caught in Jesse’s absolute grip and decapitated with casual mastery, prey to be sautéed in garlic.

Casey Affleck has an uncanny feel for these empty and unknowing characters, blind to their own neediness and supposedly ignorant of the destruction they flawlessly execute. With a small arsenal of tics and evasions Affleck draws a brittle portrait of fussy and superficial exactitude that can only barely cover the Black Hole at its core, a compellingly contemporary image in contrast to Pitt’s timeless majesty, cornered and doomed.

The famous bandit is the hero of Bob’s worship and he cleaves to Jesse like a blood-sucking slug. Feeling spurned by Jesse and unable or unwilling to accept his human and subordinate status or the loss of Jesse’s solar radiance, Bob turns in vengeance to the only other authority he knows: the Police. He betrays his former comrades and makes a deal to bring in the Big Man. As an empty coward, his only possibility of heroic stature is a supreme act of cowardice.

Bob raises his gun to the occasion, not considering that it is Jesse who has given him the weapon and offered his unarmed back. Bob pulls the trigger. He denies his action as he runs to telegraph the Governor, delirious with ideas of reward and applause. His notoriety is short and loveless- Jesse is still the object of everyone’s affections and, even in death, it is Jesse’s image that carries imagination and hope.

Bob and his brother Charley- accomplice to the murder- take to the stage profiteering in artifice, re-enacting nightly, the fateful moment. Jesse had once asked a terrified Charley if he ever thought of suicide. No, always something else he wanted to do, was his honest and cautious reply. But it is not too long before these theatrical replays of shame lead him to take his own life. Bob moves on, opening a saloon in Colorado where he will eventually be gunned down by an old acquaintance who is unable to rest with the injustice done a decade before.

Andrew Dominik’s beautiful and stylized film unfolds in post-apocalyptic monochrome, a gothic Book of Hours, all quirky medieval illumination in prairie Sampler simplicity. Heavy blankets of dark clouds bear down on inky black horizons squeezing out the thinnest possibility of escape.

Film/ Into the Wild

Based on a true story, Snow White goes on an arctic safari, dressed in the Emperor's New Clothes. "Into the Wild" (2007), with screenplay and directed by Sean Penn, the unquestionably sincere humanitarian and gifted actor, is an irritatingly righteous and slipshod collection of calendar art and cliche, strong-armed by good intentions into a predictable and neutered propaganda piece of mono-dimensional caricatures.

A Road Film with no Journey, just movement, "Into the Wild" is alarmingly self-defeating in its blinkered view of the young central character who, in all his vast wanderings, seems to discover nothing he didn't already know, thanks to Byron, Tolstoy, Thoreau, et al- except, perhaps, what poisonous plants to avoid.

Sadly, "Alex" comes off as a narcissistic and frozen personality incapable of maturation, of being moved by actual experience. Though his style and focus are completely different, he embodies the same narrow-minded, fixated willfulness and impermeability as his cruel father. Son and father also share an approach to life that is decidedly mental- dad is a genius aerospace engineer- and emotionally sentimental; both blame others for their volatility- the father lashes out at his wife, the son is his own target.

"People" and "Society" are destructive and bad- the young man runs from a truly traumatic and difficult childhood. Luckier than most, he encounters more than a new family's-worth of characters- among them an old widower played with shocking and quiet complexity by Hal Holbrook- all hopelessly honest, loving and generous, but the young man remains unhealed and unheal-able. He can allow that the people and society he meets along the way are good and supportive as long as it doesn't really matter, or change his plans.

He is all blindness and surface. Chock full of childhood hate, disappointment and disillusionment, there is no courage for inner battles, no room for a different view of himself. Just an outer path whose destination feels certain from the start, and, frankly, would have made a more interesting and challenging film told from that perspective: intentional suicide.

Unfortunately this character does feel all too familiar- a person who attempts to google-away his faults and anxieties, coming up with pedigreed cliches that obviate real scrutiny. He is more un-born than wise, trusting in all the wrong places.

The film has a shocking and ethically questionable moment when a scene includes a real-life aged eccentric desert artist recluse who does not appear to entirely understand that he is talking to Movie Stars in a Hollywood Film. From a directorial and aesthetic standpoint it is also a terrible mistake to include this footage. First, it contradicts the film's reductive equation of movement with journey, especially odious in a condescending sermon improbably directed at Holbrook's old veteran to get out and see the world. Much worse, however, the rest of the film instantly becomes even thinner, make-believe next to the raw vitality of a true voyager.

Film/ The Man From London

"The Man From London", a baleful and beauteous convergence of image, sound and meaning, is the latest masterpiece from the legendary Hungarian director Bela Tarr.

Extracting the "everyman" hidden in the improbable armature of a Georges Simenon detective thriller, Tarr reshapes character and tale into a modern and merciless slow-motion re-enactment of the ancient story of "The Flaying of Marsius"- the mortal presence reduced to a nameless night Watchman whose only claim against the gods will be the mere attempt to act and survive in a hostile and stifling world.

In mythic black and white- geometrical, spare and atmospherically gorgeous- Chance opens the story. Seeping darkness of night ebbs to reveal a tattered old boat; a waiting dockside train; two men; a heavy valise; a ruse more successful than clever; a struggle.

Still clutching the treasured case, one man falls and the sea dinks him in like a drop of ink. The other man stares into nothingness, then walks away, defeated- much too easily and probably not for the first time.

The Watchman sees it all from his cage-like station above dock and rail. Slow, methodical and intent on winning the prize that fate has flashed before him, he descends, grappling hook in hand, confident. Master of this tiny corner, he knows its ways and almost too easily retrieves the valise retreating to his perch. The haul is a shoal of shimmering small banknotes, which he lays out to dry on the old-fashioned stove heater. Not a fortune, it is just enough to be too much.

By morning, his shift over, he ambles down to the dockside cafe and then home. The other man follows, a vague intuition or desperate hope murmurs that there may be something to suspect, but ultimately neither the power nor a direction in which to proceed materialize.

Naturally, Apollo will not deign to show up at this claustrophobic dead-end sea town where even the vast horizon glares into an impassable barrier of blinding, empty whiteness. Enter the god's adjutant-accountant: the Inspector, nearly omniscient, the difference can be calculated in age and bother. He needs no knife to skin his victims, so thin is the worn down layer that life has allowed them.

At the cafe the other man from the night before, Brown- drawn in as if by magnetism- squirms under the Inspector's droning speech that, really, only the money is wanted. In fact, a percentage will be offered for the return of the bulk, no questions asked, no formal charges. We know the pinned man thinks the money is lost into the watery past and has no way to comply.

The prize has already begun its corrosive action: the Watchman flares in the shell of his marriage and rises to the opportunity of protecting his beloved daughter's dignity. He buys her a small cheap fur from the talking heads at the local shop. She knows better than to think of it as a sign on the road to a better or different destiny.

The women strain to comprehend the all too predictable actions of the men, and, why must it always come to this. Why is there so little range, so little opportunity to call forth and nurture whatever humble gifts they might posess?

The drowned man's body has washed ashore. Brown's wife has been summoned in an effort to lure him out of hiding. Even the Watchman is confronted: surely, at the least, he saw something the night of the crime?

The Watchman is in many ways the Inspector's equal and, like him, sees the puzzle taking shape. When his daughter unknowingly delivers the penultimate piece he reads the inverse treasure map and hurries to the spot that he suspects will mark his, and everyone's, defeat. Next, he will bring the valise of money to the Inspector and claim responsibility for all that has happened in the wake of the crime.

Ancient though he may be, the Inspector is a thoroughly modern man and reminds the Watchman that only the return of the money is of significance. Wasn't everything else. after all, just self-defense?

Completing his task the Inspector portions out a very few bills between two envelopes. With the leaden words of tumbled tombstones, he mouths his shock and sorrow at the course of events. As tokens of compensation to Brown's wife and the Watchman, he offers the envelopes, leaving them behind, as he daparts.

Film/ Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia

Director Ulrike Ottinger slowly pares and burnishes this boisterous fantasy into a small jewel of radiant perfection. "Johanaa d'Arc of Mongolia" opens like a bygone era children's storybook. Paper-thin and somewhat tattered painted stage drops merely pretend to evoke the once-opulent interiors of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the vibrant world outside.

A troop of rambling polyglot charmers jostles amiably in this crowded and mobile house of cards: an uncomplicated and affable Broadway chanteuse; a Baedeker-immersed bourgeois German frau; an exotically dark and beautiful, young tomboyish vagabond; a rich, fat, gay, crooning vaudevillian; an amusingly pompous Russian general and his handsome, straight-faced tap-dancing adjutant.

A sister trio cabaret act entertains in the Dining Car where a small coterie of trolls and ingenious helpers create operatic splendor in this thin environment. Magisterially overseeing both characters and tale, the elegant Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig, in her last film role) is a modern-day sorceress and know-it-all MC, unrelentingly cheerful and resourceful.

All too quickly this world of "players and painted stage" attains its limit and the party breaks up, the men shuffling off to repeat performances of well-known roles in familiar locales. Only the women will venture further east. Suddenly the diorama of Act I gives way to a real, dimensional world as they transfer to the Trans-Mongolian Railway, whose accommodations are more substantial if decidedly less luxurious.

A vast panorama of dry mountains and cloudless sky begins to emerge when the train is forced to a halt, ambushed by a Mongolian princess and her Amazonian warriors. The travellers are taken hostage, though the circumstances quickly change, altering their status to that of honored quests.

The opportunity immediately appeals to all except the uncertain frau who must choose between this uncharted experience on the Steppe and a difficult retreat to her urban obligations and hotel reservations. She decides, however, to stay, initiating an astonishing vision of timeless tribal life. The realm of the warrior princess is ritualized in every aspect- even the smallest actions are imbued with meaning and significance, direct lines of access to an ever-present transcendent.

Restless in a tame world, the exotic vagabond seems to find a natural place in this rough and vital community. The sister trio and Broadway star, artists and shape-shifters accustomed always to making their own way in any surroundings, adjust quite easily to this very out-of-town run. Lady Windermere perfects her Mongolian, interprets the archetypal signs and symbols, witnessing and cataloging the spectacular variety of creation and customs as she mediates the two cultures.

The harsh clash of sensibilities falls squarely on the frau when she unknowingly hangs out her laundry to dry and is nearly attacked by the Mongolians who believe the exposed wet clothes will bring threatening storms. She survives this ordeal and in giving up the modest propriety of bourgeois habit opens the way for a different journey. Ambling on the grassy plateau at the edge of a ravine she becomes spellbound with the resonant mandala of a simple white flower and descends a deep cavernous path that erupts into a colorful, shimmering grotto- a benevolent shaman at its potent magnetic core.

Above ground the annual festival of the Mongol tribes unfolds as a vast and varied living artwork- rapturously beautiful, unexpected and dichotomous, reconstructing the object of its inspiration, life itself.

A cycle fulfilled, the festival, season and story come to a conclusion. The women are escorted across the desert to the train that will take them out of this magical realm, back into a sense of time that can only go violently and mono-dimensionally forward. The vagabond has chosen to remain. Astride her pony, costumed in silky vest and fur-trimmed hat, she blends seamlessly into the Mongol tribe, waving her former comrades farewell.

With the reliability and exactitude of a metronome Lady Windermere divines and dictates foible and fact as she sips tea from a lidded cup, ensconced in the Salon Car of her oriental counterpart- a contemporary avatar of the warrior princess, stylishly dressed for the business world of Paris. One last glance back reveals a single horse and rider galloping frantically toward the lumbering train and, with flawless precision, the vagabond leaps into the waiting arms of the knowing Lady. Like the frau she, too, has surrendered to a freeing vision: that it is more important that the dream rings true. She makes the best of it, becoming the manager of a Mongolian-themed restaurant.

Ottinger, who also wrote and filmed "Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia", fashions a creation hard to describe: tender and joyful, funny and knowing, unafraid of darkness, always inclusive. What looks at first like a kaleidoscopic patchwork of infinite detail- from an impossibly heartfelt and campy performance of "So Long Tootsie, Goodbye" to a matter-of-fact on-screen, real-time ritual animal sacrifice in broad and glorious daylight- is more synthesis than collage. Through the prism of Ottinger's unique sensibility the spectrum of discrete elements composing her story co-mingle into a bright and singular vision.