dylanfan-2

1954 was, with the possible exception of 1953, the greatest year in the entire history of Japanese cinema. This was the year of, among other extraordinary works: Kurosawa's Seven Samurai; *two* Mizoguchi masterpieces, A Story From Chikamatsu and the great Sansho the Bailiff; two fascinating films by the popular Keisuke Kinoshita, Twenty-Four Eyes and The Garden of Women; the incredibly moving Sound of the Mountain by Mikio Naruse and also his very dark Late Chysanthemums; Heinosuke Gosho's lovely slice-of-life drama An Inn at Osaka... one could go on and on. So why, oh why, did the powers-that-be at the time choose to export to the West this reasonably well-made but otherwise utterly mediocre and lifeless melodrama? This work was reviewed by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times when released in that city in early 1956, and though he praises the film's technical craftsmanship, he rightly called it "emotionally stilted." (He also correctly pointed out that the best thing in it is the performance of Mitsuko Mito, playing a villainous but very human moneylender.) Almost nothing in this film works for me: the over-the-top acting of the "hero," the very limited range of the lead actress, the contrived plotting, the emotional disconnection and, above all, that terrible ending. Eventually, all of the 1954 masterpiece films I mentioned above, and more, made it to Western theaters and computer screens. By all means, check them out, and give Golden Demon a pass.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. If you haven't yet seen this episode (and probably every previous episode), don't read this, dude! Not to mention that it's way long!

Many users have commented negatively about this episode, which utterly baffles me. Because it's obvious that its purpose was to get all the characters in place, like chess pieces, for the final Big War; it was clearly not the intent of show runners "D&D" and the writer, Dave Hill, to create a "Red Wedding"-like episode and knock the audience's socks off. However, I'll only respond to one previous IMDB comment, in which the user called the characters of Jon and Daenerys "wooden." To that person, I'd like to say: if you really feel that way, I'd be interested to know why you're even bothering to watch the series, let alone taking the time to comment on it in a forum like this. God knows, GoT over the years has displayed quite a few major flaws: firetruck-sized plot holes (even if you approve of all the supernatural stuff), utterly bewildering character motivations, the bizarre knack of certain figures (like Littefinger) to turn up everywhere in Westeros at once, in a fictional world in which the swiftest possible conveyance is the horse. But "wooden" characters are not among those flaws. Dany in particular has had an incredibly complex and compelling character arc. Seeing her now, in comparison with the timid, doll-like girl of the first episode of Season 1, you'd almost think it's not the same actress playing her. Emilia Clark, in the face of debilitating illness, has done a magnificent job, in my opinion, of conveying that arc. End of rant.

The best scene of the episode is the final one, which perfectly mirrors the still-shocking last scene of the very first episode of the series. In that older episode, Jaime - the brother-in-law of King Robert, the brother/lover of the Queen and the (biological) father of the heir, as well as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, was one of the most powerful people in Westeros; Bran was a powerless child. So Jaime felt he could push Bran from the tower window (because he caught Jaime having sex with Cersei) with impunity. Now, the roles are totally reversed: Jaime, having sacrificed literally everything for a pathologically ungrateful woman, has nothing at all. Bran, though still paralyzed, and a Stark and thus an enemy of Cersei, is the brother of the Lady of Winterfell, the alleged half-brother (but actually first cousin) of the (former) King of the North, and an ally of the powerful Dragon Queen. Jamie, unlike Theon with the murder of the poor, innocent farm boys, had never expressed any remorse over his attempt to kill Bran. But at the moment he sees Bran in this episode, Jaime not only feels fear but, perhaps for the first time, an overwhelming sense of guilt for his crime. (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, that very fine actor, expresses all this without a word of dialogue.) There has never been a more evocative closing scene of any episode in this series.

Getting back to Dany, the character was particularly solid this week, though the more I see of her, the less sympathetic I find her. In the dragon-riding scene, she was wonderfully charming and sexy and fun: she almost threatened to become cuddly. But then there's the scene in which she's introduced to Sam by Jorah, and the other, darker Dany emerges. (Let me note in passing that Sam's dialogue in this scene is unconvincing. It's perhaps logical that he would ask Queen Dany's pardon for stealing books from the Citadel that belong to the State - "borrowing" he calls it, as if the Citadel were a lending library - but it isn't logical to ask the queen's forgiveness for stealing the sword Heartsbane from the Tarly household, a transgression that was a purely family, not a State, matter. It seemed a very clumsy way for the writer to have Sam reveal to her that he is, in fact, a Tarly, which could have been done in a much less awkward fashion.) After Dany tells him that she executed - torched, actually - his awful father and beloved brother, she goes ice cold: she has zero empathy for Sam's pain, nor does she have much sympathy for poor, embarrassed Jorah, whose loyalty is torn between his new best buddy and the queen he loves and serves. You can almost hear her wondering if this Tarly, too, will become an enemy. Ironically, he soon does become an enemy, since he then reveals to Jon the latter's Targaryen origins, thus driving a wedge between Jon and Dany at the worst possible time (though she herself is still ignorant of Jon's true parentage). Kudos to the show's creators for not shying away from the character's dark side.

Let me add my own commentary here about Sam's "reveal" scene. Sam innocently calls Jon the "true king," but in fact, there is no such thing! One of the main themes that I take away from this show is that the whole concept of legitimacy is a lie: nobody ever rules a nation by right, only by force and custom. Gendry, the illegitimate son of Robert, has as much claim to the throne as Jon, maybe more. It's true that Robert Baratheon ruled Westeros only by "right of conquest," but the Targaryens conquered the realm 300 years earlier the same way, with their dragons, and House Baratheon succeeded them. If there are any Children of the Forest left, it could be argued that they have the right to rule, since they were in Westeros before anybody else. Cersei's "I'm making myself Queen just because I can" logic is, at least, honest, as opposed to all this bloodline nonsense. End of second rant.

It was shrewd and appropriate for the episode to be introduced with the march of the great army into Winterfell as seen from Arya's point-of-view, and it was very clever for the writer to include the anonymous little boy whose behavior hearkens back to both Arya's and Bran's actions in episode 1, when King Robert arrived at Westeros.

I also liked the quiet flirting between Arya and Gendry in the foundry scene, which was very well underplayed by both actors. One of the disturbing things about this show's fans is their enthusiastic embrace of the idea of Arya the Killer. Even granting that all her victims deserved it, I remember the cute, innocent little tomboy she was in the beginning, and I'm still holding out hope that she might, after the war, be redeemed and turn away from bloodshed... though I also hope that Arya and Gendry don't become sexually or romantically involved (I don't think they will).

I enjoyed the running gag in which all of sentimental Jon's reunions turn sour, as Bran goes all weird on him, Arya implicitly threatens him (in case he might later betray the Starks), and Sam is still grieving.

And then there's that other running gag of Sansa throwing shade on just about everyone she encounters (except the little Umber boy). But this is not because Sansa has suddenly become nasty; rather, her harsh behavior perfectly conforms to the logic of her character. Sansa despises the naive, starry-eyed little girl she used to be, though nothing that happened to her was her fault, and she takes her responsibilities as the Lady of Winterfell very seriously. Consequently, she tries to play the adult in the room, the one who undercuts everybody else's illusions for their own benefit: she's gotten snarky, but out of good will. It feels right that she's the one who asks how they're all going to feed this huge army through the winter, a question that remains unanswered. It also make sense that she asks Jon privately whether he gave up his crown for the people's good or because he loves Dany - and again, there's no answer forthcoming.

Tyrion begins his part of the episode making fun of Varys' lack of testicles, and it all goes downhill for him from there. I never dreamed that he would make such an incompetent Hand of the Queen, and it's terribly painful when, at the war council, he promises the Northmen that Cersei will fight for them, when we know she intends to double-cross everybody. But it's not that Tyrion has suddenly become stupid; it's that his loyalties are unconsciously and tragically divided. Although he desperately wants to serve Daenerys, he can't help hoping that he'll somehow be reconciled with Cersei... who has hated him literally from the day he was born. This explains the crucial scene in which the more objective Sansa expresses astonishment that he believed Cersei's promises. "I used to think you were the cleverest man alive," she tells him - by far, the episode's best single line. I agree with another commentator that the show runners are setting up Tyrion for a tragic ending, which IMHO would be just and right.

And finally, we come back to Bran. All the evidence suggests that he's working with the Night King against the Winterfell alliance. The fact that he urges Sam to tell Jon the truth about his parentage, rather than telling him himself, is a dead giveaway. Remember that Bran's personality didn't change while he was in the cave with the (former) Three-Eyed Raven, though he was already "downloading" the Raven's vast knowledge. It was only after he had the dream or vision of the Night King grabbing him by the wrist that Bran ceased to be Bran, so it's not simply that his brain is overloaded that's turned him into a zombie. There's also a theory that Bran is not just possessed by the Night King, but always was him, by some sort of time-travel nonsense, but I don't want to believe this.

Wittiest line: After Jon asks what will happen if the dragon Rhaegal refuses to let him, Jon, ride on his back, Dany says: "Then I did enjoy your company, Jon Snow." Second wittiest line: When Tyrion calls Joffrey's wedding a "miserable affair," Sansa answers, "It had its moments" (i.e., Joffrey's death).

Most-expected development: Theon rescues Yara. Least-expected development: Cersei hires Bronn as hit man.

All in all, I'd give the episode an 8.

In the 1950s (in Japan at least), Tadashi Imai was the most honored Japanese film director, winning the coveted annual Kinema Junpo "Best Film" critics award five times. (As far as I know, only the legendary Yasujiro Ozu won it six times; Kurosawa won it only three times.) A Marxist, Imai made socially-conscious films with a strongly humanistic point-of-view, but in no way were his movies (or at least the ones I've seen) "propaganda." In fact, for me, he most strongly resembles the widely beloved Keisuke Kinoshita, with many of the same strengths and faults as that gentleman. Among his virtues are a very strong feeling for story and character and narrative drive, as well as solid pictorial craftsmanship (though this last admittedly is almost a given among Japanese film artists of the period). Among his shortcomings, like Kinoshita, are a tendency towards unrestrained sentimentality, and a related tendency to hammer moral points home.

Yet, American Japanese film scholars such as Donald Richie and Audie Bock denigrated him (though Richie did admire his 1958 period classic, Night Drum), and even in Japan he is nearly forgotten now. Yet the literary adaptation An Inlet of Muddy Water (1953), the muckraking Darkness at Noon (1956), Night Drum and this film are all first-rate, and highly recommended.

The tragic poignancy of this war film is that the main "warriors" are all schoolgirls and their teachers, requisitioned by the Japanese State to serve as nurses on the front lines with almost no training. Imai spares us no gruesome detail, including wartime operations (with almost no medical equipment or anesthetic), the constant and often futile search for food and water, children killed in bombings or trapped in avalanches, and the futile courage and self-sacrifice of the girls and most of their elders. Most importantly, this movie has the lovely young Kyoko Kagawa (who's still alive and working today at age 85!) as the leader of the girls. She has an outstanding scene near the end in which she performs a traditional dance on the night before a major battle, which the girls know that most of them will not survive. This antiwar classic is essential! (A version with subtitles is on YouTube under "Himeyuri.")

This film can claim a very important, though perhaps dubious, distinction among Japanese films released during that country's so-called "Golden Age" of cinema, which (according to me) lasted from 1949, the year of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring, to 1965, the year of Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard. Within that time span, 1953 is often considered to have been Japan's greatest film year, the equivalent of 1939 in Hollywood. Ozu's universally-acclaimed Tokyo Story, Kenji Mizoguchi's most famous classic, Ugetsu, and many other celebrated movies were released in 1953. (The only other possible candidate for Best Year would be the following one, 1954, which saw the release of Kurosawa's magnificent Seven Samurai, two masterpieces by Mizoguchi -- the great Sansho the Bailiff and A Story from Chikamatsu -- Keisuke Kinoshita's much beloved modern saga, Twenty-Four Eyes, and a host of other more or less wonderful movies.) Yet among the impressive roster of 1953 films that the film critics of Japan, in their annual Best Ten awards, given out by the venerable cinema magazine Kinema Junpo, had to choose from, they picked this film (originally titled Nigorie), directed by Tadashi Imai, as the best of the bunch. It also swept the best film prize in two other Japanese awards that year, the Blue Ribbon Award and the Mainichi Film Concours. This is fascinating, because there's not a critic in Japan today (or anywhere else) who, if they've even seen this work, would rate it higher than Tokyo Story or Ugetsu. Indeed, in the two most recent Kinema Junpo polls for best Japanese films of all time (1999 and 2009), An Inlet of Muddy Water is nowhere to be found, although over a hundred films were cited in the first poll and nearly two hundred in the second.

First, a word about Tadashi Imai. During the Golden Age, Imai was the most honored director in the Japanese industry except for Ozu. There were a number of interesting reasons for this. Imai was considered a committed Leftist, a fact that impressed critics of the day. His films consistently tackled social issues of the wartime and postwar eras, a trait which said "serious artist" to critics then. Furthermore, at a time when the half dozen major studios completely dominated the industry, he refused to submit to their censorship, producing his work independently (although a few other prominent directors, including Kaneto Shindo, also did so).

So should we sneer at these critics and their "shockingly" bad preference? No, because though they were clearly wrong to prefer Imai to Ozu or Mizoguchi, picking "Muddy Water" as best film was not a crass or idiotic choice, because it turns out to be a really excellent "Golden Age" film: intelligent, sensitive and evocative. Based on three grim stories, all set during the Meiji era, by the esteemed writer Ichiyo Higuchi, who died near the end of the 19th Century at the age of 24, the tales provide a devastating portrait of the low status of Japanese women then -- which was certainly not irrelevant to gender relations in mid-20th Century Japan.

In the first story, an unhappy wife, who has abandoned her philandering, verbally abusive husband, seeks shelter in her parents' home. The father, speaking for the dominant culture, reminds her of her duty to serve her awful husband and her young child (and also urges her to think of the financial situation of her family, who are accepting money from the rich husband). Now considering her desire for a bit of happiness in life selfish, the unfortunate girl resolves to return to the husband. She is transported back by a rickshaw driver whose drunken rudeness startles her -- until she realizes that he's an old childhood friend. The evocation of youthful happiness by these two unhappy adults is delicately and sensitively rendered, and the tale ends with a kind of sigh of resignation.

In the second story, a young, orphaned servant girl serves a rich, miserly mistress. (It's not clear why she never seeks other employment.) When she's forced to ask her employer for a two-yen loan to help the sick uncle who raised her, the woman promises her the money, then reneges. Given charge of a sum of money by the rich woman, the honest but desperate girl yields to temptation and steals the two yen. The resolution of this plot reminded me curiously of the stories of O. Henry. Yoshiko Kuga usually played very modern women, and so seems a bit uncomfortable in a rare period role as the servant girl. But she gives a fine, intelligent performance.

The last, longest and best of the stories is set in a brothel in Tokyo's Yoshiwara (red light) district. The beautiful O-Riki (Chikage Awashima) is the Number 1 girl in the house, and it's easy to see why. Beneath her hardened exterior, however, she harbors romantic dreams that won't go away, as she reveals to a mysterious customer, Asanosuke (So Yamamura). Meanwhile, she avoids a former customer named Gen (Seiji Miyaguchi), a laborer whose expensive addiction to O-Riki has ruined himself and his family. (She does this, she tells Asanosuke, for the man's good and her own.) Meanwhile at Gen's home, his long-suffering wife (the great Haruku Sugimura) begs her husband to forget O-Riki and think of herself and her son. Instead, for reasons that become clear only at the end, he kicks both wife and child out of the house.

It goes without saying that all this ends very sadly for all concerned. It also goes without saying that Awashima, Yamamura, Miyaguchi and, particularly, Sugimura give superb performances, and the restrained ending is quite moving. This is a classic Golden Age movie. The films of Tadashi Imai, who has fallen into obscurity, are hard to find, but I intend to try to seek out at least some of them.

This very short movie (21 minutes), shot on Super 8mm, is quite painful to watch. The surface of the film is (deliberately?) filled with scratches and dirt. The quality of the cinematography resembles nothing more or less than a bad home movie, with overly-lit shots alternating with ones of near-twilit obscurity, even those shot during daytime. (Although Marker narrates the film, he is playing a character here -- a refugee who decides to film the events described, perhaps for lack of anything better to do; thus, the amateurishness is appropriate.) Lastly, the sound quality -- which includes narration only: the images are silent, so none of the characters shown is heard speaking -- is quite poor, and, though the narration is in English, Marker's heavy accent makes his words often hard to decipher. But the film is painful also for an entirely different reason, one that perhaps only someone on the political Left could fully appreciate. It describes all too convincingly the terror, confusion and hopelessness of political progressives caught in a fascist coup. These refugees are in limbo: they can neither change the situation, nor escape; they can only try to figure out what is happening to them (from phone calls from allies, from TV broadcasts) and deal with it somehow. As the film goes on, we slowly realize that the desperate people in this very modern hell are the *lucky* ones: many of those who did not try to escape, or perhaps did try but didn't make it to a place of safety like an embassy, have been arrested, and some have been rounded up and executed by the new authorities in a stadium (as actually happened in Chile). As their tension mounts, the leftists turn on each other, each blaming the others' political factions for bringing on the disaster: according to some, by compromising too much with the powers-that-be, according to others, by not compromising enough. At last, the refugees are offered the only solution to save themselves: exile, an option they gratefully take. As they climb into a van that will take them away forever from their country, a panning shot over the city they are escaping reveals... that the audience is not where it thought it was. This work, a reaction to the right-wing coup in Chile, is a somber corrective to the revolutionary optimism of Marker's earlier work. (Interestingly, this film is included on the same DVD as The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (La Sixieme Face du Pentagone), a short 1968 film, showing the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon, which perfectly embodies that earlier optimism.) And although The Embassy (utterly unlike the elegant La Jetee or Sans Soleil) appears utterly artless, even crude, seeing it twice reveals subtle symmetries: the film begins and ends with the vapor trail of a jet, and the face of a woman, the first refugee who enters the embassy, is the same face we see in close-up as the refugees leave. (I think I'll remember the face of that woman -- confused, haunted, despairing -- until I die.) The movie works above all because the Left, at least at the time the film was made, had the same types all over the world: the lawyers, the folk singers, the student radicals, etc. They are all instantly recognizable, and universal. Marker would recount his journey from revolutionary optimism to pessimism and back again in a much longer and more ambitious film: The Base of the Air Is Red (Le Fond de l'Air Est Rouge). For now, this extraordinary 1973 work records a left-wing intellectual's dismay at the death of the 'Sixties' dream.

This film accomplishes something very strange and paradoxical: it creates in the receptive viewer a mellow, elegiac sense of loss for a world so harsh and brutal no sane person would ever want to live in it. In its evocation of a Pacific Northwest town in 1901 (to clarify: although the film was shot outside Vancouver, British Columbia, the town in the film, called Presbyterian Church, is supposed to be situated in either Oregon or, more probably, Washington State, *not* Canada), it does not stint on showing the harshness of everything about this frontier settlement, from the weather to the flophouses, dining halls, saloons and brothels within it. The people are hard-bitten, too, none more so than Mrs. Miller, the worldly doxie who arrives in town to shake things up. (Interestingly, we never see or even hear about Mr. Miller; my guess is that, like Ida, the Shelley Duvall character, Mrs. M is the ungrieving widow of a loveless marriage, forced by economic circumstance to take her fate -- and the local men -- in hand.)

This film has been called a masterpiece of realism, yet in some ways that's very misleading. Robert Altman, the director, had the very good fortune to come to prominence just as it became possible for the first time to say or do just about anything in a movie and still get it a commercial release, so long as children were kept out of the theatre (thanks to the new Motion Picture Association code). So the characters could now use language and make references to intimate behavior that would never have been possible if the picture had been released just nine years before, the same year that Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) came out (which was entirely possible, as the source material, the novel "McCabe", was published in 1959). However, this use of raw language, which has since invaded even television (The Sopranos, Deadwood), is now very common, so the edge of the film's verbal realism has blunted. Also, it was relatively unusual in the early 1970's to shoot a film entirely on location, as the cast and crew of this film did, but that fact is no longer the case. I think when critics still praise the movie's realism, what they really mean is that the filmmakers have built (quite literally) the world of the film with such depth and detail that it envelopes the viewer and draws her/him into the characters' lives to a degree that few films do.

And yet there's a rapturous dreamlike quality to the picture, too. About halfway through the film, it becomes clear that Mrs. Miller is an opium addict, a fact unknown to and unsuspected by McCabe. So the question is: when will he find out about her addiction, and what will he do about it? The story's unusual answer is that McCabe, clueless to the end, never does find out -- and his ignorance, or innocence, is somehow beautiful, as is Mrs. Miller's decision to go deeper into her "dependency" rather than try to rescue McCabe. In a sense, the movie's antique glow and bizarre logic suggest one of Mrs. M's opium fever dreams.

Obviously, this is not the film to see if you're suicidally depressed. But for those who appreciate one of the central paradoxes of art -- its ability to create joy while evoking the deepest suffering and even despair -- it will be an experience you'll want to return to again and again.

The "received opinion" of critics of the past concerning Keaton (including the great James Agee, who ought to have known better) was that sound films killed his career because his speaking voice was too dark and raspy to be funny. This was, and is, total nonsense. Keaton might actually have been *funnier* as a sound era actor, if he had been granted the material and the creative freedom to make the pictures he wanted. This film, made outside Hollywood and indeed outside the US, proved that - as hobbled by alcoholism and depression as he was - the Great Stone Face could still be great.

The funniest and most memorable gag in the film occurs early on when Buster, as a naively ambitious actor who has been hired to distribute advertising flyers for a bank disguised to look like French currency, accidentally gets his hands on the bank's *real* money and starts throwing it to passersby on the streets of Paris. His calm acceptance of the excitement of the crowd as they follow him around, scooping up the bank notes, is hysterical. (In one case, a man about to be married is given money by Keaton, and he runs away from his homely bride, shouting "Saved! Saved!") There is another great sight gag (this time influenced by Rene Clair) of the Board of Directors of the bank weeping and wailing in unison as they discover that Buster has literally tossed away the bank's fortune.

There is one other eye-popping sight gag that I'll never forget. In the gangster's lair, Buster is holding a glass of whiskey in his hand and one of the gangster's henchmen pats Buster on the back a little too roughly, so that the glass of whiskey jumps out of his glass and looks about to spill. Suddenly Buster reaches out and literally catches *every drop* of the precious alcohol in the glass before it hits the floor! Only Keaton could have dreamed up, much less pulled off, such an amazing gag. (The sting in the joke is that, as I have already mentioned, the great man had a serious drinking problem at the time.) Finally, I'd like to comment on his acting. In addition to playing the hapless actor Buster Garnier, he also portrays an escaped hoodlum, Scarface Jim. This was his only role as a villain (if you don't count his incredibly bizarre short, The Frozen North). Yet he is completely credible as the heavy, and it is, in fact, perfectly easy for the audience to guess which character Buster is playing at each moment, even when the gangster and the actor wear the same clothes. So the picture is one of his finest acting triumphs as well as perhaps his last great moment as a comedian.

Though my French is rudimentary, and though the print was unsubtitled, this film was a total joy, and is highly recommended.

Ray throughout his career created films with a great human warmth that sometimes bordered on sentimentality (e.g., the Apu Trilogy, Two Daughters, Charulata). Others of his films seemed to me a bit dry and clinical, anthropological rather than deeply felt (e.g., The Middleman, Distant Thunder). And other works are just embarrassing failures (e.g., his adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.) By coincidence, I saw Sadgati at the same festival and on the same day as Enemy of the People, and thus witnessed within hours the very worst and the very best of Ray. As for Sadgati, I don't know how to overpraise it. Made for TV, it is a brutally ironic condemnation of the Indian caste system and, by extension, all inequality and injustice. It has the concentrated power of a story from Russian literature. (Tolstoy would have loved it.) The cruel directness of this work displays an unexpected aspect of Ray's genius. The scenes in which Om Puri struggles to work for the disgustingly lazy Brahmin are almost unbearably painful. The scream that the late Smita Patil gives when she is told the tragic fate of her husband I will remember all my life. The final scene takes the story's irony to its logical, devastating conclusion. It's a matter of great regret that this work is not available on video: if it were, Ray's reputation would be even higher than it is.

This movie begins with a shot that I will never forget. An androgynous child, sharply illuminated in an almost totally dark space, sits on a bunk in what appears to be a bedroom. The door opens and a man appears, in silhouette against the light behind him. The camera pans down to find a young woman, her face ghostly, sitting in the foreground, staring zombie-like before her. None of the characters is looking at the other. The man crouches down, puts a cigarette in the woman's mouth and attempts, in vain, to light it. (What would French films be without cigarettes?) The man then removes an enormously long cigarette from his pocket, puts one end in his own mouth and the other end in the woman's, and lights the middle of the thing, whereupon it splits apart into *two* cigarettes. (Shades of "Now Voyager"!) The adults rise and leave the room; the child is alone. What makes the scene memorable is the eerie silence (the film was shot without a sound track) and the ultra-high contrast black-and-white photography, by Michel Fournier, that makes the whole movie seem like the recording of some primitive rite. This short picture is notorious for having been shot while the entire adult cast and crew was high on LSD, which is not surprising, given its strangeness. What is surprising is the extraordinary maturity of its imagery and technique: though the director was only twenty when it was made, it feels like the work of a master. The night scenes in the forest are incredible, not least because Bernadette Lafont's eerie eyes and loping gait provide an amazingly disturbing image of schizophrenia (or else she was having a very bad trip). Though cars and other humans are occasionally glimpsed, the family appears utterly isolated, and there is an apocalyptic sense to the whole film (hence, presumably, the film's title, which evokes St. John the Apostle and the end of the world). The total love and devotion which the family members long to express for one another, and their simultaneous alienation from themselves and each other, give the picture its poignancy. Directed by Philippe Garrel, who is most famous for his relationship with the singer-songwriter Nico, this is the obscurest of obscure masterpieces.