Next we meet up with a foursome of Depression-era women. And these are determined women, bonding together to make it through a man’s world in hard times. Ruby Keeler is at her innocent best. Joan Blondell is the wide awake, street-smart wisecracker. Aline MacMahon is the shrewd, conniving skeptic, and Rogers (who is a supporting character here) personifies the word “gold digger.” Although Rogers part is brief, she commands attention, especially in the opening scene, so much so that it is abundantly clear how and why she rose above her co-stars. Rogers could do just about anything.

Oddly (and most refreshingly), the women are the stars here. The males are merely supporting characters and are portrayed as either weak, gullible, or uptight. Without the ladies, these men are impotent, only reaching their potential when pushed by their better halves. The foursome of big city girls might be seen as the original blueprint for “Sex in the City”‘s Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda. Their nasal-toned, cynical, cigar-chomping director ( the much imitated but never equaled Ned Sparks) is looking for  a new backer to fund his Depression musical. He gets needed support when Keeler coaxes pianist-beau Dick Powell to his cause. Powell has an apartment across the way. He’s a remarkable songwriter (essentially, a personification of the Dubin and Warren team), but he’s also got a secret. MacMahon suspects he is a crook on the lam, but actually he’s well-to-do, with artistic aspirations, hiding out from kinfolk who do not want him mixing with theater trash.

The first obligatory number of the triptych, “Pettin’ in the Park,” is a an amorous romp with Powell and Keeler (whose dancing is still clunky). Berkeley gives each anonymous, pretty girl her two-second close-up  and contrasts that with his usual amazing overhead shot, this time taking the pattern of a kaleidoscopic snowball. Dwarf Billy Barty(from Footlight Parade) is back as a lascivious toddler (!) on roller skates whose finds his rubber ball resting beneath the pumps of short-skirted women. The women, in gartered thighs, populate an artificial landscape akin to Seurat’s “La Grand Jatte.” Barty’s infantile raging libido tries to pull the veil away on a myriad of drenched women undressing. He’s a second too late, and now they are all comfortably armored in aluminum chastity vests. Powell is among the frustrated gents, but not to worry, Barty has a convenient can opener and the nondescript number ends with Powell plowing his way through Keeler’s metal barrier.

Back in reality (the sections directed by LeRoy), Powell’s sibling, Warren William, shows up to put a once-and-for-all stop to any and all showbiz ambitions. William is aided by family lawyer Guy Kibbee, but the two men fatally underestimate Blondell and MacMahon. Blondell displays raw emotion and her expression of guilt at having mislead William is genuinely convincing. Almost as good is MacMahon, who shows no such mercy toward Kibbee.

Naturally, it all works out, but even these accomplished actors, in the dramatic bits, cannot tell the story in such a way as Berkely’s numbers. “Shadow Waltz” is Berkeley at his most diaphanous, looking very much like a precursor to Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). The whirling dervishes of Rumi are mutated into Aryan Venuses, each rigged with neon violin. When the lights go down, they form a giant bowing violin. As impressive as Fantasia undoubtedly is, seeing similar ideas done with such expressionistic, black and white, primitive precision, with live actors and unfathomably monumental choreography, is startling.

That leaves the final number, “Remember My Forgotten Man.” This is Berkeley’s harrowing ode to the displaced veteran of the Great War. Wisely, Berkeley cast Blondell in the role of the tough hooker with golden heart, in full survival mode. Proving to be the Zeitgeist of the film, this is Blondell’s great celluloid moment. Rows of transient WW1 veterans, breadlines, and pathos-drenched housewives constitute cynical comedy as visual aria. Contrasting with the opener, “We’re in the Money”, it makes for a fascinating bookend to the Leroy/Berkeley tome. It is, perhaps, the closest film will come to being socially relevant opera.

DIRECTED BY: Dziga Vertov

FEATURING: Mikhail Kaufman (cameraman)

PLOT: A plotless record of twenty four hours of life in the Soviet Union of 1929, exhibited

through series of experimental camera tricks.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Man with the Movie Camera is a visually inventive, historically important and formally deep movie that reveals more secrets with each viewing; but, the only quality in it that might be called “weird” are the surreal camera tricks it occasionally employs. It’s a movie that demands space on the shelf of anyone seriously interested in editing techniques or film theory, but as far as weirdness goes, it’s purely supplemental viewing.

COMMENTS: Reviews of Man with a Movie Camera often spend as much, if not more, time discussing the history and philosophy of the production and its influence on future films than they do describing what’s actually in the movie. That’s because the challenge the movie sets for itself—to create a “truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature”—is more fascinating than the film’s subject matter (the daily lives of Soviet citizens in 1929). On a technical level, Movie Camera is a catalog of editing techniques and camera tricks, many of which were pioneered in this film but are commonplace or obsolete now. Be on the lookout for double exposures, tricks of perspective, slowing down or speeding up the camera speed, freeze-frames, reversed footage, split screens, and even crude stop-motion animation. One of the most interesting techniques is the amphetaminic editing of Movie Camera‘s climax, which moves almost too fast for the eye or mind to follow (a technique Guy Maddin would fall in love with and use to ultra-weird effect in the Constructivist/Surrealist hybrid The Heart of the World). Structurally, the film flows along as a series of counterpoints, alternating between two sets of scenes to create ironic contrasts (cross-cutting a funeral procession and the birth of a baby), metaphors (scenes of soot-covered workers in the mines followed by women being pampered in a beauty parlor to suggest the dignity of the worker compared to the frivolousness of the bourgeoisie), or other surprise connections (the cameraman getting dangerously close to the being hit by a speeding train is intercut with a sleeping woman tossing and turning as if having a nightmare). Other sequences interlace shots of the cameraman and film crew with the footage they’re shooting so the audience can see how the movie is made; for example, we see the cameraman filming horse drawn carriages, then watch the reaction of the bonneted women out on a Sunday ride trying to act nonchalant as if they don’t realize there’s a camera aimed at them from the car speeding along beside them. At several points the movie pauses and we focus on Vertov’s wife working in the editing studio splicing the footage together into a montage, as if we’re watching the movie being assembled before our very eyes.

Philosophically, Movie Camera advocates a pure Marxist agenda; thanks to the distance of time and circumstance, the preaching is not as heavy-handed and obvious to the modern viewer as it may have been to the film’s intended audience. The common worker, whether miner, factory worker or clerk, is spotlighted and glorified throughout. All that footage showing the cameraman and the physical process of making movies serves double duty here, reminding the audience that the propaganda artist is not a privileged class but is a fellow worker sweating away in the trenches. The film also advances temporary policies of the time: in 1927, Stalin had embarked on a policy of rapid industrialization to close the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West. Movie Camera therefore fetishes the machine, taking a voyeuristic delight in glorifying belching smokestacks, pumping pistons, and particularly in the clicking shutters and winding cranks of its own favorite apparatus, the camera (I half-suspect director Vertov only shows the explicit birth of a baby because the vagina reminds him of a camera aperture).

At a more abstract level, the non-narrative, everyday subject matter of the film expresses the director’s ideological hostility to the fictional films of the West. Like Leon Trotsky, Vertov saw the spectacle and fantasy of fictional films as an opiate for the masses that needed to be reformed into something useful to the socialist state. This last position, turning the cinema away from escapism and towards practicality, was Vertov’s central concern in Movie Camera, but it resulted in two ironies. First, there is a paradox in that Vertov wants to limit himself to depicting reality, but so many of the images he chooses are fantastic and even surreal: a man with a movie camera standing on top of mountainous movie camera, a building collapsing on itself via split-screen manipulation, a plate of cooked prawns coming to life and slithering around. Presumably, Vertov resolves this apparent inconsistency between concern for reality and addiction to fantasy by constantly reminding the audience that they are watching a film and not a story, by emphasizing the role of the omnipresent unhidden cameraman and showing how he accomplishes his tricks, thereby unmasking the illusion and revealing the reality behind it. There remains, however, a (not unpleasant) tension between the director’s championing of reality over fiction and the way he continually undermines the reality of his motion picture.

The second irony is that, despite the fact that Movie Camera‘s foundation was doctrinaire Marxist theory, the movie was rejected and disavowed as avant-garde and decadent after Stalin adopted the official Soviet aesthetic of “social realism.” The Communist stance became that filmmakers should depict easy-to-digest, non-stylized narratives that could inspire the average theatergoer, showing him exemplary citizens and uplifting historical victories such as Alexander Nevsky‘s victory over the Teutonic Knights. Vertov stopped making his own films after 1934 and finished out his career as nothing more than an editor. Invented to celebrate the proletariat, Man with the Movie Camera ended up of interest entirely to the cultural elites; intended as a leftist manifesto, it proved too radical in its formalism for the Marxists.

Man with the Movie Camera is a recommended film, but with a qualification: you almost certainly must have an interest in film history or film theory to enjoy it. If anyone without such predilections were to call the movie insufferably tedious, I wouldn’t be able to refute them. Because the movie itself is in the public domain, but the various soundtracks are not, you have several options to watch the film. It can be streamed or downloaded from the Internet archive, but there is no musical accompaniment. The three main competing DVD versions currently available are distinguished by their unique soundtracks, each made in different styles but all following Vertov’s broad original scoring notes. Kino’s 2003 release (buy) features a minimalist score by Hollywood composer Michael Nyman. The record label Ninja Tune released a DVD (buy) with a hipper score from the electronic jazz outfit The Cinematic Orchestra. The version I watched to prepare this review was the 2002 Image disc (buy), with a very good soundtrack from the Alloy Orchestra that is hypnotically rhythmic and occasionally exotic; it plays as both period-appropriate and “futuristic” at the same time, and reminds me a little of the style of George Antheil. The Cinematic (digital version) and Alloy (digital version) versions of the movie are both available for online rental or purchase.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the] wiggiest effects would seem to violate the idea of verit. But that’s the intoxicating power of making movies–you start out trying to record realism, and you end up animating a plate full of prawns.”–Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (DVD)

In direct contrast to the virginal Keeler, Blondell is the much more interesting, wise-cracking working girl who manages to get Guy Kibbee into a compromising situation. She uses that to her advantage and blackmails Guy into financing Dick’s Broadway production. Naturally, it will all work out.

Plot-wise, that’s about all one needs to know. Unfortunately, the film does not spin the plot quite that fast and it takes some time before we get to Berkeley’s numbers, but once we do, most is forgiven.

Blondell is Warren and Dubin’s “Girl At The Ironing Board” and, on the surface, the song seems a bit subdued. But, the discerning eye will notice that not only is she singing to the fellas’ shirts on the clothes line, but the shirts are singing back. This number, set at the the turn of the century, is eyelash batting cynicism that only Blondell could have done justice to (with Keeler, the piece would have fallen flat). Blondell is a good sport even when one of the undie shirts gets a sleeve-full of her tush.

Dick sings “I Only Have Eyes For You” to Ruby and, to prove it, he imagines every girl in the number as a Ruby Keeler clone. She’s the Silver Lear Cigarette Girl. She’s the Willard Hair Gal. And when she is transformed into the Society Cosmetics model she literally morphs into hundreds of  decapitated heads floating in a crepuscular abyss. The Ruby Keeler Ferris wheel is adorned with row after row of lily white twirling Ruby divas. Busby’s black marble floor serves as a pond  for the Rubys, who are now, literally, water lilies. These form a Kong-size decapitated Ruby head, petrified in a synthetic grin. The real Ruby ascends from the iris of an eye, wearing a dress split all the way up to the mystery of her crotch. The army of Rubys end the high camp number by forming the pattern of a mirror handle.

‘What Do We Go For? Beautiful Dames!” is among the most blatantly sexist musical numbers ever filmed. Paired dames in negligees rise from their silky beds, stretch, and jump in a tub-full of “Calgon, take me away” bubbly. One shy blonde objects to the camera’s voyeuristic eye and powder puffs the lens. Now it’s make-up time, and of course all long-legged dames apply their foundation while wearing garters. Off to the stage and the girls, now dressed in skin-tight black leotards, spread their legs in unison, a promise in exchange for that gold ring, fellas! But, heaven promises far more than just that and your gal, on a wire, will “float” right up to the door to greet you! (Obviously, the genesis of the Promise Keeper dogma.) Released the year that the Hayes code went into effect, Berkeley (mostly) compensates for increased censorship by barraging the viewer with kaleidoscopic patterns. Berkeley sneaks in some jokes at the expense of suburban values and gets some jabs in through Herbert’s pious, hypocritical character. The Hayes restrictions inspired some “imaginative dodges” on Berkeley’s part, but, compared to his pre-Code films, there is the sense here that his wings are clipped, which may be another reason for the film’s unevenness.

Aptly,  Dames concludes with a drunken brawl, which was, alas, all-too familiar territory for Berkeley. The eternal mama’s boy had as a big a weakness for the juice as he did for the dames. A few months after the release of this film, a drunken Berkeley plowed into two vehicles, killing three people. Berkeley was charged with  triple murder. Warner Brothers invested in Berkeley’s representation with legal top gun Jerry Geisler. Geisler’s work was cut out for him, but he eventually won an acquittal for Berkeley after two hung juries. The studio execs at Warner’s were impressed enough with the attorney that they would hire him again to (famously) get Errol Flynn acquitted of statutory rape charges.

After the death of  his mother, Berkeley went through numerous personal and career slumps. He attempted suicide several times, plowed through six marriages, was briefly committed to an institution, had a comeback in the 1960s and died in 1976 at the age of eighty. To this day, Busby Berkeley, the most innovative choreographer in cinema, does not have a star on Hollywood Boulevard. But, who the hell needs reality?

Mark Sandrich directed a number of the RKO musicals with Astaire and Rogers. His first teaming with them was The Gay Divorcee (1934). This was followed by Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Shall We Dance (1937) and Carefree (1938). Later, he directed Astaire with Bing Crosby in 1924′s Holiday Inn (which some people still confuse with the inferior 1954 remake, White Christmas) and Blue Skies (1946).

Top Hat is Astaire and Rogers’ at their near-peak, although some revisionists have argued that honor should actually go to the George Stevens directed Swing Time (1936). I’m not siding with the Swing Time revisionists, because I  have my own revisionist opinion, which I will cover down a later RKO road. Top Hat is a near-perfect film from Hollywood’s near-perfect decade, and it’s pure class, catapulting Depression-era man from his oppressive environment for 101 minutes of “Heaven, I’m in heaven” (well almost 101 minutes. More on that later). Astaire’s choreography blends seamlessly with the musical direction of the great composer Max Steiner. Steiner fills the film to the brim with some of the best songs Irving Berlin ever wrote, from Astaire’s solo number “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” to the Astaire and Rogers signature song “Cheek to Cheek.”

I don’t care if you have an aversion to musicals, to black and white films, or to any film that was made before your entry into the world—if you’re not smiling ear to ear by “The End,” then you had better check your pulse.

Top Hat literally kicks off in the “smooth, classy and cool” mode. The opening shot is of Fred’s dancing feet, soon joined by Ginger’s feet, a swirl (that’s Bernard Newman’s gown), and then art deco credits over a bird’s eye view of a top hat: “Why ask for anything more? Why ask for anything more!”

It turns out there’s a fella under the credits’ top hat, and he escorts us into a gentleman’s lounge filled with a bunch of constipated “SILENCE!” types. There to mix up the atmosphere a bit is young and dapper Fred; as we can see from the pumps he’s wearing, he is indeed going to create a dancing ruckus. There’s a bit of rusting-newspaper business and the anal old guys huff and puff their ceegars and give Fred the evil eye.  When Fred’s business manager Edward Everett Horton shows up (in his typical, perfectly cast role), failing to be quiet as Timothy Churchmouse, Fred is inspired to tap dance his way out of the gentleman’s lounge, upsetting the ceegars!

Back in their luxurious hotel suite, we discover that Ed is trying to get the reluctant Fred married off. In protest, Fred breaks into a song and dance so intense that it literally frees all the loose putty from the walls. Unfortunately, the ceiling putty on the room below also comes falling down–and that room is occupied by none other than lady Ginger. Underneath satin sheets and another Newman gown, Ginger reaches for the telephone to lodge a formal complaint. But you know those hotel types are a tad slow, so Ginger slips into anther silky Newman number and darts up the Grecian stairwell. Phooey on you naysayers who deny love at first sight. Fred is one suave cat. He smiles, lights up a cigarette, says to hell with anti-tobacco lobbyists, and charmingly woos Ginger by sprinkling of sand across the floor and scuff-shoeing her into la-la land, counting the sheep.

A bouquet of roses, a horse and buggy jaunt, a precursor to Singin’ in the Rain, and a side trip to Venice are all part of this classic boy gets girl, boy loses girl, and boy gets girl back quintessential Hollywood musical plot. For the boy loses girl section, mix in miscommunication and mistaken identity to stylishly spice up the brew.

The dance numbers are filmed in crisp black and white. Who the hell needs color? Who the hell needs reality?  Astaire’s ability to make it all look easy is his genius, and you’ll be dazzled as he takes his cane and rat-a-tat-tats an entire chorus of top hats to a beautifully artificial set.

The climax arrives with “Cheek to Cheek” and Ginger out graces the graceful Fred in a PETA-unapproved Newman feather gown. There’s even a Busby Berkeley-like number after, but it really doesn’t fit into such an intimate setting. (It seems it was Busby who did Busby best).

Top Hat is probably about fifteen minutes too long, but that complaint amounts to carping. For me, when I depart this mortal coil, I’ll put in a request to St. Peter, or whoever is manning the pearly gates, and ask them to plant me forever in Top Hat, shorn the ten minutes of excess chatter.

This is the first in a series of the extinct Hollywood musical. Next week we will move to Berkeley himself on 42nd Street.

DIRECTED BY: Chris Marker

FEATURING: Jean Négroni (narrator), Davos Hanich, Hélène Chatelain (models)

PLOT: After World War III, a man is trained as a time traveler to try to find a cure for the

devastation, but he is more interested in locating the woman on a pier whom he briefly glimpsed as a child and whose image burned itself into his memory.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: La Jetée has all the cinematic quality it would need to qualify for the List, and a significant enough level of weirdness to justify inclusion. The film’s only drawback is its length; at a mere 30 minutes, it would need to be ghost-of-Hunter-S.-Thompson-on-a-peyote-trip bizarre in order to take a spot on the List away from a movie that’s three or four times its length. It is, however, a historically important film with links to lots of other weird movies, and any serious student of cinematic surrealism should be sure the name “La Jetée” at least rings a bell.

COMMENTS: The credits introduce La Jetée not as a film, but as a photo-roman (photo-novel). Filmmaker Chris Marker made this experiment, his only significant fiction film, between his usual essay-style documentaries; the story is told entirely through still photographs (with one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it motion sequence), third-person narration, and sound effects. The technique is surprisingly effective and remarkably cinematic, and it dovetails with the movie’s theme of memory; each image is itself like one of the nameless hero’s stored memories, which he accesses as if he’s browsing an interior museum. Sometimes the pictures fit together in sequence to compose a fragmented scene, and other times they make giant leaps into the future or past, in the same way that the mind jumps back and forth between present and past as it composes reality in real time. The story is vague in its details—we get no information about the war that nearly destroyed the world, and the potentially troubling etiquettes of romancing a woman across a gulf of time are glossed over—but we accept the fabulous story more easily and focus on its emotional and intellectual messages better without a lot of distracting exposition. The tale becomes disoriented and dreamlike once we reach the time travel experiments; our hero is doped up, mainlining time (which washes over him and lifts him like a wave), and he drifts through timeless moments with his beloved mistress of the past. “They have no memories, no plans,” the narrator tells us as the couple discovers romance in their own particular dimension. “Time builds itself painless around them.” Every so often we are brought back to the present and see the subject’s sleeping face covered by a mask, hear indistinct whispering in a foreign tongue and the sound of a beating heart. It’s as if he’s lying on an operating table hallucinating; we’re reminded that in this reverie he can’t clearly distinguish whether he’s dreaming, remembering, or experience. When he travels into the future, he wears sunglasses and discovers that citizens of the weird world to come have buttons on their foreheads and are fond of becoming partially transparent and appearing in front of celestial fields. The vague and dreamy middle portion sharpens its focus for the ending, which brings us, Möbius-strip fashion, back to the beginning so the hero can relive that moment where he first glimpsed the girl on the pier who would become his lifelong obsession. The famous ending isn’t so much what we think of as a typical time-travel paradox as it is an anti-paradox; the way the plot points connect so perfectly, so artificially, so ironically, is unsettling. La Jetée emerges as a fascinting narrative meditation—though unfortunately the ending has lost some of its punch-in-the-gut impact for today’s viewer, who’s been exposed to so many variations on Marker’s final twist that it now plays out like a cliché. Fortunately, there is much more to marvel at in this trip deep into the abysses of mind and memory than just its trick ending; it’s an utterly unique film experience that serious science fiction fans (in particular) will want to savor and remember.

La Jetée was explicitly expanded and remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys (1995), but it could almost be said that every time travel film made since 1962 (including Terminator) is at least an oblique remake of Marker’s fantasia. La Jetée cinematically quotes Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another film about the destructive consuming power of memory, and has itself been visually referenced in numerous weird movies, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). The Criterion Collection presents the short on a gala disc alongside Marker’s next most famous film, the maddeningly wandering documentary travelogue Sans Soleil.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Every philosophically inclined Möbius-strip narrative that came after ‘La Jetée’—from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to the Terminator trilogy, Somewhere in Time and Lost Highway—is in its debt.”–Matt Zoller Seitz, Time Out New York (DVD)

I say that up front because I have watched this film in the company of such alien types as the Hyperrealists. Their melodramatic, aggressive reactions were the same as I saw in a showing of the films of  Busby Berkeley (be forewarned: a series on Berkeley is coming). Naturally, I saw it as my aesthetic duty to cut those sophistic assailants down to size.

The Marx Brothers, perhaps, are the quintessential comedy team with an edge. W.C. Fields exhibits a comparable level of surrealism, but as a predominantly solo act, he’s a mono whisper compared to the quadrophonic Brothers. 1930s audiences showed themselves to be a somewhat more imaginative lot (not by much) than us in that they not only accepted the Brothers level of unhinged zaniness, but they even made stars out of them.

Note that “but not by much,” because Duck Soup (1933) was the Marx Brothers most revolutionary film, a surrealist-politico masterpiece, and it totally bombed at the box office. This resulted in the Brothers being released from their Paramount contract.  MGM and Irving Thalberg were quick to snap them up, but Thalberg, a self-confessed fan, knew he had to polish their act in order to increase their accessibility.

The MGM films that followed Soup retained a certain level of  zaniness, but it was noticeably diminished.  The new producers added musical numbers aplenty (the songs in Duck Soup are minimal and non-intrusive—and although I love musicals, saturating a Marx Brothers film with dance numbers is a really bad idea), and sacked the bland Zeppo (the sole good move). The best of the Thalberg lot was probably Night At The Opera (1935) directed by Sam Wood, a fleetingly competent commission director. Wood lacked the consummate craftsmanship and idiosyncratic comedic intuition of Duck Soup director Leo McCary. McCary had cut his teeth with some eccentric peers. He started as an assistant to Tod Browning and had worked, as a writer, with Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and W.C. Fields.  With Wood and Thalberg reigning the Marx Brothers in, a slow descent into the pedestrian was inevitable.

Still, we have Duck Soup, which has rightly been lauded (by those who know better) as the great anti-war masterpiece (along with 1964′s Dr. Strangelove). (Although, if I remember correctly, the late critic Leslie Halliwell preferred Fail Safe to Kubrick,’s film, a judgment I’ve never fully understood).

The irreverence displayed in Duck Soup should delight any weird movie lover. Nothing is sacred. Much to FDR’s dismay, patriotism was lampooned, as was religion: “We got guns! They got guns! All God’s children got guns!” Hallelujah! Bourgeoisie society is likened to fascism, and the boys libidos are raging.

Groucho is new President, Rufus T. Firefly, and his kingdom is the fictional Freedonia (only W.C. Fields could come up with wackier names). The object of Rufus’ affection is the aptly named Mrs. Teasdale (the hilarious Margaret Dumont—stocky, unattractive and no spring chicken, she couldn’t even make a local commercial today). Mrs. Teasdale is a wealthy widow, and Groucho’s painted mustache and ceegar have come ‘ a courtin’ her—and his ceegar is noticeably stiff.

The antagonistic neighboring country Sylvania has sent two spies into Freedonia (Chico and Harpo—go figure). Of course, this is a set-up for nonsensical dialogue, political intrigue, seductive vamps, surreal one-liners, even more surreal slapstick (during the eventual war), and raging testosterone.

A cabinet meeting scene is typical. Rufus is handed a report: “Your excellency, here is the treasury Department report. I hope you find it clear.” “Clear? A four-year old child could understand this report.” Rufus then hands the report to secretary Zeppo and instructs him: “Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make heads or tails out of it.”

Of course, Zeppo ignores him and goes about his business. And that’s sort of reaction led to much of the complaining I heard during the screening of the film. The unrealistic exchanges throw many modern audiences off. “He didn’t even respond to what she said!” “He looked at the camera!” and so on.

While Duck Soup was a subversive anti-status quo film, it was not rejected by the masses at the time because of all the unrealistic zingers (one of which will immediately be recognized by fans of the Addams Family movies, but then that’s old business). Rather, it’s unpatriotic irreverence went too far for a nation trying desperately to unite together during the depression (which few of us could fathom, I’m sure!) and for a nation on the brink of war. However, escapism was the order of the day, and the Marx Brothers were happy to oblige.

Although their films were probably not considered weird in their day, they have evolved into time capsule misfits because of shifting aesthetics and ideologies. That Duck Soup is still, unfortunately, frighteningly relevant possibly goes unnoticed.

The film is often callous, cruel, uncouth, and laced in spiked Jewish humor, but it never resorts to dumbing down to its audience. And that is a refreshing change of pace.

The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth

DIRECTED BY: Werner Herzog

FEATURING: Helmut Döring, Paul Glauer

PLOT: As the film begins we infer that a group of people in some sort of institution, possibly a mental asylum, have revolted, and an “instructor” has barricaded himself in a manor house while holding one of them prisoner. As the instructor tries to reason with the rebels and waits for the arrival of the police, the insurgents vandalize the property in increasingly bizarre ways: lighting flower pots on fire, fixing a stolen car so that it circles endlessly around a track and throwing crockery at it, and crucifying a monkey. All parts are played by dwarfs, although the buildings and props are scaled normally.

BACKGROUND:

• Herzog financed Even Dwarfs Started Small, his second feature, with funds he received when he won the German National Film Award for his first feature film, Signs of Life. Dwarfs was then banned by the German censors on its release.
• The film was shot on Lanzarote, a volcanic island in the Canary Islands.
• Herzog partially attributes the dark influences of the film to the fact that before making it he had been imprisoned in a third world prison while shooting footage for another movie in Cameroon in the paranoid weeks after a coup attempt. While incarcerated he contracted a blood parasite and ran a high fever.
• The production was plagued with problems: one of the dwarfs was struck by the driverless car (he was unscathed), then the same actor caught on fire (he had minor injuries). With the morale among the non-professional troupe low, Herzog promised the actors that if they completed the film, he would jump into a cactus patch and allow them to film it. The actors stuck with it and Herzog fulfilled his end of the bargain.
• A scene of piglets nursing at what appears to be the corpse of their mother is disturbing and proved highly controversial. The sow’s eyes are shut and it lies almost perfectly still, but its legs clearly jerk during the feeding—though perhaps this is just a post-mortem reflex.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Hombre, the tiniest dwarf with the most demonic laugh, nearly chuckling himself to death as he watches a camel struggling to rise to its feet. Watch the scene and share an inexplicable nightmare with millions of other human beings.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Even the title of Even Dwarfs Started Small starts weird. What

Japanese trailer for Even Dwarfs Started Small

follows is a grotesque parade of cannibalistic chickens, insects dressed as a bride and groom, a crucified monkey, a defecating camel, and dwarfs running amok destroying everything in sight. Presented in bleak black and white in a heartlessly cold documentary style, it’s the gloomiest depiction of the triumph of the irrational ever filmed.

COMMENTS: A provocateur knows he is doing something right when he gets criticized from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Shot in the late 1960s, when cultural revolution was as hip as body painting and paisley bedecked bell bottoms, Herzog’s depiction of an unmotivated rebellion of dwarfs at an unspecified institution seemed like it must have been intended a commentary on the times. The remnants of German Fascism were outraged by Herzog’s degenerate vision of man and society, a vision that was antithetical to the utopian purity of National Socialism. They must have seen the film as a call for decadents and freaks to revolt; Herzog reported that he received anonymous phone calls from Aryans bragging about their aim. The Left, on the other hand, accused Herzog of mocking the worldwide countercultural revolution, depicting it as futile, destructive and childish. (They were right, it turns out, although that wasn’t the director’s main purpose).

Those attempting to give Dwarfs a political interpretation—seeing at the institutional rebellion as a metaphor for what was going on in the larger society—were looking through the wrong end of Herzog’s telescope. They should have taken a cue from the diminished perspective of dwarfs and looked down rather than up, inward instead of outward, seeing the absurd insurgency as a metaphor for the human psyche rather than human society. Although Herzog was new to the scene at the time, we now understand that he is personal rather than a political filmmaker; an ecstatic, not a didactic, artist. Dwarfs is a nightmare, and nightmares originate in the self, not in society. The institution is the Self, and the reason we have trouble picking a side in this conflict between the authoritarian, rational instructor and the rampaging rebel inmates is because they both represent parts of ourselves. We lust after the unfettered libidinal freedom of the rebels, yet we fear the dangerous and destructive anarchy they represent; we chafe under the rule of our own internal instructor, while at the same time we hope he will somehow find the strength put down the uprising and restore order to the mad landscape.

We don’t know who is “right” and who is “wrong” in the power struggle that unfolds in Dwarfs. We know that the instructor, and presumably his missing staff, ruled over the residents of the nameless institution prior to the uprising; but we have no idea whether the inmates were mistreated, or merely revolted out of boredom or spite. From the irrational behavior of the freed dwarfs it seems likely that the institution is an insane asylum, although the nomenclature (the instructor refers to his absent superior as “the principal”) suggests a school. The instructor has managed to capture Pepe, one of the rebels, and tied him to a chair. He restrains him, but he doesn’t mistreat him. He warns the mob that unspecified harm will come to Pepe if the rebels don’t calm down, but none of the other dwarfs consider it a credible threat: they see the instructor as a coward with no guts. In fact, he’s restrained by his civilized nature and adherence to rules; he’s too ethical to hurt Pepe. He recites the institution’s motto–”Cleanliness and Order”—and pleads with the mob to be “sensible” or “reasonable.” He is ridiculously, stupidly ineffectual at quelling the rebellion, calling the police on a dead phone and asking the dial tone for help. Impotent and despondent, he sits at his desk fiddling his hands and asks Pepe what he would do if their situations were reversed. Pepe laughs at him. The instructor, the voice of reason, has lost all control, and outside of the citadel he’s imprisoned in, glorious chaos reigns.

If the instructor is too weak to admire, the rambunctious little people are too cruel and unpredictable to love. Their freedom is intoxicating, but they take things too far for any but the most dedicated nihilist. Food fights and breaking dishes are fun, and the truck they steal and rig so that it travels in an endless circle looks like a blast. But they are mean even to their own kind. The gang torments the two blind dwarfs, stealing food from them and laughing as they swing their canes wildly. They watch cockfights for entertainment, and they tie a monkey to a cross and parade him around. Like young teenagers playing sex games, they force the smallest two of them to “marry,” laughing and locking them in a room together hoping they will mate, even as the male, Hombre, struggles to escape and howls that he doesn’t want to. The actors are all obvious amateurs, and their unstudied performances lend another layer of oddness to the proceedings. Disconcertingly, the dwarfs all laugh and giggle uncontrollably most of the time, in those high-pitched voices, whether the situation calls for it or not. Whereas the child anarchists in Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (which, perhaps not coincidentally, also features an ineffectual dwarf in a position of authority) are unquestionably the heroes, Herzog casts a far more cynical and ambivalent eye on revolutionaries. These have no cause and no purpose. The glorious achievement of their revolution is a symbol of futility: a truck traveling in endless circles. Even as their freedom from all conventions fulfills a secret fantasy of the viewer, they are horrifying to watch.

Why dwarfs? The simple answer is the film wouldn’t be half as weird if it did not take place in a world of little people, a world where the exception (dwarfism) is the rule. Dwarfs unavoidably provoke an uncomfortable reaction in people of normal dimensions; they look “wrong,” even while we know intellectually that they are every bit as human as any of us. Against our will, the appearance of a dwarf (or any “freak”) creates a tension in us. We feel guilty about our own instinctual aversive reaction to them. We’re curious, but we don’t want to be caught staring. Yet, Herzog’s movie forces us to stare. A world in which everyone is a dwarf is a world we are unequipped to deal with; the baseline has been wiped out, and there is no longer any normal. The world of Dwarfs is inescapably real, but it frustrates our every expectation. Doorknobs and beds are too high for the inhabitants to use them. Nature itself—represented by the animal kingdom—is out of whack, perverted. The chickens are cannibals. Piglets continue to vainly suck at the teats of their mother after she’s dead (of all the twisted gloomy images in Dwarfs, this is the saddest and most shocking). Here is a disconcerting, frightening universe that shows no regard for our psychic comfort or need for order.

The triumph of irrationality seems so complete at the end of the film that it’s easy to forget that, per the official narrative, the dwarf rebellion was put down. The first scenes show us that Hombre and the others have been re-captured, and the status quo—whatever that was—has been restored. This is hardly reassuring, because our experience as viewers has been quite different: we watch the dwarfs behavior become crazier and more unhinged until finally all reason has been shattered. The insurgents finally force the instructor to come out by throwing live chickens through the windows and by threatening to hang one of their own. The instructor cracks under the pressure; he starts taking his furniture from his office and stacking it on the roof. Suddenly, from nowhere and without explanation, a dromedary appears in the courtyard, kneeling as if to pray. The instructor runs out of his refuge and all is lost; once outside his sanctuary, he’s as insane as the rest. He runs past the dwarfs, past the kneeling camel, and to a dead tree in a field, which he yells at, then enters into a pointing contest with.

Meanwhile, Hombre is chuckling uncontrollably as the beast in the courtyard struggles to stand up. It raises one foreleg, then puts it down, and Hombre laughs and laughs, until he’s no longer laughing out of mirth. The laughter has trapped him and he can’t escape it; he’s laughing himself to death. The camel voids its bowels in distress. Hombre keeps on laughing, until he starts coughing; he wipes his mouth and starts laughing again. Minutes pass. Herzog keeps the camera on the laughing dwarf; if there was ever a joke here, for either Hombre or for the viewer, it ceased to be funny long ago. There is no better way to describe this nightmarish finale than with Herzog’s own words from the DVD commentary track, speaking about Hombre’s long last laugh: “This was frightening for me. He seems to be laughing but it’s getting really out of hand… Sometimes there is no mercy in filmmaking. I mean, it didn’t really do him harm but that was a moment when I thought, ‘Oh my God, I must stop this. I should cut. I should end it.’ And here, the moment comes very, very soon where I couldn’t take it any longer. And I still keep watching, and in a moment I thought, ‘now, I can’t go any further.’ Just stop the camera, end the film, and that’s that. And the pain, hopefully, is over.” Then, mercifully, the screen fades to black.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the] images, because of their essential meaninglessness, become their own reason for being. ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ eventually is indistinguishable from its Germanic, side-show spectacle, as if it were a movie that had been conceived by the same kind of perverse, uninvolved intelligence that had created the world of the film.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…one of the most bizarre and hilariously disturbing freakshows ever executed by a major director…”–Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine

“The very definition of a weird movie right to its core… easily lives up to the confusing, peculiar promise of its title.”–Mondo Digital (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Herzog jumps cactus.mov – YouTube clip of Herzog discussing Dwarfs and the cactus incident, from the documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

Even Dwarfs Stated Small: Werner Herzog and the Aesthetics of the Grotesque – Against Herzog’s direct wishes, B. R. Sebok links Dwarfs to the Rabelaisian grotesque tradition for the journal Kinema

Examining the Role of Disability in Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small – Politically correct analysis of the depiction of dwarfs in the film, by David Church in the Fall 2005 edition of Disability Studies Quarterly

even dwarfs started small | Tumblr – Stills, YouTube clips and quotes tagged with “Even Dwarfs Started Small” on Tumblr

DVD INFO: The 1999 Anchor Bay DVD (buy) is presented in a full-frame 1.33:1 aspect ratio (close enough to the film’s actual 1.37:1 proportions). It contains liner notes written by Crispin Glover (!) (who was considering making a Dwarfs-inspired film at the time, most likely the movie that became What Is It?). The disc itself features a short but informative Werner Herzog bio and a commentary track consisting of an impressive three-way chat between Herzog, Glover and Norm Hill.

The film is also available as part of Anchor Bay’s 6-disc “Werner Herzog Collection” (buy), along with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and Stroszek. The same commentary track is included on this set.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Gideon.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

METACHAOS from Alessandro Bavari on Vimeo.