FEATURING: Friedrich Haak, Hildegarde Watson, Dorthea House
PLOT: In ancient Sodom, young men revel in sensual choreography, inspiring the Lord’s anger.
COMMENTS: The first wave of the American cinematic avant-garde developed between 1919 and 1945. According to some of its pioneers, like Herman Weinberg, it encompasses everything except typical Hollywood productions. There is already a review of a compilation of American experimental films ranging from the movement’s early days till the 1970s on this site, which you can check it out if you are interested in learning more about this scene. It is in this context that we examine “Lot in Sodom.”
This short silent—only about thirty minutes in duration—combines a familiar Old Testament setting with a modernist stylistic approach, diffuse sensuality, and a heavy innuendo. The plot revolves around Lot and his wife, the only honest people in a town full of perverts immersed in immorality. But the narrative isn’t as important as the way it is used to create an atmosphere of depravity. Human—mostly male—bodies dance semi-naked across the screen. The camera is voyeuristic, eager to consume and fetishize their bodies. Along with an underlying hint of violence, “Lot” can be viewed as a predecessor of contemporary performance art in the vein of ” Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men” (1989) .
In the film’s latter half the female body makes its appearance, similarly sexualized. Through Latin intertitles comparing the woman to a temple and symbolic Bible imagery (a snake, white pigeons), the film implies a sexual climax and an immoral desecration of the female body.
The scenery, often quite pointy, is a tamer version of German Expressionism. High contrast black and white lighting, along with distorting effects that multiply figures and objects, create a collage-like, almost cubist aesthetic. Archaic techniques like rear projection and superposition are also used extensively for a similar purpose. When examined in the correct historical context, this work is transgressive and daring. There is a pretense of moralism here, however, which makes it feel a bit dated. “Lot in Sodom” remains important because of its unique stylistic approach, but today its audience is mostly technicians interested in the history of visual effects.
PLOT: A stoical barber develops a plan to blackmail his wife’s employer, which spirals out of control.
COMMENTS: The Coen Brothers began their career in film noir with Blood Simple (1984), and much of their subsequent work has either referenced or revolved around noirish themes. Blood Simple, alongside Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), are classic neo-noirs in rural settings. Non-noir offerings like Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991) still feature doomed, alienated heroes and challenging ethical dilemmas, and even The Big Lebowski (1998) flirts with noir themes with its complicated crime caper in an LA setting. But The Man Who Wasn’t There is their one take on the classic formula: post-war period setting, chiaroscuro cinematography, carefully-planned crime that goes horribly wrong, moral corruption, and a flawed protagonist increasingly resigned to his dim fate. Who wouldn’t want to see the brothers give their straightforward take on film noir, with all the moralistic nihilism that implies?
The plot is a classic noir knot: a “simple” act of blackmail leads to a pair of unintended murders, which leads to the wrong person being put on trial, which, in a roundabout way, eventually leads to misplaced but ironically appropriate justice. Our antihero, Ed Crane, is a disaffected barber who is only slightly more engaged with the world than Mersault. He tolerates his job; he likes his wife and their passionless life together well-enough, even though he suspects she may be cheating on him. His descent into crime happens on a whim, to garner investment funds after hearing a pitch by a dry-cleaning entrepreneur. He’s a man of few words, except when it comes time to deliver expository voiceovers.
In some sense, there isn’t a lot there in The Man That Wasn’t There. Although there are twists, the plot often drags, like Ed Crane’s own mundane suburban life. But for a single bad decision, Ed would not have left much of a mark on the world: he would have glided through life silently cutting hair and smoking cigarettes, dispassionate and content to watch life slip by. He’s a barber by profession, but it’s just something he drifted into; really, “that'”barber” is too much of an identity for him. As he says, he “just cuts the hair.” In the course of the film, he develops exactly two passions: once, his brief interest in dry-cleaning, and a more substantial interest in the teenage daughter of a drunken customer (it’s not what your dirty mind is thinking; he’s charmed by her faltering rendition of a Beethoven piano sonata). Both times, his sudden engagement with the world leads him to unwitting tragedy.
The Man Who Wasn’t There is, mostly, a solid, authentic rendition of the classical noir style. It only departs from the 40s formula in a few particulars. Homosexuality is acknowledged and plays a role in the plot; Ed’s slightly inappropriate fixation on Birdy also crosses a line that would have barely been hinted at by the previous cinematic generation. Further, the film is more obviously and artily existential than its forebears. The Coens humorously reference Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (absurdly, Ed’s trial lawyer wants to make it the centerpiece of his defense), which presages their more thorough exploration of the enigma of Schrödinger’s famous feline in A Serious Man. Finally, the movie’s weirdest element (perhaps its only weird element) is the mysterious usage of UFOs as a metaphor for…. something (modern man’s futile search for meaning in the universe?) But these eccentricities hardly depart much from the source homage, making The Man Who Wasn’t There a satisfying throwback to a simpler age, when people were more complex.
PLOT: A psychiatrist sets himself up in an apartment overlooking the East River where he beds a series of women, all the while heading steadily toward a complete mental breakdown.
COMMENTS: It’s hard to appreciate just how strange the conceit of Coming Apart must have felt to moviegoers in 1969. Here in the second quarter of the 21st century, when people document their lives frequently and extensively, the sheer strangeness of a man choosing to capture his illicit second life on film just doesn’t come across the same. Viewers at the time were surely perplexed by a film that seemed to be composed entirely a footage taken from a single vantage point. It must have seemed like nothing short of voyeurism, the worst kind of candid camera. Contemporary reviews of the film frequently flail about for the one point of comparison they have at hand: James McBride’s groundbreaking pseudo-documentary David Holzman’s Diary. But while this intentionally self-aware movie has similar vibes, Coming Apart is something very different. Ginsberg crafts a silver screen salute to a man who feels compelled to chronicle his life for a very compelling reason: self-loathing.
Torn’s erstwhile analyst has ditched his career and his pregnant wife, creating a new identity for himself by setting up shop in a Kips Bay love nest. He doesn’t seem at all clear as to why he’s doing this, and for reasons even he can’t begin to unpack, he decides to film everything, making this an early example of the found footage genre. The footage we find is largely his attempts at seduction, successful to varying degrees; but while this is a film with plenty of sex, it’s much more about the manipulations and deceptions that are perpetrated just to get to the act. The wayward Dr. Glaser is an easygoing seducer, but he gets no enjoyment out of it, neither the hunt nor the kill. He’s like a man grazing at the buffet not because he’s hungry but because there’s food. Anyone approaching Coming Apart looking for sexytimes is likely to end up as disappointed as Glaser.
For anyone who knows Torn primarily from the lacerating deadpan he brings to later projects like Defending Your Life, Men in Black, or “The Larry Sanders Show,” his work here is revelatory. He deploys his gravelly baritone infrequently, communicating largely through the subtlest of expressions. It can feel like he’s hardly acting at all, until a crucial scene late in the movie when he goes nearly catatonic and you realize just how emotive he has been all along. Most of the women opposite him, such as Lois Markle’s aspiring fetish-lover or Lynn Swan’s mercenary young mom, are richly detailed, although they can feel melodramatic by comparison. The characters who avoid sex are the most grounded, like Viveca Lindfors’ ex-mistress who tells Torn to his face that his charms won’t work on her anymore. Standing out among the crowd is Sally Kirkland, whose growing mania is grounded by her shockingly total lack of vanity or guardedness. Her role could easily be viewed as “the crazy broad,” but she earns respect and sympathy by giving nothing less than her all. The idea that Torn’s hidden camera captures these people so authentically justifies the gimmick.
While the filming technique suggests gritty realism, the characters and situations we encounter feel forced, as most of Glaser’s sexual partners bring their own lunacy to the show. Were it not for the bad doctor’s slow-motion breakdown, it might be easy to interpret the film’s message as “women be wack.” It is interesting, though, to see documentary formalism deployed in an experimental manner. In the early hangover following the sexual revolution, Ginsberg’s daring feature has the smarts to get out of the way and let the stories of the shellshocked survivors speak for themselves.
Rip Torn (Men in Black) gives one of the great screen performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form
PLOT: A mysterious stranger gradually infiltrates the home and family of a missing man.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA:The Man Who Lies suffers from doppelgänger syndrome, both the title character and the film as a whole. A second shadow protagonist haunts the main character, who defends his own existence and reality by repeatedly telling the same story over and over again. But with each telling the details change, until the final version becomes the exact opposite of the first. Where reality ends and the lies begin is impossible to untangle. Every scene of the film negates its own double and even the dual protagonists swap identities by the end.
COMMENTS: In the opening narration, Trintignant introduces himself as “Jean Robin” but then backpeddles and admits he’s actually called “Boris Varissa.” And people sometimes call him “The Ukrainian,” though he doesn’t know why. As the film progresses, it becomes obvious none of these names actually belong to him, and we never find out who he really is. In one meta-moment, he even describes himself as an actor rehearsing a role. Robbe-Grillet covers much the same territory as Last Year at Marienbad but in a more comedic tone, closer to the literal winking at the camera of Trans-Europ Express.
“Boris” enters a small rural town after escaping from a brigade of soldiers. He describes how he anonymously disappears into the crowd, though we see him walking alone down deserted streets. He enters a pub, which he describes as empty, though it’s so full of patrons he has difficulty finding a seat. Here the townspeople discuss the unknown fate of local hero Jean Robin, whose portrait adorns every building in town.
The details of Robin’s disappearance are sketchy and inconsistent. No one is quite sure where he is, how long he’s been away, or when he will return. Some believe he will definitely come back, others declare him dead. His poor lovely wife and sister remain in their crumbling ancestral chateau awaiting his return, though no one has actually seen them in years.
Boris immediately begins telling everyone he was great friends with Jean Robin during the war. In fact, he personally helped Jean escape their enemies. No one is particularly inclined to hear this tale, and many, like the pub’s proprietor, treat the interloper with outright contempt. Others act like he isn’t even there.
After this inauspicious debut, Boris heads to the Robin chateau. There, Jean’s wife, Laura, his sister, Sylvia, and their maid, Maria, amuse themselves playing Blind Man’s Bluff and other obscure games involving blindfolds and medieval weapons. Boris first insinuates himself into the affections of Maria. He regales her with long tales of Jean’s heroism in the Resistance. But cracks quickly develop in his facade. He doesn’t recognize his dear friend’s elderly father? And who is this Dr Mueller he speaks of? There is no doctor of that name in town.
In one scene, where he meets with Jean’s sister, Trintignant poses before a grave in a cemetery marked with the name “Boris Varissa,” which he quickly moves to hide from her. In another scene, he re-enacts his own near-death experience for Maria, telling her dramatically of how he suffered a near-fatal head wound. As he collapses, he pours a bottle of fake blood onto his chest. “But wasn’t it a head wound?” she asks him.
Even with the humor, the repetition of Jean/Boris story gets a little tiresome. The viewer may find themselves thinking, like the film’s characters, there he goes again—the war, the war—whenever Boris launches into yet another version of the narrative. Though he initially lauds Jean as a valiant hero, Boris eventually claims he was actually a treacherous traitor. But since Boris is a liar, the identities of both men remain questionable and unstable.
After a while, it’s the women who fascinate, though they hardly say a word. They play their strange games in an abandoned attic full of forgotten heirlooms and family portraits. Here Robbe-Grillet displays all his classic fetishes: the nape of the neck, the suspended gesture, bound wrists. Though Maria and Sylvia succumb to Boris’ advances, Laura remains spectral and aloof. She drifts through the house in a long white nightgown, appearing to give no credence whatsoever to anything Boris says. Indeed, she barely acknowledges his existence.
Unable to crack her, Boris starts to lose it. When Jean’s father dies in a sudden accident and a “Dr Mueller” shows up to write the death certificate, Boris looks genuinely spooked. Though he makes headway in removing his detractors, his success in taking Jean’s place at the chateau is far from secure, as the subject of his lies keeps coming back to haunt him.
In his quasi-autobiographical “romanesque,” Ghosts in the Mirror, Robbe-Grillet credits the mysterious figure of Count Henri de Corinthe with providing the inspiration for the screenplay. In Robbe-Grillet’s telling, Corinthe comes across as a Ripley-esque character, who may have disappeared one of his own friends in order to “borrow” his military exploits. Of course, we must take this explanation with a grain of salt for, as Robbe-Grillet admits, in writing the book he deliberately took on the role of the man who lies for himself. Any viewer looking to discern the “truth” here will inevitably be frustrated—by design.
FEATURING: Al Warren, Sarah Coffey, Kimball Farley, Luke Speakman
PLOT: Fraternal twins enter a Catholic church and demand the priest shoot one of them so that the Holy Spirit may be set free.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Rapaport again slides an odd one across our desk, as his sophomore effort kicks off Funny Games-style before converting into fully blown mystical madness.
COMMENTS: What is the Holy Ghost? One would think that the metaphysical world is sufficiently inscrutable without theorizing about an entity that lacks substance in a realm that is already beyond the perceivable. A more-vaporous vapor, it travels without constraints in a realm already lacking any constraints mortals might conceive. Though utterly incorporeal, this Ghost can apparently still be trapped in a vessel—a human vessel no less. And although its selfhood cannot be fathomed, even we lowly, three-dimensional meat-and-bone creatures are aware that no one, nothing, wants to be trapped.
This musing is amongst the prerequisite considerations when approaching Mark H. Rapaport’s sophomore feature, Godhead. Creepy twins, named Firstborn (Sarah Coffey, slipping around the screen with serpentine malevolence) and Secondborn (Kimball Farley, trapped in his own spastic discomfiture), seem all too familiar with the “primary” third of the Godhead. The Creator; the twins claim It speaks to them. A small town priest (a mild and exhausted Al Warren) knows the triune Son, and also has an earthly son (Luke Speakman), a boy found as an infant found in a shopping basket on his doorstep and now stowed away in the back rooms of the church. A night-long journey through menace, hope, despair, and impossibility develops between these four characters.
Godhead has a delightful, temporally ambiguous style. Low tech, the story often plays like a classical Hollywood morality tale (and that title font, oh yes). Cinematographer William Babock is on board once more, whipping up stark church imagery to contrast with the occasionally-seen “other” world from whence came the uncanny siblings. There is an odd sense of humor sprinkled about. While the priest is berated by Firstborn, Secondborn earnestly helps him with a dust pan as the priest fretfully sweeps the church. A delightful scene with the boy-in-the-backroom features a static-glowing television; the director slips in an exchange which encapsulates anticipated reactions to his movie: “I’m not sure what this is.” “I do not like it.”
Rapaport and his tight cast alternate between punches of shock (gunplay in the sanctum is frowned upon, I can assure you), feints of deceit (a pair of hearse-bound conversations tip this film into hard-R-rating), and a third act which darts seamlessly, and often, between the mundane and the divine. The climax ratchets from one kind of weird into another. I did not expect Rapaport to be so gracious to his own creations. But that is within the dimension of possibility when you are a filmmaker: you are your own movie’s Godhead.
![Coming Apart [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41cbhK2CjSL._SL500_.jpg)
