Device Notes

  The two main characters, Agent No. 326 and Sonja Barranikova, are spies on opposite sides.  326 works for the government of the unnamed country where the film takes place, while Barranikova works for Haghi, a criminal mastermind who is "richer than Ford" and seems to have agents on every other city block and train car.  Haghi sends Barranikova to a hotel where one of 326's associates is staying, ordering her to approach 326 and earn his trust in the hope of getting information from him and eventually taking him out.  But when the two meet, they quickly fall in love after he helps her escape from the police.  The film sets up their connection with a discontinuous insert shot, typical of Fritz Lang's silent filmmaking.  When 326 arrives at his associate's hotel room disguised as a hobo, he leaves a dark hand print on an armchair.  The film cuts directly from the hand print to a shot of Barranikova's hand holding a cigarette and a smoking gun before ret...

I've never encountered anyone who called themselves an "aesthete" whom I thought I could be friends with.  Admittedly, I've met very few people like that.  I bring this up because I recall one of them criticizing Vertigo as only holding value for people who are into Lacanian psychoanalysis or meditations on memory like that in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil .  To be fair, there is a long history of people analyzing Vertigo and many of Hitchcock's other films in this way, and Freud is directly invoked in Marnie .  And since Hitchcock is a quintessential auteur, efforts to analyze his films, especially Vertigo , often involve efforts to analyze his psychology. As a follower of Kristin Thompson, I tend to wonder if the Lacanian approach to film criticism isn't a little Procrustean.  In any case, I think the reason a lot of critics love Vertigo isn't really because of their Lacanian reads.  Consider this scene: This image is from a single long take in which...

  The thing that struck me most about Babylon was that it's almost always firing on all cylinders, people screaming, music blaring, the film itself shuffling rapidly through images.  It offers you few breaks in 189 minutes.  Much is made of its "hedonism," "wallowing in excess and sin," "debauchery," "bacchanalia," and so on, but in the end this is not shocking except for one moment, maybe two moments near the beginning that, in fairness, are hard to forget.  I'm not saying it's tame.  It's just on the level with a great deal of other R-rated American gross-out comedies.   It isn't shocking or disgusting, but it is unruly.  The way it treats cinema is like a child upending a box of blocks and building them into teetering structures.  There's a scene in which director Ruth Adler witnesses actress Nellie LaRoy's ability to cry on command and reacts as if she's just received a new toy, and makes everyone shoot t...

  Shitposting has always existed. Hellzapoppin' was originally an immensely popular stage musical that ran on Broadway from 1938 to 1941.  It featured newsreel footage of politicians, electric buzzers under audience members' seats, acrobatic dancing, magicians, animals, fourth wall breaks, etc., and the show was altered freely.  For its creators, the vaudeville duo Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, no joke was too lowbrow and no gimmick was too absurd.  It must have made the film look subdued, which is saying something.  The film has a lot of the same things but also has something resembling a story.  It begins with a projectionist in a cinema loading the film into a projector.  The film-within-a-film depicts a group of well-dressed people descending an ornate staircase, singing " I had a vision of heaven, and you were there. "  Then the staircase becomes a slide under their feet, explodes, and they all go careening down into hell.   The way...

  I'm the kind of person who thinks the province of art is to shake people into seeing things differently, if only temporarily, and to me the effect of this film is more intense than any other's. At the end of the film, the main character speaks in defense of a world in which the "birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, and flowers" teach people how to feel both grief and joy. The line "birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, and flowers" comes from a folk song the characters sing about the progress of time. I think it's more appropriate to call the main character "Takenoko," the name she accepted, rather than "Kaguya," the name forced upon her by aristocrats.  It starts out with the world as perceived by an infant with loving parents, witnessing constant surprises from a place of safety and comfort. It's also the world perceived by the parents, transfixed by their child's first outward signs of thoughtfulness, and her first steps. The ...