151. Italian maestro Federico Fellini’s “La Strada” (The Road) (1954): Re-evaluating a neo-realist classic by reflecting on the movie’s screenplay

A  half century after La Strada was made and widely accepted as a world classic, the film needs to be evaluated by its content as much as by its often touted “neo-realist” style.  Interestingly, Pope Francis considers La Strada to be the film that he loves the most. Director Frederico Fellini considered this work  to be his most “representative film”, most autobiographical, and one which he had the greatest trouble “realizing” and finding a producer (p. 85 in Edward Murrays’s Ten Film Classics). Fellini also felt close to all the three principal characters in the film (p. 115 in Gilbert Salachas’ Federico Fellini).

First, it is interesting to study the three lead characters--three distinct types of idiots/fools—that Federico Fellini and his co-scriptwriters, Tulio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, presented us. These are characters  that provide the basic, pivotal elements of the film. What made them create the three major characters? Were these characters fools or intelligent folks playing the fools? Who survives and who does not? Aren’t the three a reflection of the fool in each of us?

The fool Gelsomina--childlike innocence devoid of evil

The first fool in the film the viewer encounters is a woman, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), who is childlike and innocent, fatherless and a burden on her single mother, who in turn is struggling to feed her many children. And Gelsomina, the fool, is most eloquent when she is silent. To top it all, she is not a sexually or a physically attractive person.  She is described in the film by another thus “What a funny face! Are you a woman, really? Or an artichoke?” She is the epitome of the innocent fool, unattractive, and yet without a trace of evil. Even the nun who befriends her sees parallels between Gelsomina and herself.

The fool Zampano--all brawn and no brains

The second fool is Zampano (Anthony Quinn), the strongman, who is a brute who uses his brawn more than his brains. Zampano does use his limited intellect to earn his daily bread (he fools his audiences that he is able to breaks chains strapped around his chest  with a physical effort  that could make his eyes pop out) but is not smart enough to be able to recognize true love or thank his benefactors who provide him shelter. He can never consider the consequences of his actions. In the film he is compared with a dog “He is like a dog.  A dog looks at you, wants to talk and only barks.” One could assume that Rosa, Gelsomina’s sister, either fled Zampano’s company or died while working for him. He believes his women can be bought either for sex or for work. He does not realize that he needs long-term companionship until it is too late. When Gelsomina suggests marriage he does not even consider it as an option. The first scene of Zampano in the film La Strada suggests a wicked, street-smart and physically overpowering man “buying” a woman. The final scene of Zampano in the film suggests just the opposite, a vulnerable and sensitive man, lonely and remorseful for his past actions, a King Lear who bemoans the loss of a loved one. Zampano’s eloquence is not verbal, his physical expressions, as Fellini captured them, in the final sequence of the film says more than all the spoken words in the film just as director Arthur Penn captured the essence of his film Night Moves (1975), visually and non-verbally with the brilliant end sequence.

The professional fool Il Matto--well-read but ignorant of his limits of foolery

The third fool is “Il matto” (The fool/The clown), a professional fool, played by Richard Baseheart . The clown is the smartest of the trio and a philosopher. He considers himself to be ignorant but he reads books. He is able to spot the latent capability of Gelsomina . But he is not smart enough to know when he has to stop playing the fool. He is the proverbial jester of a king’s court, intelligent enough to spot talent and grasp universal truths. In the most philosophically important line in the film he states “Everything is useful... This pebble for instance.” When queried as why the pebble is useful, he replies even more interestingly “If I knew, I would be the Almighty who knew all. When you are born, and when you die... Who knows? I don’t know for what this pebble is useful but it must be useful. For if it is useless, everything is useless. So are the stars.”   “Il matto,” the clown, when dying, is philosophically worried that his watch is broken, when it is his skull that is actually broken by Zampano.

Gelsomina is initially not able to play the trumpet but the filmmakers without showing her practising to play the instrument suggests, as the film progresses, that she had become close to the musical instrument (Zampano leaves that trumpet with her as she sleeps blissfully unaware that Zampano  is leaving her). What is more, we also learn later in the film that she has mastered the very musical notes that Il Matto the clown had always played on his miniature violin to make the audience laugh and cry.

Thus La Strada presents the viewer with three kinds of fools: the simpleton, the boor, and the professional clown, who pokes fun at others and at himself, sometimes to earn money, sometimes by habit. Each one of us plays the fool some time in our lives—but we need to identify for ourselves which kind and when we played each role.

Gelsomina playing on her trumpet Nino Rota's touching notes

It is interesting to study how Fellini and his two co-scriptwriters developed the story of La Strada. It is well known that Fellini loved the circus and much of the ideas of La Strada was a result of this fascination. Fellini modeled Zampano’s character partly on a real-life pig castrator, who was also a womanizer.  He had wanted to make a film on a travelling circus. But the concept of Gelsomina was the contribution of Tulio Pinelli, who had seen a tiny woman pushing a cart just as Gelsomina pushed the motorcycle driven van with a tarpaulin cover when it would need a push to start. But it was Fellini who made Gelsomina the dim-witted woman in the tale.  The melancholic irony of La Strada was possibly the contribution of Ennio Flaiano, whose literary works represent that very bent of mind. Thus, the film distills a tale picked up from real situations by three writers to forge an unforgettable story of three unusual characters on the fringes of society, a story delicately  woven to entertain  a wider audience over time, not just the Jury members at Venice Film Festival or the voting Oscar Academy members but even the current Pope.

Zampano and Gelsomina on the road

Is there religion in La Strada? The only obvious religious reference is provided by the nuns who provide Gelsomina and Zampano a place to stay overnight and Zampano rebukes their generosity by stealing from his benefactors. The nun who befriends Gelsomina comments that she views Gelsomina’s purpose in life to be much like her own life with the nuns.  “Il matto”, the clown, sees  Gelsomina’s life having a purpose just as each pebble has a purpose. These are vignettes of philosophy and theology that possibly appealed to Pope Francis who took his papal name after St Francis of Assisi. And at the end of the film, a reflective viewer realizes that the “pebble” of the film did have a purpose, which might not be so obvious to some other viewers.

Nino Rota’s contribution of music to La Strada might not stand out but the theme music first played by “Il matto” (the fool/clown) on a kit violin is the same music/notes that Zampano hears a stranger, a lady drying her laundry reproducing towards the end of the movie.  The strength of Nino Rota’s music is not just the cadence of the philosophical theme “Travelling down the lonely road” but the ability of Rota to capture the mood of the film in those few notes and Fellini’s ability to use the music sparingly and yet so strategically at the right moments in the film to underscore its vitality.

Director Ermanno Olmi, a neo-realist filmmaker of eminence, has questioned has questioned the concept of neo-realism in cinema that utilized professional actors in neo-realist cinema. In that context, where does Fellini’s La Strada stand? For this critic, actor Anthony Quinn has never been as impressive as he was in La Strada and perhaps in a little known Biblical film of director Richard Fleischer called Barrabas (1961). Richard Basehart, too,  has been an outstanding thespian in most films that he appeared in and his role in La Strada is not one that can easily be forgotten. But the real winner is Giulietta Masina, who is able to bring shades of burlesque when presenting tragic realism and slip so effortlessly into a role quite different from her real life. (It is not surprising that she chose to study for a degree in philosophy just as her husband Fellini, who graduated with a degree in philosophy and literature.} Thus, if we subscribe to Olmi’s purist definition of neo-realism Fellini’s favourite work does not fit into a neo-realist mode as La Strada is often considered to represent. Yes, the film did capture the poorer sections of Italy with some honesty, but the recreation of that reality was done by great accomplished actors.

Cineastes today might find it interesting to compare and contrast La Strada with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish film Three Monkeys (2008). Both films deal with three fools, two males and a woman. Both films have a touch of melancholic irony.  The films are separated by half a century and two religious perspectives but the end result is starkly similar. In both films, the three idiots are the losers at the end of the tale more as a result of their inherent personalities that they cannot control. They are parallel tales with totally divergent contexts. Yet both films offer much for a reflective viewer.

Fellini assesses his wife's transformation into Gelsomina

There is more to the film if we extrapolate the film to the lives of Fellini and his wife Masina. They were in love but their love life was tragic—their only child died as an infant. This apparently affected them unconsciously in their later work and lives. One can definitely assume Masina, a close associate of Fellini and his wife, would have contributed to the screenplay even though she is not officially credited with it. The two musical instruments (apart from the drum introduced briefly) shown in La Strada, were unconsciously linked to them. Masina was a daughter of a violinist mother, though she was brought up by her aunt.  It is therefore not surprising that violin should be one of the two chosen instruments.  And Fellini before his death requested that a famous trumpeter play the notes of Nino Rota from the film La Strada over his grave at his funeral. Masina died soon after the death of her husband and both are buried next to each other and their infant son. It is interesting to note how the unconscious references to one’s life or those close to one’s life creep into screenplays and to study how what the screenplay writer had developed in a screenplays affects him/her in later life. Thus, both the violin and trumpet were not just important facets of La Strada's screenplay but of the filmmakers' lives as well.

La Strada won of Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1957 and the Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival for Federico Fellini.

P.S. La Strada is one of the author’s top100 films of all time.  Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) with Giullietta Masina, and Pier Paolo Pasolini as its co-scriptwriter, has been reviewed on this blog earlier. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys (2008) has also been reviewed on this blog earlier.

150. Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi’s masterpiece “L'Albero degli zoccoli” (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) (1978): An uplifting and monumental work of a cinematic genius

Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a 3-hour long feature film, won the prestigious Golden Palm and the prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978. For those who have been fortunate to have sat through the slow-paced realistic film right up to its end, it would prove to be a rare cinematic entertainment, indelible from their memories. It would touch any sensitive individual’s heart and mind in a way few movies can. It is a film without a single professional actor and yet when the respected Hollywood thespian Al Pacino was asked to identify his favorite film, the first name that came to his mind was The Tree of Wooden Clogs.  That statement says a lot about the quality and credibility of the performances by the ensemble of non-professional actors gathered by Olmi from his own village in Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy. 

Why is The Tree of Wooden Clogs an outstanding film? Few films are made by directors that are based on a script totally written and developed by themselves, without the aid of professional screenplay writers. Film directors Ingmar Bergman and Terrence Malick are prominent examples who can be termed original screenplay writers. But their films are always photographed by regular cinematographers. Few are the films where the director is also the sole cameraman. The Tree of Wooden Clogs is one such rare example. And finally, how many filmmakers edit their own cinematic works without help from professional editors. Ermanno Olmi is one. Thus The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a rare film where so many critical roles of the film-making process—including casting of non-professional actors---can be credited to a single individual.

Olmi explained his penchant for picking non-professional actors in an interview given to Bert Cardullo, Professor at the Izmir University of Economics, Turkey: “In a film about peasants, I choose the actors from the peasant world.  I don’t use a fig to make a pear.  These people, these characters, bring to the film a weight, really a constitution of truth, which, provoked by the situations in which the characters find themselves, creates palpitations—those vibrations so right, so real, so believable, and therefore not repeatable.  At the twentieth take, the professional actor still cries.  The real actor, the character taken from life, won’t do more than four repetitions.”  (Cineaste,Vol.XXXIV, No.2, 2009)

Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs resembles a 3-hour long documentary and yet it is not one. It is realistic fiction. It weaves the stories of four peasant Italian families, who serve as tenant farmers to a rich landlord in 1898. Olmi is able to find buildings that resemble those of that period so that the viewer feels the authenticity of the tale. The viewer is introduced to a time and place where the peasants wore wooden clogs instead of shoes and these clogs were made from certain trees that lined to the paths to the peasant's living quarters. But the trees belonged to the landowners and the peasants had no ownership of those trees. Recalling bits of oral history from his mother, Olmi fashions a film that weaves realistic details that depict their mostly honest hardworking activities that could get further worrisome if the landlord found them to be dishonest.

Education and poverty

Being a fervent Roman Catholic, Olmi’s peasant families in The Tree of Wooden Clogs are fleshed out as devout Christians, who listen with respect and reverence to their priests and nuns and say their prayers each day with devotion. Right at the beginning of the film, a priest advises one of the heads of the four peasant families to send his son to school, even if it meant one less person to help him in the fields. It is advice well meant, as most of the peasants are illiterate, and education of one member of the family would indeed pave the way for a better life than providing an extra pair of hands for the head of the family to till the land and harvest the produce. And this advice that the elder peasant accepts becomes the fulcrum of the film’s tale and gets closely associated with the movie’s title. Even science of the day (the veterinarian’s prognosis that a milch cow, an important source of financial sustenance for one of the four poor families in the film, is dying) is superseded by the fervent religious faith of a woman and her prayer miraculously cures the cow written off by the veterinarian  Another religious and economically poor widow skips going to church on Sundays so that she could wash more clothes of the landlord’s family and thus earn more money to feed her children. The flip side of religion is also ambiguously stated—a priest offers to take away two of her children to a monastery, ostensibly to lessen her financial burden. But the eldest son prefers that they stay with them as he has started earning. A nun gifts a one-year old orphan to a newly married couple to bring up as their own as the parents would be rewarded financially—a “gift” the shocked couple cannot refuse. There is further religious ambiguity, if the viewer carefully studies the spoken words of the peasants. Before killing a fattened pig, one peasant comments, “I know how it was raised. I cared for it better than any Christian.”

When everything around the poor fails, there is religion

These details form the delightful mosaic of humility and goodwill that pervade the diverse lives of the peasants. A child trudges miles to study in a school, a privilege of richer folks, wearing a pair of clogs that eventually gives way. A pregnant mother opts to give birth without the help of a midwife so that the money saved could be used to buy warm clothes for her elder kids. There is care for each other and discrete sorrow expressed within closed doors at another neighboring family’s misfortune.

Olmi is not just a devout Christian but also a socialist. There is a political uprising against the glaring social divide but the peasants of Olmi’s tale seem oblivious of politics. A newlywed peasant couple pass a stream of chained prisoners being led away by the law-keepers, apparently unable to comprehend the political scenario in the cities. One elder attends a political gathering in a town square but his priorities are to retrieve a gold coin lying on the ground without anyone in the crowd noticing his action rather than listening to the speaker. Olmi seems to underscore one fact—survival from day to day is more important than either politics or religion for the poor, while the rich landlords are content to hear their young ones play Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo” on the piano, strains of which are alien to the peasants less exposed to fine music.

The peasants, the animals and the birds sharing space

What are Olmi’s views on cinema? The Olmi responses to Professor Cardullo’s questions are revealing: “Some would say that the raw material of film is the image, but it’s not just the image.  Today we have the image, sound, rhythm.  All that is so simple, and at the same time it is complex, just like the unwinding or playing out of life itself.  While sound is one moment here, and the image there, cinema is this extraordinary instrument that allows you to reproduce—but “reproduce” isn't the exact word—to repropose some of those moments, some of the fractions of life, to select and compose them into a new mosaic through the editing.  This operation consists of choice, image, sound, rhythm, synthesis.”

“In the case of my films, they contain a reality that is entirely taken from the real.  Within this reality there is the echo of the documentary, but this is documentation that is critically penetrated and put at the service of the content presented.” (Cineaste,Vol.XXXIV, No.2, 2009)

The trees used for making clogs line the path as peasant
children transport washed clothes of the landlord's family

Olmi’s “compleat” cinema in The Tree of Wooden Clogs is precisely as stated in the Cineaste interview. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fugue in G Minor is used discreetly early in the film and the next occasion for music is hours later into the film, when a rich child plays Mozart on the piano on a moonlit night. Tragic details and comic details are beaded alternatively to retain viewer attention. Details of the death of a breadwinner alternate with a young lad walking long distances in the night to be near his sweetheart, singing aloud to muffle scary animal sounds in the dark. A honeymoon for a newly married rural couple is an overnight visit to a convent in the city where their aunt, who is now a nun, lives. The most humbling bit in the film is when families struggling to survive are happy to share their modest meals with visitors who have even less and how elders pass on that tradition of  "giving" to the young ones in the respective families to inculcate the habit in the future. What the film provides is more than social or religious commentary—it provides an honest peek at the tenuous lives of simple, hard working, rural folk. It is both real and touching. It is. as Olmi stated, "a reality that is entirely taken from the real” Few movies have achieved this—perhaps Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thief came very close in style and content but what de Sica offered was nowhere near the overwhelmingly  large canvas of believable characters offered to the viewer in The Tree of Wooden Clogs.

P.S. The Tree of Wooden Clogs is one of the author’s top 10 films of all time and is widely considered as the best work of Olmi. Mr Olmi is also one of the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers

149. Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Dekalog, dwa” (Dekalog 2) (1988): Absorbing cinema that provides entertainment beyond its run-time

There are very few examples of movies that make you scurry to the libraries to figure out the full implications of the source material after a screening, with the implicit understanding that one needed to know more. That is the power of great cinema. Kieslowski’s ten part movie Dekalog is one of them. The late film director Stanley Kubrick had described Dekalog as the only masterpiece he could name in his lifetime. And, interestingly, Kubrick is often considered an atheist!

And the added attraction for most viewers is that, unless one is a die-hard film enthusiast, each of the ten parts can be seen and appreciated in isolation. Each of the ten parts has different characters, all living in the same condominium in Poland. Each tale is set in the late Eighties. What is common to all the ten parts is that they all have the three common creators: the director Krzysztof Kieslowski, the co-scriptwriters Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, and the music composer Zbigniew Preisner. And last but not least, the ten parts relate to the Biblical Ten Commandments, given by God to Moses—as is believed by Christians, by Jews and by Muslims. And what is most important is that none of the ten segments is overtly religious. But each tale is underpinned by the Ten Commandments.

The ten segments of Dekalog can be appreciated as top-notch cinema as Kubrick and most film critics have found them to be. But they can also be treasured for their unusual lateral theological discourse that a viewer will only discover if the viewer puts the cinematic tale in the perspective of what has been written about the Ten Commandments in the scriptures and by theologians of various faiths over the years. "Everyone seems to accept the Ten Commandments as a kind of moral basis," Kieslowski has said, "and everyone breaks them daily. Just the attempt to respect them is already a major achievement."

Of the 10 segments, Dekalog 2 is one of the most difficult and yet poignant segments to appreciate and savour.

A non-theological assessment of Dekalog 2. The scriptwriters present two individuals facing unusual moral dilemmas. One is an old dour oncologist (Aleksader Bardini), who has no family left—his grandchildren and daughter, all killed in a bombing. The personal loss has only accentuated his interest in life, growing indoor plants and keeping pet birds, when not tending to his cancer patients. He does not smoke cigarettes. The old man is always conscious of the importance of time. This is reinforced on the viewer subtly by his actions, his precise recollections of his grandchild’s teething troubles and the time of the day when it occurred, the necessity to cover the birdcage with a cloth so that it could sleep, his need to collect milk (milk is a connecting symbol for most parts of the Dekalog) in the morning, etc. The good doctor spends his time treating his patients hoping they survive. Deaths of his near ones have made him appreciate life and the importance of children.

"One thing I know is I don't know"

The counterpoint to the old man is an attractive lady Dorota Geller (played by the wonderful Krystyna Janda) in her thirties who also lives in the condominium. She has met the old doctor in the past, presumably to apologize for having run over his pet dog in her car. Unlike the old man she is unfortunately associated with death: her husband is dying from cancer, she is killing her well tended indoor plants out of exasperation, and is seriously considering aborting a 3-month old child conceived out of wedlock. She is a chain smoker, which any oncologist would know is dangerous. And she is so disoriented with stress and sleeplessness that she has to ask a postman for the time of the day.

To bear or not to bear a child

The two opposites meet because Geller’s husband is being treated by the old doctor. She needs to know if her husband will live, in which case she will abort her foetus, as she still loves her husband. Dorota also knows that if she aborts she is not likely to have a child again with her husband. If the husband is likely to die, she could keep the baby and possibly live with her lover. The outcome is unpredictable for both the key characters.

A mysterious silent character, playing a hospital orderly (who surfaces in 9 of the 10 segments of Dekalog) observes the key players making the key decisions, the wife at her seriously sick husband’s bedside and the doctor looking at the growth of cancer cells of the woman’s husband in the laboratory, with his understudy confirming the disease is spreading. A keen observer will notice the ambiguity in the old doctor’s body language.

"Don't do it.."

As a movie just 54 minutes long, the filmmakers use every second and every body movement of each character, to flesh out the moral dilemma that an ordinary individual could face. The viewer at the end of the movie will recall the statement of the old wizened doctor “One thing I know is I don’t know.” Humility comes from knowledge.

Dekalog 2 is not just a great story, it is a movie of great performances, understatements and pregnant silences, punctuated with amazing music used with discretion. One can enjoy the film as a great tale superbly told. But is that all?

A theological assessment of Dekalog 2. According to the Roman Catholic Church, the second of the 10 Commandments is “You shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” as stated in the Book of Deutronomy (5:11). Of the two scriptwriters, Piesiewicz was a Roman Catholic and Kieslowski a possible atheist. The lead actress Ms Janda was a Lutheran.

There are only two occasions in the movie that overtly brings up religion. Mrs Geller (Janda) asks the doctor “Do you believe in God?” The doctor’s response is “I have a God. This is enough for me only.” To this answer, Mrs Geller responds “Your private one? Then ask your God for absolution.”

The second is a critical point in the film where the lady is told she should not abort the foetus by the doctor with the clear words “Don’t do it. He is going to die.” To this, the lady responds, “Can you swear?” And the old man responds. “I swear.” One assumes you swear by God’s name.

If we go by the words of Deutronomy 5:11, the scriptwriters have dished out two occasions where “God’s” name has been taken in vain.

Interestingly the second Commandment “You shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” mentioned above is the third Commandment for Protestant Christians. For the Protestant Christian Church, the second Commandment is “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments” Deutronomy 5(8-10). As the Catholic Church finds no problem with images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, the second Commandment observed by the Protestant Church is not underscored by the Catholics. In Protestant churches, the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary are never exhibited, which is strangely in parallel with Muslim concepts. The only symbol that you find in Protestant churches is a bare cross.

 

That does not mean that the Roman Catholic Church has only nine Commandments. For the Protestants, the ninth Commandment observed by Roman Catholics ”You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife”, is merged in the tenth “You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.’’ Thus both Churches observe Ten Commandments.

 

" I wan't to hear you play the violin in the Philharmonic Orchestra"

Now which version of the Second Commandment is applicable to Dekalog 2? The screenplay writers of Dekalog were not novices. Dekalog 7, if we go by Roman Catholic list of Ten Commandments refers to “You shall not steal.” Any viewer of Dekalog 7 will note that there is no conventional stealing but only abduction by a mother of her own biological daughter. The screenplay writers in Dekalog 7 have adopted the Jewish interpretation of the Commandment, which is “You shall not kidnap”, as the Jews aver that stealing of goods is covered by the Tenth Commandment, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.”

 

If we accept that Kieslowski and Piesiewicz were looking at a larger audience than Roman Catholics, could the Protestants' Second Commandment be equally applicable to Dekalog 2? Could the God in question be the good dying husband and the ‘carved’ image of the husband be the wife’s lover outside her marriage? This dual possibility is what makes Dekalog 2 difficult to comprehend with any accuracy. Kieslowski and Piesiewicz love to make the viewer think outside the box—they don’t provide answers. This is why Dekalog can be enjoyed at a level beyond pure cinematic aesthetics. Kubrick had noticed it.

 

 

P.S. Dekalog is one of the author’s top 10 films of all time. Reviews of Dekalog 5 and Dekalog 7 have appeared earlier on this blog. A review of Dekalog 1 has been posted subsequently. Kieslowksi’s Three Colors Blue, White and Red are among the author’s top 100 films. The author had the privilege to meet Kieslowski during a film festival in Bengaluru, India, in 1982 but did not consider him, at that time, sufficiently important for an in-depth interview because he had not yet made his masterpieces--all made 6 or more years later.

148. Argentine director Juan José Campanella’s “El secreto de sus Ojos” (The Secret in Their Eyes) (2009): Closing of open doors and revealing tales through the eyes, underscoring a visual element one often takes for granted

Viewers of this Oscar-winning Argentinean film are likely to enjoy the experience for varied reasons. It is definitely an engaging thriller with loads of subtle humor.  It is therefore not surprising that the film was a commercial and critical success in the country of its origin, Argentina. The best foreign film Oscar, the second for Argentina over the years, bestowed on the film would have boosted its popularity at home even further. However, the film can be enjoyed by non-Argentinean audiences as well for several additional elements beyond the obvious thrilling tale the film unfolds.

The film is at a basic level a detective story of tracking down a rapist and killer and ensuring that he gets a fitting punishment for the crime. At a more complex level, it is a tale of love of two sets of couples and a strong camaraderie of two detective colleagues. And finally, the screenplay captures the mood of Argentina’s “dirty war” period from 1976 to 1983 (during which tale is set) when criminals held sway and at least 15000 social activists ‘disappeared’ and often social status provided a sense of security for a privileged few (such as the Cornell-educated Hastings in the movie) when compared to lesser mortals (such as the investigating officer Benjamin Esposito in the movie). The indirect connection to the "dirty war" is established briefly with the TV news item watched by three pivotal characters in the movie that shows Isabel Peron morphed with the rapist/killer as her bodyguard/security staff.

The remarkable screenplay of the film, an adaptation of a book written by Eduardo Sacheri, is by both the author Sacheri and the film’s Argentinean director Juan José Campanella. The screenplay uses the power of cinema to elevate the tale of the book to an even more sophisticated level.

Campanella, for those unfamiliar with his work, is an engaging and creative screenplay writer. For instance, Campanella’s 2001 film The Son of the Bride, another delightful Argentinean film that made the final nominee list for the best foreign film Oscar that year, had the lead character muttering away that he is “no Albert Einstein, a Bill Gates or a Dick Watson” making all viewers wonder who on earth was this Dick Watson. At the end of the film, when the end-credits are rolling, the movie humorously reveals that this mysterious Dick Watson is a character from a pornographic film. Campanella carries forward his unusual penchant for juggling non-chronologically images and incidents in The Secret in Their Eyes that add to a diligent viewer’s entertainment. For instance, the movie begins with shots of Judge Hasting’s and Investigator Esposito’s eyes and shots of the railway station in Buenos Aires which are only fleshed out much later halfway into the movie. Campanella is apparently reinforcing two important strands that continue throughout the duration of The Secret in Their Eyes: the importance of eyes so pivotal in the film and the development of the plot; and the importance of railway stations as a key location for both the two parallel love stories and the detective story in the film. And both deal with memories, something the script reminds us is “all that we end up with.”

Campanella and Sacheri had devised a cute devise to capture the mood of Argentina to be weaved into the film. Judge Hastings (Soledad Villamil) hands Investigator Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) a typewriter which cannot type the alphabet “A”. Much later in the film the retired investigator Esposito, while writing a book on the case is shown waking up from a disturbed sleep and scribbling the word  TEMO (‘I fear’). He knows and is afraid that he could be knocked off by the killer-cum-rapist who is out on the loose and is seeking revenge for being briefly arrested by him.  Towards the end of the film, Esposito adds the alphabet “A” to TEMO to transform the scribble to TEAMO (‘I love you’). Campanella and Sacheri again prove the importance of a script that appears initially disconnected but  is all tied up eventually.

Temo to Teamo: From 'Fear' to 'Love', with an alphabet added

Similarly, throughout the film Judge Hastings wonders if she ought to close the door of her office.  The viewer would assume that it had something to do with the latent love affair between Hastings and Esposito that Hastings did not want her office staff to hear. But is it only that? It was a time when everybody seemed to be snooping on each other and the closing of doors became imperative for all important discussions. Take the sequence when Esposito and his dear colleague go snooping into a house of the suspect’s mother. The streets are empty. Yet there were people taking note of the car,its registration number, and what they were up to. The tale is set in a period when everyone was snooping on each other in Argentina.

And later on, Esposito’s rival colleague berates Esposito in front of Hastings that he is a nobody on the social ladder, minutes before the spine chilling encounter in the lift with the rapist-cum-killer loading his gun to send a message to both Esposito and Hastings. It is a sign of the terror most Argentinians had encountered, irrespective of their social status, during the 'dirty war' years.

The message of terror in Argentina during the Dirty War years

Campanella is a delightful scriptwriter. He has proved it time and again with two marvelous films: The Son of the Bride and The Secret in Their Eyes. In both films, he was aided by the marvelous thespian Ricardo Darin, who exudes magnetic charm in each role, film after film. And Campanella  has a magical touch with his actors Darin and Ms. Villamil not just in The Secret in Their Eyes but in an earlier work Same Love, Same Rain (1999). In all the three films, Campanella shows that he can elicit great performances from all his actors and he has a magic touch with script-writing. The viewers are not likely to forget the line “the gates of heaven have opened’’ muttered by the males time and again as they encounter any beautiful woman in The Secret in Their Eyes.

However, Sacheri and Campanella, through this film, have raised the issue of crime and punishment of rapist-killers worldwide. The punishment suggested by the filmmakers is thought-provoking. The contents of the film will make the viewer think about corruption and the consequences of lenient punishments accorded to such criminals.

But is Campanella the director, the best filmmaker to come out of Argentina in recent years? This critic considers the late Fabián Bielinsky, who made just two feature films The Aura (2005) and Nine Queens (2000) (both with Ricardo Darin in the lead roles), before he passed away prematurely in 2006 to be head and shoulders above Campanella as a director. The two Bielinsky films had a maturity that should make Argentinean cinema proud of raising the bar of quality though it is Campanella, who eventually brought home the Oscar statuette.

P.S. The late Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura was reviewed earlier on this blog.

147. US maestro Orson Welles’ last film ”F for Fake” (1973): The most thought-provoking film on illusion and reality from an exceptionally gifted filmmaker and intellectual

“Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth”—Pablo Picasso

“I must believe that art itself is real” Orson Welles in F for Fake

What is cinema? How real is realism in cinema? These are questions that every reflective filmgoer need to ask when we see a realistic film or documentary claiming to record reality, while there is always the director, the film editor, the camera-person, the actors, manipulating the mind of the viewer without the viewer realizing this is happening. Each documentary is telling a story, not merely reproducing facts as we think it is doing. F for Fake explores the extension of this argument in myriad ways, sometimes honestly, sometimes, er.. not so honestly.

Orson Welles, the director and narrator of the film, makes an honest confession early in the film “I am a charlatan.” And you love him for this very candor at the end of the film. You love him even more when he utters another loaded truism “Almost every movie is about some kind of a lie.”  And later, “I must believe that art itself is real.”

What is Orson Welles talking about? The movie starts with simple harmless magic tricks that Orson Welles plays on a child. It is not the tricks that are important but the fact that the director himself is playing the tricks that is important. The director/narrator is actually introducing the kid (read instead "the viewer") to subtle interesting parallels of how magicians manipulate their audiences, of how the so-called experts of art can fool art lovers by innocently claiming a forgery is real, of how hoax writers can dupe gullible readers into believing what they write is true, and finally how filmmakers can manipulate the viewers of cinema. Welles tells you quite honestly in this film that for an hour he promises to tell the truth, and he keeps his word, but  the average viewer of F for Fake is not likely to realize when the film cleverly deviates from telling the truth. Welles later acknowledges the part that was indeed fake in his film to the viewer, but what Welles has done is to prove his own contention that art itself is often not real. Most important of all, this swansong of Welles, actually looks back at the life of Welles himself rather than the two more obvious subjects–a distinguished art forger and a convicted fake biographer of Howard Hughes--that occupy much of the screen time.  And yet, F for Fake is actually about Welles. How so?

Let’s start with the opening words where Welles entertains a kid near a rail carriage. “Did I say I used to be a magician, sir? I'm still working on it. As for the key, it was not symbolic of anything... this isn't that kind of movie. You'll find the coin in your pocket now, sir. Keep your eyes on that coin sir, while it's returned to you... as your key. Should we return you to your mother? Is this your mother? No, of course not. Open your mouth wide... and we'll return you your money. And by the way, have you ever heard of Robert-Houdin, speaking of magicians, I mean. Oh no, of course not. But of course, you do know my partner Francois Reichenbach. Robert-Houdin was the greatest magician who ever lived. And do you know what he said? "A magician, he said, is just an actor--just an actor playing the part of a magician."

These words are not banter but loaded with meaning.  Much of F for Fake was made from footage recorded by cinematographer/director Francois Reichenbach (Welles even shows Reichenbach behind a camera, after the amazing street walking scene of actress Oja Kodar, ogled by all the males on the street, and Kodar lived with Welles in the evening of his life but out of marriage.) Orson Welles utilizes the footage shot by Reichenbach that the cinematographer had initially wanted to use to make his own documentary, gets Reichenbach to shoot some additional footage of Welles, the talented art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, convicted for publishing a fake biography of Howard Hughes as real, interacting with each other. Lo and behold,  on the film editor’s table Welles constructs and perfects the cinematic film essay on truths and lies that he calls F for Fake for posterity. F for Fake is a film about real gifted con men that actually includes Welles himself, one of the greatest and one of the most intelligent filmmakers of all time, terming himself a ‘charlatan’. That’s the bravado of Orson Welles! But there is a caveat used throughout the essay on celluloid--each of these con men is an affable genius in his own right.

"The key" mentioned in the magicians episode near the rail carriage, Welles assures you is not symbolic.  But the visuals that follow do provide ‘the key’ to the rest of the film—Oja Kodar is introduced opening the carriage window and so are the camera crew in action. Kodar and the camera crew play a major role as the film essay unspools. That the key was "not symbolic," is a loaded statement, if there ever was one. That’s the showman Orson Welles!

The magician and 'charlatan' Welles

Note again that in the last-mentioned quotation (And by the way, have you ever heard of Robert-Houdin, speaking of magicians, I mean. Oh no, of course not. ) above from F for Fake, Welles mentions Robert-Houdin (1805-71). Now Robert-Houdin was more than a magician, he was a craftsman, and a well-read showman, facets that are evident in Welles himself. Another recent American work of cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) doffs its cap at Robert-Houdin, who invented the automaton that ran on gears and springs, just like an anlog clock. The automaton was the precursor of the modern robot. Robert-Houdin’s statement that Welles quotes about actors and magicians couldn't have been better understood than by Welles the actor and director who had himself lived out the actor’s world of magic with the incredible War of the Worlds episode on radio and later in his own film Citizen Kane.

“I started at the top and have been working my way down ever since,” says Welles in this film. And that, too, is a true statement. Why is that? Welles was the American prodigy best remembered for his remarkable debut film Citizen Kane (1941), which he co-wrote, acted, produced and directed at the age of 26, yes 26! And he did it without much help of the Hollywood studio system. Citizen Kane was partly based on the life of a real newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst. And Hearst eventually turned his mammoth media machine against Welles to suppress the brilliance of the movie, ultimately allowing Welles to win a single Oscar for Welles’ co-written screenplay for a film that remains as one of the undisputed best films of all time.

Now how did Welles, at age 26, get to make the movie? To start at the beginning, the young American Welles goes to Ireland and pretends that he is a Broadway star from America, only to make waves as a real actor in Ireland. That real fame catapulted him back to America, initially to the world of Shakespearean stage and then to another related career of writing for the stage. Then in 1938, young Welles read out his adapted H G Wells’ The War of Worlds radio-play on radio so realistically that all those who listened to the broadcast were convinced that Martians had invaded USA, leading to mass public panic. The fame of the radio broadcast of faking a Martian invasion of USA allowed the 26-year-old to enter Hollywood, to act, to write, to produce and to direct his own debut film. Welles’ incredible career began with fakery and was peppered with it at many crucial stages. But prodigies make powerful enemies like Hearst. And it was indeed  a steady downhill run for Welles after Citizen Kane, in spite of his outstanding abilities in several artistic fields. And F for Fake charts this journey of ups and downs by employing the sidebar tales of other charlatans Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving.

“Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie,” says narrator Welles in F for Fake in the beginning. Later, in the same film, the brilliant director confesses to the viewer, “I did promise that for one hour, I'd tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past seventeen minutes, I've been lying my head off.”  And somewhere in the middle of the film Welles oxymoronically states: “What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is ‘art’.”

Aberration of truth or art?

Director Orson Welles is the narrator in F for Fake, which could be considered as a documentary or more accurately a cinematic essay on illusion and reality, captured on film. It deals with illusion and reality in fine arts, in books that fake truth only to become bestsellers, in the lives of public figures like William Hearst and Howard Hughes, in the delicate art of magicians, and last but not least in cinema for its gullible viewers.  The film, at a basic level, is about art, art critics and art collectors.  A painting gains value when art critics rave about it and the art collectors buy it because “the experts are the new oracles” as Welles expounds in F for Fake. ‘Yet there are lots of oysters out there but only a few pearls,” Welles cautions the viewer.

Elmyr de Hory is a gifted forger who can produce a forged masterpiece that even art experts would swear was real. Reichenbach/Welles captures de Hory at work and even Clifford Irving applauding the talents of the forger de Hory, much before Irving himself was discovered and convicted as a talented hoax biographer of Hughes. It will remain one of the finest examples of film editing that manipulates the viewer engagingly. And film shows Welles doing just that on the editing tables surrounded by spools of film that will eventually end up as the film you are watching! Incidentally, Irving was convicted of fraud in 1972 before Welles completed the film in 1973. What a bonus for Welles!That Elmyr de Hory committed suicide before he was to be extradited to France is not part of the film.

After all the discussion on magicians and fakers, Welles pays an amazing homage to the magnificent artistic Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, Paris, a building constructed and designed by several anonymous builders and architects and that Welles calls “a premier work of man without signature, one anonymous glory..a grand shout of affirmation.”

 But Welles probably knew he himself was dying.  So he grimly makes another ponderous statement “Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”

But the name of Orson Welles will matter for lovers of cinema as a magical story-teller par excellence.

At the editing table, Welles narrates as he constructs the final tale for the viewer

The well-read Welles refers in F for Fake in passing to a little known poem Conundrum of the Workshops by Rudyard Kipling and that poem is reproduced in full below:

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,

Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,

Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

Wherefore he called to his wife and fled to fashion his work anew—

The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review;

And he left his lore to the use of his sons—and that was a glorious gain

When the Devil chuckled: "Is it Art?" in the ear of the branded Cain.

They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart,

Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: "It's striking, but is it Art?"

The stone was dropped by the quarry-side, and the idle derrick swung,

While each man talked of the aims of art, and each in an alien tongue.

They fought and they talked in the north and the south, they talked and they fought in the west,

Till the waters rose on the jabbering land, and the poor Red Clay had rest—

Had rest till the dank blank-canvas dawn when the dove was preened to start,

And the Devil bubbled below the keel: "It's human, but is it Art?"

The tale is old as the Eden Tree—as new as the new-cut tooth—

For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;

And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,

The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg,

We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk of an addled egg,

We know that the tail must wag the dog, as the horse is drawn by the cart;

But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It's clever, but is it Art?"

When the flicker of London's sun falls faint on the club-room's green and gold,

The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold—

They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start

When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

Now, if we could win to the Eden Tree where the four great rivers flow,

And the wreath of Eve is red on the turf as she left it long ago,

And if we could come when the sentry slept, and softly scurry through,

By the favor of God we might know as much—as our father Adam knew.

One can watch F for Fake many times over and rediscover some aspect of Welles' genius that one might have missed. He stood tall towering over his contemporaries. Even when the stunning Rita Hayworth, his second wife, divorced him, the reason she gave the press was "I can't take his genius any more."

P.S. Who was/is the greatest American filmmaker? For this critic, It would be a toss-up between Orson Welles and Terrence Malick. Both were/are filmmakers of exceptional talent, intelligence and maturity and both made films that are/were well ahead of their contemporaries both in vision and substance. Both filmmakers were/are incredibly well read and that wisdom percolated in their cinematic works. Orson Welles’ last film F for Fake may be unknown to many cinema-goers possibly because it is neither a regular feature film nor a regular documentary. Yet it is a magnificent swansong from the American prodigy.! Citizen Kane won just a single Oscar for Best Screenplay. Similarly, the only Oscar won by a Malick film was for best cinematography in Days of Heaven. Both filmmakers won the Golden Palm (the highest honor) at Cannes Film Festival, Welles in 1952 for The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, and Malick in 2011 for The Tree of Life.

F for Fake is among the top 100 films ever made for this critic and among his top 20 US films of substance ever made.