Images of the Day 10/13/2014

Norman Rockwell, Freedom From Want, USA, 1942

Tobe Hooper, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, USA, 1974

Wanderers Before God: Alexander Sokurov's Faust

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Casper David Friedrich, Oil on Canvas, 1818

Somewhere between a Rabelaisian paean to Earthly pleasures, complete with the drunken waltz of the camera, and a serious investigation to the failure of human desire for knowledge, Alexander Sokurov’s Faust is quite unlike any other cinematic event I’ve encountered this year. The film’s loose adaptation of Goethe’s masterwork sees no difference between its highly aspirations and its low humor—an opening CGI shot that sets up an epic mythology ends with a blurry shot of a flaccid (and dead) penis of a cadaver being examined for the progress of human knowledge. That failure of knowledge is key for Herr Doktor, a man who has learned all he knows about the stars, only to be disappointed that he finds no pleasure in this life—that perhaps the science he defines his life brings him no pleasure (he has much to learn by the woman visiting his gynecologist father, her checkup an excuse for the orgasm the examination will produce). Even a monkey on a moon, a bizarre and lovely image, adds no interest to him. This man is destined to his meeting his Mephistopholies (Anton Adasinsky, the performance of the year), a drunken and ghastly creature who will take him through the maze of life’s lowly pleasures (a bath of virgins, a drunken pub, a mockery of a funeral), all in the hopes to make him reveal some desire worth trading his soul. Like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Faust meanders without implicit meaning or classical rhythms, forcing the viewer to accept his venture of the physical into something metaphysical, the camera spinning around like a waltz (two steps forward, one step back) in an attempt to make Faust find something within the moral schema he still submits to. Sokurov's demented view of humanity is so decidedly strange (the Devil is not just evil; he's also a bad speller) that it’s easy to dismiss his portrayal of this “important” work as the sign of a filmmaker who can’t tell good from bad, but even his obsession with bowel humor is sublimated into the great philosophical search, all implemented through the garish colors of Bruno Donbonnel's boldly inventive visual palette (at once seductive and repulsive). The film’s most beautiful moments—a golden vision of his beauty, and the two’s romantic drift into a river—are also the most tragic.

Hill and Hopper: A Study in Stoicism

The Driver (Hill, USA, 1978) 

Nighthawks (Hopper, USA, 1942)