Mini-Review: Krakatit (1949)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c7/Krakatit_poster.jpg

Dir. Otakar Vávra

Czechoslovakia

A scientist Prokop (Karel Höger) who is an expert in explosives is left dazed and badly injured after his new compound krakatit destroys his flat by accident. It leads him into a murky, distorting conspiracy of people vying for his creation, a subjective one where everyone wants the mega weapon that takes the form of white powder and an elegant woman (Florence Marly) keeps appearing in many different guises with the same, distinct and sensual face. The resulting film, adapted from a Karel Capek novel, is a fascinating hybrid, science fiction with the characters and monochrome shadows of an American Film Noir, oneiric cinema as the reality of the scientist’s world is under question and abstract manipulations take place, and digressions looking back at World War II and its devastation through the outspoken moral the film has. The cinematography is rich befitting the material – befitting a film as well from a country whose cinema for me alongside Iran is creeping up to the level that I will watch anything from the nation like with Italy and Japan – especially as it becomes more unconventional and hazy in tone as it goes along. Looking like the visions created in the illness and fading thoughts of its protagonist, it is suitable “off” and in its own realm distant from ours, the closest comparison being Guy Maddin to help you with the tone of the film picturing it. The individuals that eventually kidnap him and want him to create more of the krakatit have a militaristic edge, a foreign country whose military uniform for the grunt soldiers and the officers in command are similar to German uniform. Made at the end of the forties with only a few years absent from the chaos of a second global war, this film clearly wears its anti-war and anti-weapon message tattooed to its face, even more so when you consider the fear of nuclear weapons that was simultaneously felt in the period. As the scientist finds himself surrounded by numerous people who just want the compound for their nefarious desires, the reoccurring woman becomes a femme fatale of a more omnipresent type, everywhere he goes and part of his mind at the point she is introduced onwards, smouldering and yet completely out-of-comprehension. Florence Marly is sexual and alluring in just looking cold and aloof, the advantage of cinema before the sixties, of black-and-white and femme fatales, in that just her expression she’s both erotic and more powerful than the men in the same location. It has to be asked though whether Krakatit stands up as a great film; the word “rewatch” threatens to creep out from my thoughts, but there’s the question of, regardless of the look and unique tone, whether the storytelling in the centre is fully engaging. It’s interesting to see a film that is clearly influenced by American cinema of the time even if its mood is like that of a silent era, German Expressionist work, but as a narrative film which has to deal with dialogue, plotting, and the obvious message it has, it somewhat doesn’t have the full weight to carry such an immensely interesting veneer, especially as its begging to become even more abstract and dreamlike than the director allows it to be. To be narrative driven you need to either need to be willing to tighten it or completely throw it out the window. Matter of fact, it’s simply my own tastes which makes me hesitant to give it higher praise; outside of this it’s really something I cannot say I’ve seen before.

From http://i.imgur.com/qXRZb.jpg

Must Know The Meaning of Plus (Alphaville (1965))

From http://stagevu.com/img/thumbnail/owexfdyavficbig.jpg

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

France-Italy

From http://adamcr007.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/alphaville-1965-12-g.jpg

Jean-Luc Godard was once the most overrated director for me. Unlike the drastic change of mind, for the positive, I had for the films of Luis Buñuel, which has effectively changed my viewpoints of cinema completely in the last year or so, the change of mind for Godard has been slow and gradual while still as important. Even when I hated Godard for the most part, I still watched as many films as I could of his as a completists and a fan of cinema trying to figure out his acclaim was to cinema viewers, going as far as viewing Week End (1967), a film I despised once, six times even if the first four viewings were painful. As I saw the virtues in his work, I realised, with my growing maturity, how complex, brilliantly made and legitimately intelligent his work was. I even prefer his post-Week End work which has been dismissed as pretentious but is that of a veteran at the top of his craft, even when making a minute long short which has the soundtrack from a tennis match spliced into it. Amongst all the Godard films and shorts I still need to see, countless in number, I need to rewatch many films that I had dismissed before, especially the pre-Week End works that made his name.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7pEPmd69ju9L6tqHqNsjHnv9GhA5Dn_fQ0MA79rxEHl91HNNEuvmTRCbsSA52yjqT2RHAYbx8KwyOtrd3LU7k5RqvtVs-VroqzHRW0W0T1VDErlWQfH2XhpZ1vzhyOQNBKK3eWaf-su0/s1600/alphaville.jpg

Using the pre-existing character Lenny Caution (Eddie Constantine), Alphaville is a science fiction film in which Caution, posing as a reporter, enter the titular city to bring back a professor to the Lands Without, only to see that the city is run by Alpha 60, a sentient computer who has removed “illogical” behaviour, human emotions such as love, sadness and joy, from the populous under the belief of the greater good. Upfront, Alphaville is drastically different from conventional sci-fi dystopia films with similar premises made now, even to later Godard films with precise, directorial styles to them. Alphaville was partly improvised and even the parts that may have been carefully planned out feel the same way to, low budget and stark in tone even with a rich plot to it, drastically pushing itself away from what would be expected from it. Using Paris itself at the time as the setting for the dystopia, most of the film’s science fiction is unshown ideas, background details and comments that have to be imagined in the viewer’s head. The gritty, darkly lit locations works effectively for the premise, but the concepts must be added to the film by imagination; terms like “The Lands Without”, cities like “Tokyorama” or “Cinerama museums” must be conjured up by the viewer rather than presented to you already visually. Then there is the core idea of how Alpha 60’s logic destroys the humanity in people, presented through Anna Karina as Natacha von Braun, beautiful but a cold vessel from a metropolis where crying is punishable by death and where the question “Why?” is replaced with “because”. Caution becomes enamoured by her and does what he can to break down the behaviour she has been givem. Very much a genre film rather than Godard’s more essay-like works, it expresses its story background and ideas through the mood of a noir film with a trench coat wearing hero, a femme fatale and questions left unknown.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidbHUpAQJttHa1p8tbw9UtRIEs1zDfBh30IHjlZmFJFWsOzHRRSXBZScTnIWRGtRosfp2cGTk36Bf9_f1DD69pfcJlZ-bCJzLg5xnxQEVnIDXPcV7Qai5pbvLbcvM2SMDHUMG3qNo3-e6i/s1600/alp.jpg

It does show though, quite early on in his career, where Godard would go, not alien from the old master who made Film socialisme (2010) decades later with manipulation of words, visuals and sound throughout it. Sadly the version I viewed of Alphaville did not subtitle a part of it that I would have immensely taken a lot from – a series of diagrams that manipulate images and words that Alpha 60 monologues over in his omnipresent, deep, electronically aided voice – but the breaking down of standard conventions of narrative and structure Godard is famous for is here and allows him, like in his other work, to place idea after idea within pockets and gaps within the main film. Alphaville works as a sci-fi story immensely, but cannot be viewed in terms of a conventional film, missing the point to how it alters its narrative trappings subtly and abstractly. What could be viewed as logic or plot gaps, like for me in the first viewing of this film years ago, turn out to be gaps Godard put in there on purpose so the viewer would start thinking about how and why they watch the film. Of course, Godard is clearly passionate for the pulpy storytelling and the aesthetics of “coolness”, Constantine’s grizzled looks sitting well in a world of blackened streets, guns and smoking, but what prevents it from being a dated European arthouse film from the Sixties is that Godard takes advantage of the dormant science fiction writer inside him to his advantage in probing views of humanity and what society means. Logic by itself creates a dictatorship where art is lost, perceived to be for the better by higher-ups, and language is watered down as words are banned from the dictionary. Even the cinema, in a brief anecdote, Godard’s obsession, becomes a place where illogical people are put into and killed on mass through electric shocks. The film is a melding of real ideas of politics, pulp storytelling, grim social commentary and science fiction as a vessel for “what-if” scenarios. By its end, Alphaville emphasises how this tangential mass of pieces in his work, once a great flaw for me, is in fact his greatest virtue as a director.

From http://files.myopera.com/RoughneckCowboy/blog/vlcsnap-141451.png