JFL

Willy Bogner is a neglected, though absolutely essential name for the concept of vulgar auteurs, i.e. the attempt to highlight the creativity and formalistic signature of distinctive filmmakers working in the area of physical genres. Unlike most of the filmmakers who were glorified in this way by fannish critics several years ago, this former top-level skier has not only served as the director of his own films, but also as producer, screenwriter and cameraman, so that the resulting works fully reflect the creative personality and distinctiveness of their creator. All of his films are characterised by boisterous cinematography, narrative and logic. Ad hoc formalistic ideas and random narrative twists go hand in hand with unabashedly nonsensical premises and absurd gags performed for their own sake. Bogner was a torchbearer of the advertising aesthetic in the field of feature films and, besides his absurdist hippie debut Stehaufmädchen, the rest of his filmography comprises sports movies focused primarily on skiing sequences. Bogner actually followed in the footsteps of pioneering filmmaker Arnold Fanck, who established the mountain-film genre in the 1920s and whose breathtaking formalistic compositions influenced Leni Riefenstahl’s directorial style. Like Fanck, Bogner strove to depict the emotions and aesthetics of sports in winter landscapes as effectively as possible. Unlike his predecessor, however, he was not bound by traditional narrative structure and its principles. Instead, he embraced the Dadaist principle of free association, the logic of slapstick randomness and the autotelic spectacle of commercials and music videos. Benjamin represents the intersection of the ethos of Bogner’s unrestrained early work and the spectacular nature of his later films set entirely in the world of sports. The film has not one, but two parallel premises. In the first one, a meek office worker unwillingly becomes a global skiing star based on the results of a computer program and in spite of his actual skills. In parallel with that, a storyline in the mould of Jeckyll and Hyde develops, as the same office worker transforms into a self-confident braggart when listening to music. Both of these storylines enable Bogner to develop a crazy satire at the expense of the falseness of marketing and the prefabricated nature of celebrities. Mainly, however, they give Bogner an excuse to fill the feature-length runtime with a series of skiing exhibitions. But the slopes in Benjamin represent a Dadaistically psychedelic world in which anything is possible and things, people and entities simply appear based solely on the logic of the gag. They can thus freely move through time and space just for effect. From standing on skis, the protagonist may suddenly find himself riding waves on a surfboard or at a rodeo. The whole thing is reminiscent of animated slapstick, but the difficulty of execution of the individual shots demonstrates that the randomness is not merely the result of a sudden impulse and its immediate realisation. Behind the madness, there is a method and creative determination to translate the given vision to the screen. We can even say that Bogner, in his second feature film, came up with the cinematic equivalent of turntable scratching in music. This is true not only of the narrative, where he mixes together two fundamentally unconnected plot motifs, but also of his creative method with respect to genres, styles and the approach to the substance of the film in its final compilation in the cutting room. At its core, the film combines the style of music videos and commercials with the style of nonsensical parodies with their incongruous gags, thus creating a new form. In doing so, Bogner lets himself be carried away by his own nonsensical flow and boisterously plays with the rapidity of the shots and their montages.

The central paradox of Willy Bogner’s debut consists in the fact that the scion of an industrial family, working on commission from the foreign studio United Artists, made a hippie satire in the spirit of the New German Cinema. Let’s leave aside the fact that Bogner’s cinematic contemporaries differed from the decorated athlete and heir to a clothing brand only in their study of the humanities and self-proclaimed position as intellectual elites, but otherwise were also products of the well-off upper class. For Bogner, film was a hobby and a source of pleasure, not a medium for expressing his personal worldview or for artistic self-realisation. Thanks to that, he approached his work in an extraordinarily broadminded and playful way. While his contemporaries were presenting sombre treatises on the clash of generations and basking in festival acclaim, Bogner came up with a typically more authentic form of New Wave impertinence. Rather than with the German cinema of the time, Bogner’s approach has more in common with the formalistic radicalism of the French New Wave, but it ventures rather into the domain of the casually rebellious and commercially focused opposition typical of the key voices of American indie film, particularly Roger Corman, Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafeslon and Robert Altman. However, Bogner also remains true to his roots in advertising and his work foreshadows the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers from that sector, led by the British brothers Ridley and Tony Scott, who at the time were still searching for their own voice, burdened by the legacy of the domestic British New Wave. Though Bogner’s formalistic signature of autotelic camera angles and adrenaline-fuelled dolly shots, zooms and pans maximally suits his later spectacular sports-action exhibitions, these aspects are paradoxically put to better use in his first work as an illustration of the film’s absolute boisterousness. Stehaufmädchen is a totally random meta-film in which absolutely anything is possible and which, thanks to its origins, simultaneously takes aim at both predatory capitalists and self-admiring naïve hippies. In the spirit of the ambiguous title, which can mean both “I like girls” and “Rise up, girl”, despite expectations the narrative is not content with a typical celebration of the free-spiritedness of young love, but continues even after the initial buzz wears off and the existential considerations of everyday life come into play. The climax, in which the roles are reversed and the protagonist emerges as the central and fully active character, casts the whole project in an unexpectedly progressive light. Bogner makes fun of not only authorities personified in particular characters, but also of the ideological structures and basic principles of modern society, with money and its power at the forefront. Throughout, however, he remains playful and formalistically unrestrained above all else. This is also apparent in the fact that, true to his nature, he stages a free-thinking blockbuster packed with chases and breakneck physical sequences, which, however, he conceives in a purely Dadaist and slapstick manner.

The Lehman Trilogy is an absolutely phenomenal play in which three actors on one stage manage, over the course of just a few hours, to impersonate dozens of figures and raconteurs from several generations and centuries in the history of America and its economy. Not only all of those who salivate over opulent yet, at their core, actually just literal and straightforward cinematic epics, including those by masters such as Martin Scorsese and Sergio Leone, should watch this in order to understand how a certain segment of history can be covered more imaginatively and, surprisingly, more playfully, entertainingly and engagingly in the same runtime. The Lehman Trilogy shows us that theatre remains a distinct form of art with its own means of expression, which other dramatic arts can borrow, but cannot replace.

Though slightly flat in places, Party Harder: Summer Massacre is mostly solid entertainment that kicks into gear in the crucial final act. It’s necessary to recognise that there have not been so many naturalistic faces and other body parts in front of the camera in a Czech film since Pictures of the Old World, and Party Harder deserves praise just for that alone. In the traditionally miserable dry season of, before all of the decent films have their premieres in Karlovy Vary, this solidly messed-up freak show is precisely the hero that Czech cinemas may not deserve, but it’s the one they definitely need. So thanks, Party Harder, and we wish you even more viewers than before.

Good Morning is the best and most adorable movie about farting in the history of cinema. The traditional moronic elevation of the supposedly high-brow in comparison with the contemptible low-brow caused, among other things, comedies to be overlooked in Ozu’s filmography for many years. Not only does Good Morning fully deserve to rank among the director’s best works alongside universally acclaimed melancholic classics like Tokyo Story and Banshun, but it also fundamentally completes the image of the glorified grandmaster. Ozu was not a filmmaker who just wanted to repeatedly wallow in emotion over the beauty of transience and the passive tragedy of life. Or rather, that was only one side of him. As a boisterously playful filmmaker who finds beauty in ordinary, everyday life and baseness, Ozu stood in opposition to that. Good Morning was not a misguided return to Ozu’s beginnings in lighter genres (after all, he made gangster flicks as well as comedies), but one of his best works, made when he was at the absolute peak of his powers. The master’s refined style of stark static shots and frontal compositions is shown here not as an ascetic signature with strict or binding rules. On the contrary, its universal nature and the possibility of effectively using it to meet the needs of visual and carefully constructed comedy are revealed. Among other things, Ozu makes fun of the uniformity of the post-war suburbs and the tottering superficial morality found there. At the same time, he still finds beauty and humorous tragedy in the contrast of childish boisterousness and its clash with adult supposed authority figures, rules and the principles of communication that form the absurd connective tissue of society and the basis of bonds between people. In addition to that, the individual etudes and narrative lines, tied to various characters from the middle-class suburbs, portray the transformations in post-war Japanese society and the contemporary widening gap between the lifestyles and values of the elderly, middle-age and adolescent generations with an astonishing blend of satire and melancholy.

Sōmai’s debut established all of the typical elements of the director’s style and the characteristic attributes of all of his later films, starting with the screenplays based on popular books, excellent casting and his work with young actors, to his formalistic trademarks including long shots, inventively designed dolly shots, transitions from diegetic to subjective sound and the expressive use of the natural elements, particularly rain. Primarily, however, The Terrible Couple established the director’s empathy toward the characters, especially the adolescents, thanks to which this adaptation of Kimi Yanagisawa’s manga about the unplanned cohabitation of two high-school students in the same house becomes a sort of teenage variation on Scenes from a Marriage. The narrative gradually shifts from initial rambunctiousness and light-heartedness to a stifling relationship drama weighed down with emotions, deliberate hurtful behaviour between the characters and missed opportunities. The film begins and ends with the protagonist looking into the camera, but what he and the other three main characters experience and the personal development they undergo between these two points in the narrative is almost incredible. Sōmai excellently depicts the unbearable tension between the adolescent characters’ feelings and the dread that they might reveal them to someone. The basic premise, in which the room of an adolescent boy who lives in his uncle’s house while attending school is sublet to his classmate, is used to create a world where seemingly only high-school students and their teachers exist, but there are no other adults. This situation is further intensified when the adolescent protagonists are allowed to interact in situations similar to adult cohabitation, while being buffeted by teenage emotions in combination with timidity, insecurity and stubborn denial of their true feelings.

Watching 3 Women may evoke in viewers memories of Bergman’s Persona and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. These three films share the motives of intertwining identities, irrational narratives and a distinctive setting whose aesthetic attributes fundamentally complete the dreamlike atmosphere. Though we can assume that the individual films, or rather their creators, are connected by a thread of direct inspiration, all of them remain distinct and unique, and even deal with completely different subject matter. Like the other two, Altman’s film, whose subject came to him in his sleep, can be perceived and interpreted in different ways, but at its core it offers a deconstruction of the position and roles of women in (not only) American society. Each of the titular three women shows a different side of gender roles as a construct of artificially formulated roles that are passed on and the process of merging with them as a kind of disappearance, or at least denial, of one’s own personality and identity. This is brilliantly embodied by the phenomenal Sissy Spacek, who undergoes several transformations of her personality over the course of the narrative, from a wide-eyed, childishly uninhibited girl to a coolly calculating and dissembling vamp. Conversely, Shelley Duvall superbly portrays a woman who follows the absurd ideal of the chattering homebody that was foisted on American women, especially in the 1950s, to the point that there is seemingly nothing left of her own self, even though she is an active character and multi-dimensional personality. Unlike Bergman and Lynch, who from the beginning establish references that lead viewers to perceive their respective films in a different way than as a standard narrative, Altman keeps his film seeming very ordinary for a long time. Only certain details of the characters’ behavior come across as overly naïve or affected, but no special attention is focused on them. The transition to the disturbingly unhinged narrative is thus even more effective when the film seemingly suddenly shifts into a bizarre relationship triangle in which the personalities of two of the central characters radically change. However, the foundations for this are evident from the beginning in the way that the film transforms the usual optics of mainstream cinema, when, instead of the usual objects, it places women in the roles of the central mysteries, forcing the viewers to figure out their personalities and motives. Conversely, the men and their bodies are fragmented and relegated to the second plan, which also highlights the absurdity of the fact that they determine the conditions of everything. The climax is even more radical and otherworldly, as the women are conversely liberated from the men and the roles that have been assigned to them by the patriarchal society and instead live in the harmony of a matriarchy. ___ PS: 3 Women exhibits a full range of parallels with Patricia Resnick’s later screenplay for 9 to 5, in which again a trio of women, portrayed by other superb actresses, oscillate around one man and more literally reassess their social roles and relationships.

This black-and-white film about a world made up of conmen and patsies is not black-and-white at all. On the contrary, it is tremendously empathetic and emotionally colourful.

In Altman’s classic fresco, the city of Nashville is shown as an absurd world of dreams, ambition, power, desires, broken hearts and tragic fates, as well as populated by people with all of their dark and light sides and difficult life stories. The brilliance of the film’s narrative consists in the fact that it manages to encompass and interweave a tremendous number of characters and locations, while constantly drawing in and fascinating viewers. The basis for this is the excellent screenplay, which takes an absolutely empathetic approaches to all of the characters in the country milieu, whether fallen or beautiful, even if it doesn’t avert its gaze from the shadowy and absurd aspects of their lives and personalities.

Seventeen years before Wenders’s Wings of Desire, the then neophyte director Robert Altman made his treatise about a place in time, angels without wings and people longing for freedom. The first of Altman’s mosaics of human turmoil, which became the director’s trademark, is surprising primarily because, unlike his later acclaimed milestones Nashville and Short Cuts, it is not a serious drama. On the contrary, it is a cunning farce that abounds with symbols and metaphors, while concurrently paraphrasing and disparaging the formulas of Hollywood spectacles. The schizophrenically entertaining principle of adoration and acerbic subversion forms the basis of the entire film and its individual motifs. Thanks to that, Brewster McCloud is simultaneously about everything and nothing. It has a detective storyline about a serial killer whose victims are rather symbolic and a screwball story of love that both uplifts us and drags us down. The film contains a spectacular car chase and a reflection on ideas that are more intoxicating and more stimulating than their execution. It reveals social roles and hierarchies, both metaphorically and parodically, as well as through a separate storyline of goofy ornithological commentary. And, of no less importance, it is a film about shit or, more precisely, bird droppings. At first glance, Brewster McCloud comes across as goofy absurdity thrown together willy-nilly, but it is apparent from the carefully detailed casting, costumes and set that there is a heart of thoughtfulness and sophistication beating below the surface. Like Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s, which was made in the same year and is several orders of magnitude more free-thinking in terms of filmmaking and narrative, Brewster McCloud reflects the ethos of the hippie generation. It thus inevitably undermines not only authority and the conservative building blocks of society, but also film genres and classic narrative logic. Brewster McCloud plays by its own crafty rules and thus remains the most rollicking and free-thinking work in Altman’s diverse filmography, in which, unfortunately, his comedies are usually overlooked in favour of his films in serious genres.