He Had to Find Her: The Searchers

There are few other films that are so brimming with images that are utterly indelible, images that have been quoted and re-quoted and referenced and displayed and popularized to such an extent that they can be called almost a part of the American collective psyche, as far as that exists, or at the very least the cinematic psyche. The small band of settlers riding desperately paralleled by bands of Indians, the horses and their riders that march with palpable loneliness across a yellow sunset with a brilliant pinpoint sun above their heads, the buffalo stampeding across snow-covered plains, the refuge and redemption a man finds while framed within a cave, and perhaps most famously of all, that man, John Wayne, framed in a doorway with the magnificence of Monument Valley in full display behind him. John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece western The Searchers is the film that contains all of these images and more, and is commonly regarded as one of the greatest films of the genre, the director, and the history of cinema. But despite this, there is an inescapable darkness that lurks at the centre of The Searchers: the genocidal racism of Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards.

Edwards is a former Confederate soldier who returns to his family three years after the war’s conclusion under shady circumstances: there is gold implied to be stolen, and according to Ward Bond’s sheriff, he fits a lot of unspecified “descriptions”. Despite all of this, he still returns to the loving arms of his brother’s wife Martha, and Ford treats us to one of the masterpieces of subtlety and visual storytelling in the cinema. Wordlessly, he shows us that Edwards and Martha are hopelessly in love. Ford’s direction here is sublime in the way that he suggests a passion that can never be anything more than repressed, but plenty of credit must be given to Wayne in the execution. He is able to accomplish Ford’s task often with no more than his eyes. His gaze down at Martha during their most famous long embrace shows that he clearly loves her as far more than a sister, and later in the family’s cabin his eyes look his brother up and down with a look that contains jealously and movement that suggests that he is sizing him up: he wants to have a good look at the man with whom his lover is trapped.

At supper, Ford finally completes Wayne’s initial characterization with a startling edification of the facet of his personality that grows to consume the film: his utterly unapologetic racism. Any prior hints have been taken by the audience in stride as merely characteristic of the unfortunate casual but  ultimately rather slight racism of many Western characters, even some in prior Ford films, although he made plenty prior to The Searchers that feature sympathetic portrayals of Indians (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon being probably the most notable). But when Martin Pawley enters the room, it’s made clear that Wayne’s is egregious. “I could have mistaken you for a half-breed!” he exclaims, and in that line and Pawley’s reaction Ford establishes the most important part of the Edwards character but also one undercurrent of the tension that exists between them and drives their interactions throughout the many solitary scenes later in the film. Pawley replies quietly that he is an eighth Cherokee.

Ford soon delivers the threshold scene in the film and one of the most influential. While Edwards and Pawley are with other local men investigating a cattle robbery, they realize that it is a diversion for a “murder raid”. By the time Edwards gets back to the homestead, it is too late. Like Luke Skywalker surveying his own family’s destroyed desert home, Edwards observes the ruins of the household and most importantly the scene of his beloved Martha’s death. He launches a fanatical quest to hunt down and kill the Comanches responsible, ultimately developing into a five-year crusade undertaken only by him and Pawley.

Edwards’ quest is so obsessive that it obligates an examination of his motives. He detests the Comanches, obviously, and indeed all Indians, and the slaughter of his family and lover gives him the justification for his quest to avenge their deaths. But the quest is about more than avenging their deaths. It is about killing his niece, because he sees the Comanches as so sub-human that killing her would be preferable to seeing her absorbed by their culture. What drives Edwards to such a frenzied loathing, a dehumanization of another race to the extreme that violence is the only way to liberate an object of purity from desecration at their hands (if this sounds familiar, watch Taxi Driver again)? It cannot be innate, and ultimately Ford uses Edwards’ racism to indict not only the mindset that justified the genocide of the Indians and underlies so many of the films of the genre of which Ford was the master, but to indict revenge as well. Revenge is the true target of The Searchers.

Ford reveals this through a number of quite subtle details. Perhaps the most important is the scene at the homestead that immediately predicates the massacre. Deborah, the youngest niece who becomes the object of Edwards’ quest, is sent to hide behind the house next to her grandmother’s grave. On the grave is written a message that ultimately is one of the keys to Edwards’ madness: Deborah’s grandmother, Ethan’s mother, was killed by Comanches. Edwards’ racism is shown to be something instilled in him at a very young age by the death of his mother. His quest is a quest to avenge not only his lover but his mother as well.

Lest this seem too subtle to be important, there are other references to past deeds that serve as the foundation for Edwards’ racism. The most important of these is the back story of the Martin Pawley character: as a small child, Edwards saved Pawley from a Comanche raid like the one that later took his own family. Pawley’s mother was not so lucky. Countless years later, the memory still preys on Edwards enough for him to be able to pick out her scalp on a stick of several settlers’ scalps presented to him by Scar, the Indian chief who kidnaps Deborah. When Edwards is later shown scalping a dead Scar, it is easy to see that act as one of reciprocity for the mother of Pawley. Edwards’ genocidal racism is ultimately an act of revenge.

This latter incident provides a very strong unspoken line of tension between Edwards and, and a motivation for Edwards’ sometimes contemptuous view of, Martin. Edwards thinks that Martin should share his racist contempt of Indians because they slaughtered his mother. Her death provided a motivation for Edwards’ own frenzied hatred, and he sees it as a character flaw on Pawley’s part that he is not similarly motivated.

Now, just because Ford shows Wayne’s racism to be primarily motivated by revenge, he does not for a minute let this justify it. He even provides a view of Scar’s reciprocity of the feeling. Scar tells Edwards when they meet that his two sons were killed by white men. For each son, he says, “we take many… scalps.” In showing that ultimately the violent hatred of The Other is not only shared by both sides but is motivated by the same reasons, Ford provides his most damning indictment of the idea of revenge: no matter who you are, at its extreme, it leads to genocidal racism (as well as less prominently the oppressive loneliness of Edwards seen progressing throughout the film)

This indictment is carried out with a fearlessness ultimately unrivaled by anyone except the highly underrated Anthony Mann (The Naked Spur, Man of the West). This indictment is also the most important manner in which The Searchers strikes the most important blow in the death of the classical Western, a death that would finally explode nine years later in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. A view of Indians as the perpetrators of massacres that deserve to be punished, indeed, the antagonizing of Indians  as dangerous attackers, even when done in a non-racist manner and featuring some sympathy, such as Ford’s earlier masterpiece Stagecoach, that provided the basis for innumerable Westerns up until that point was utterly de-legitimized by The Searchers in an unprecedented way and with crippling effectiveness because it struck not only at the view but at the justification for the view itself.

This is not to criticize the Western genre, which has been the vehicle for some of the greatest films ever made. But rather if it a criticism of anything it is of the West itself. The racism and mad revenge is not a flaw with Westerns but rather an occupational hazard to filmmaking about that particular period of history. Perhaps Ford himself put it best: “There’s some merit to the charge that the Indian hasn’t been portrayed accurately or fairly in the Western, but again, this charge has been a broad generalization and often unfair. The Indian didn’t welcome the white man… and he wasn’t diplomatic… If he has been treated unfairly by whites in films, that, unfortunately, was often the case in real life. There was much racial prejudice in the West.” The reason, then, why The Searchers was an irreparable break with the past, and the reason why the break was irreparable, was because The Searchers modernized from within. Instead of revealing many of the themes of the West and therefore the classical Western to be brutal and outdated through blatant criticism, it does so by culminating everything the classical Western was. It takes the classical Western’s themes to the extreme and it is that which reveals the flaws with revenge and racism. Such an effective, undeniable, inside culmination-based assault makes it no wonder that the film failed to meet with the embrace of the Hollywood film establishment (it garnered not even a single Academy Award nomination). Not only did it strike at the heart of many industry films (and, if Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition is any indication, revenge perpetuates as a staple of Hollywood filmmaking) but it did more than that: it opened the doors to the modernization of the Western. It hauled it forward, and the establishment has never thrown itself behind such an effort.

Now, this is not to try to divide the Western genre into pre-Searchers and post-Searchers. The trend towards modernization and the abandonment of the classical Western started as early as the end of World War II, which made many filmmakers reconsider the touching reverence towards violence that the classical Western showed. Howard Hawks’ 1948 masterpiece Red River explored anti-Indian sentiment in negative space (there is talk about the Indian threat, but the most crippling blows to the cattle-moving operation are struck from within the band of cowboys) and in another John Wayne performance, one which purportedly caused Ford to remark, “I never knew the son of a bitch could act,” it is one of the first Westerns to explore the dark and ultimately destructive side of revenge. Zinnemann’s High Noon, Nicholas Ray’s astoundingly good Johnny Guitar, and others were also pre-Searchers films that moved away from and began to take a more questioning look at the themes and devices of the classical Western. The Searchers is merely the most wholly damning look at the West itself. It is the first film to conclude, through its extremes and culmination, that modernization was vital, that a classical look at the period was untenably outdated.

For me, the most fascinating facet of the richly multifaceted film from a thematic perspective, and another way in which Ford outdates the classical Western through culmination and extremes is the film’s dealing with the theme of the Frontier. Many classical Westerns revolve around the romanticization of the Frontier. They were for a large part set within the context of the danger of the Frontier that surrounds them, and perhaps no film so richly and thrillingly captures the danger of the landscape, of the Outside, as Ford’s Stagecoach. The Searchers, in a way, completes Stagecoach, and yet again, culminates the classical Western in that it principally preoccupies itself with an examination of the reaction to that danger; how the danger of the frontier is dealt with, and ultimately it takes a sharply critical view that reveals the impossibility of continuing to make films that romanticize the frontier insofar as he shows, once more, the all-consuming dark side of that process. Ford shows that ultimately in order for Western civilization to exist (by which I mean the civilized aspects of the old West), the wild Frontier that surrounds it must be dealt with, and the only way to deal with it in a way that allows civilization to exist requires brutality, racism, and a deep drive for vengeance.

Ford accomplishes this through an astonishing and underappreciated technique that Shakespeare is known for: he sets up a subplot within the main plot and uses the tension between them to make his point. No other film except for Powell and Pressburger’s sublime The Red Shoes uses the technique of tension between two stories to the same effect. Throughout the film he communicates his message through a juxtaposition of images of the outside and the inside, of the frontier and civilization. The opening shots are remarkably effective at establishing this: in the way the camera emerges from the house into Monument Valley Ford initiates his film by showing the audience the crossing of the threshold. The homestead is an oasis in the desert that surrounds it and in his shots Ford sets up the image that he will circle back to throughout the film: the image of civilization surrounded and threatened by the wilderness. In the long shot across the desert to the burning homestead, imitated in countless later films, most notably Star Wars, Ford sets up the inciting incident in the plot as an instance of the Frontier winning its battle with civilization and sets up Edwards’ quest as a fight against the danger of the Frontier that is omnipresent in the classical Western.

He punctuates this thread, the story of the ruthlessness of the West and the ruthlessness of the successful fight against it, with seriocomic interludes of home life, of views of the civilization that Wayne is trying to protect. Many critics have commented correctly that these scenes feel remarkably out of place, and even that they feel more like parody of the Western than the quintessential and extraordinary views of the West that Ford constructs around them. Roger Ebert’s comment is that many scenes feel more at home in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers than in a John Ford Western. In doing this, I think that Ford, to borrow Jonathan Rosenbaum’s phrase, has failed as a storyteller consciously in order to succeed as an artist. These scenes must feel out of place, because Ford’s point with them is in their juxtaposition, in the tension that is created with the Ethan Edwards plot. In the latter he gives us an unflinching view of the brutality that permeates the Frontier and the murderous, genocidal methods necessary to attempt to control it. Of course quaint love triangle scenes back at home feel ridiculous when compared with this. Ford highlights this ridiculousness because it is the most powerful manifestation of his recognition of how untenable the classical Western had become. In these scenes he poses us the rhetorical question, “How can we make films about the civilized aspects of the West; how can we make films that show love made all the more rustic and thrilling by a surrounding danger when all around them that danger is being checked, that civilization is being allowed to exist, through viscerally harsh means?” The final shot, then, the mirror of the opening, is, when seen through this light, one of the most brutally damning of all. Outside is the wilderness of the frontier, it says, kept at bay, as we have seen, by a racist fanatic slaughtering Indians. That is what allows the quaint civilization here inside to exist, and when the door closes and Wayne has been welcomed inside, it represents not only on the surface a final demonstration of the humanity that the Ethan Edwards character has found, emotional and masterful in its own right, but also beneath that a palpably rueful, nervous demonstration of the inevitable unity between tame and wild. Ford has made it impossible to continue making films about the quaint tameness because it necessitates an acceptance of the methods with which that tameness has been preserved. This is the most radical and the most modernizing aspect of the film.

And that is not to say that the surface tale is not worth of attention and fascination and admiration. It is. In it Ford has given us one of the greatest humanist tales of the cinema. In tandem with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Welles’ Citizen Kane, it offers the greatest and most heartbreaking examination of a man’s loneliness, an unfulfilled desire for love, acceptance, or redemption, ever committed to film. Ford remained a devout Roman Catholic throughout his life and had a huge influence on Martin Scorsese, possibly the most Catholic filmmaker to ever live. The Searchers is one of Ford’s most Catholic films, and had an inexpressible influence on Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Scorsese’s single most Catholic film. The two offer deal with the exceptionally Catholic themes of guilt and especially redemption through violence. They both conclude with inexpressibly powerful images of their lonely main character’s redemption and their acceptance by civilization. Scorsese accomplishes this by the extended fantasia that follows the gruesome climax in the brothel; Ford accomplishes this in a single shot. From the very first shot, interiors, roofed areas, have served as symbols of the society and civilization that struggles to survive in the West. When Ford gives us the shots of Wayne’s redemptive moment (his unification with the freed Debbie), he significantly frames it in a desert cave. Death and rebirth are the primary framing themes of the story, and in the use of Ford’s favorite hymn, “We Shall Gather At the River”, at both the funeral and marriage scenes, he unites these themes with water in a Catholic way exemplified through the sacrament of Baptism. Ultimately, The Searchers is a magnificent tale of a man determined to find his own humanity and as a result achieve the acceptance by society he desires. Ford pulls this off magnificently and layers beneath it one of the greatest and most revolutionary examinations of genre ever contained in a narrative film.

I began this essay with a discussion of the photography of The Searchers, and it should be noted that even if The Searchers was not so rich of a source of thematic depth and complexity, it would still be worthy of reverence due to the photography alone. The astonishing beauty and complexity of the photography has been rivaled by few films in the history of cinema.

Just as with the plot, the key to the photography is juxtaposition. One of the most interesting of these is the juxtaposition of scenes shot in a highly naturalistic way with scenes shot in a very expressionist way. There are two main instances where Ford does this: the sequence of the assault on the homestead and later the Rangers’ first attacks on the Comanches. The scenes where the men pursue the perpetrators of a cattle raid, are all shot obviously on location and are lit by the shining sun ahead. Monument Valley itself is magnificent in the background and Ford goes mainly for evenly angled and documentary realism in lighting the landscape shots that mainly comprise these sequences. But they sandwich the scene that takes place at the homestead. In contrast to the naturalism that surrounds this scene, Ford goes for unrealistic exaggeration of the colors of the sunset and provides obvious manipulation of his lighting to throw up terrifying, oppressive shadows on the cabin walls and lowers his camera to give a few glimpses of Kane-esque oppressive ceilings. Similarly, after the assault on the homestead, when the Texas Rangers go in pursuit of the Indians, Ford starts off and ends the chapter of their initial pursuit with breathtakingly beautiful but clearly naturalistic, on-location landscape photography. But in between these scenes he has one scene of a night time raid on and Indian camp that is filmed in a vein that is anything but naturalistic: in the background there is a matte painting and there is obvious external light shown through the artificial fog to similarly create a dazzling and portentous shadowy atmosphere. This juxtaposition serves to enhance the effectiveness of the expressionist scenes. They seem all the more claustrophobic because of their placement in between wide-open realistic landscape shots of Monument Valley. This use of photography is very interesting in the way that it very effectively highlights the strengths of both approaches. He demonstrates that often “fakeness” and an abandonment of reality is the often most effective when creating tension and conveying fear or some otherwise disturbed psychology, as Hitchcock shows with this approach in Marnie. Similarly, he shows that location photography and naturalistic photography is unrivaled in its ability to establish atmosphere and provide context for a film, as well as demonstrating the potential of landscape photography to offer some of the most beautiful sights in art.

Within these on-location landscape sequences, Ford makes use of the juxtaposition of two ways of filling space and showing motion. Just as before, the use of these two techniques side-by-side serves to highlight the effectiveness of both of them. The first, which is the technique that had the greatest influence on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, is to begin with a long shot of the vast desert landscape scattered across which are tiny figures placed towards the background, which gradually move towards the foreground and gradually grow and grow until they fill the space. Such a shot is incredibly effective at establishing a feeling of the sheer immensity of the desert, and is extraordinary at forging the image of the frontier as a force that envelops the struggling settlers that is key to his commentary on the romanticization of the Frontier. These long takes are also effective at letting the extraordinary beauty of the shots themselves sink in. Throughout all of subsequent film history, filmmakers have tried to achieve the same staggering, monumental, breathtaking  effect that Ford calls out effortlessly in The Searchers. Undoubtedly we would have never seen Omar Sharif emerging from the heat that wavers on the edge of the horizon of the Jordanian desert in Lawrence of Arabia if it was not for Ford’s shot of John Wayne emerging from the heat that wavers on the desert of Monument Valley. The second way Ford shoots landscapes in The Searchers is through a technique that he had already used to great effect in previous films, especially Stagecoach, that of cutting quickly between long shots (but not long takes) of the landscape with small figures and close tracking shots of those figures hurtling along at top speeds. In The Searchers, though, he does this with masterful effect, possibly the greatest effect he ever achieved with this technique. I’m always struck by how much both of the shots that comprise this technique are constructed with a highly conscious eye for composition. It is clear when watching that Ford has designed these tracking shots with the intention not only that they be thrilling (which they certainly are) but also that they do not sacrifice effect for beauty. As such, we are treated to remarkable images such as a herd of buffalo scattered in a frenzy, throwing up snow in their charge and framed against a wistfully blue sky, and Texas Rangers riding for their lives in the foreground while discernable in the background are the Comanches who pose the threat.

Indeed, all of Ford’s compositions are astonishing in their mastery. Time and time again Ford creates compositions that are both distinctly modern in their depth of focus and interaction between foreground and background while still retaining strong roots in classical tradition. Edgar Degas, in particular, is the artist to whom Ford seems to be the most indebted in the way that he constructs his shots. When not shooting expansive landscapes, Ford returns again and again to shots of figures that are aligned on diagonals distinctively not in the frame but in the space itself, with the most lateral figure also the closest and featuring receding depth moving sideways across the frame. This use of “spatial diagonals” is a quintessential feature of Degas’ painting, who also pioneered the Impressionist habit of not showing the most lateral figure in the composition in full. Ford often frames his figures in the same way, and in many of his shots the figure that is side-most and closest to the camera is cut off partially.

Here is supposed to be several images of Degas paintings and Searchers screenshots. Alas, they cannot appear here.

Note the framing and use of the space. The beauty and aestheticism of many of Ford’s shots derive from solid roots in classical composition.

The final element of Ford’s photography that makes it so brilliant is his use of color. Shot in widescreen in the VistaVision format, first used only two years previous in White Christmas and brought to prominence the previous year with Robert Burks’ Academy Award winning cinematography in the process for Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, Ford takes advantage of the rich colors the process provided. He uses color mainly, again, to delineate between the harshness of the wilderness and the quaint comfort of the home. In contrast to an almost exclusive use of faded, warm, yellow-based colors in his outdoor shots, most of his indoor shots feature breathtakingly rich, saturated colors that are far cooler and make more use of green. By doing this, Ford is able to do two things very effectively: first, he is able to establish atmosphere very well, conveying with color the harshness of the frontier and the cool, relaxing, quaintness of civilization, second, he is able to once more create conflict and tension between those two aspects of the film through juxtaposition of not only content but also of color; the cool, refreshing feeling we get when we move indoors in part due to the coolness of the colors is effective at creating the out-of-place feeling we get when watching those shots: rich, saturated green does not belong in a world that everywhere else is faded and yellow.

Ultimately, John Ford’s The Searchers still stands over fifty years later as an astonishingly fresh, modern take on the Western. It’s thematic complexity is endlessly fascinating and it provides some of the most emotional and moving depictions of loneliness and humanity lost and found ever put down on film. The depth of its plot is astonishingly complemented by breathtaking and truly beautiful photography that invigorates classical form with modern application. It will remain forever as one of the most important landmarks in the history of cinema, a film that was one of the most important acknowledgments of the slow death of the classical Western as well as a film endlessly influential and endlessly imitated, although only a few of its admirers (Lawrence of Arabia, Taxi Driver) have rivaled its brilliance. In a career so rife with masterpieces, The Searchers will live on as one of the most masterful in John Ford’s oeuvre.

Rome, Open City

Out of all of the extraordinary filmmakers that emerged from Italy in the post-war years, collectively known as the Italian neorealist school, I think that my favorite has to be Roberto Rossellini. Rossellini made films that are astonishing portraits of life as it is, with attention to delightful nuances that lend all of his films a remarkable sense of familiarity, as if the viewing experience has been with us forever, because, in a way, it has. He was termed by Jean-Luc Godard the “Father of the New Wave”, and in his humanist portrayals, incredible sense of rhythm as far as editing is concerned, and a masterful ability through misé-en-scene, lighting, editing, and acting direction to convey utterly full characters and wonderful, heartbreaking, mesmerizing portraits of what life really is, he was not only a synthesis of the outpouring of poetic realist ideas that immediately proceeded him, but a key influence on a wide berth of world cinema for decades to come. To once more quote Godard, “Roberto Rossellini Prefers Real Life.”
If I was forced to chose just one Rossellini masterpiece to accompany me to a desert island, I would have to chose his 1945 film Roma, citta aperta (Rome, Open City, referred to from now on as Open City). The first film in his noted War Trilogy, which includes Paisa (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948), Open City is arguably the best and certainly the most famous. It displays all of Rossellini’s greatest qualities: strong performances, fluid, rhythmic camera movement and editing, magnificent understatement, and above all, unflinching honesty.
The scenario, based on real events, is a straightforward but effective melodrama that explores many of Rossellini’s favorite themes, such as betrayal and loyalty as well as a sense of the ethics of dying that shows up in Germany, Year Zero. The main story surrounds Don Pietro, a Catholic priest in Rome during the German occupation who is a supporter of the Resistance movement. This brings him into contact with both Giorgio Manfredi, a condemned leader of the resistance who is seen at the film’s opening fleeing the police, and his friend Francesco. A lesser director than Rossellini and a lesser scenarist than Federico Fellini would have turned this into a routine chase film but it becomes clear after Francesco’s wife is shot by the police and Manfredi’s girlfriend betrays Manfredi, Pietro, and an Austrian defector that the focus of Rossellini’s drama is the priest, and his obligations and the source of his resistance.
Rossellini is one of the most underrated directors of actors. All of his films feature fantastic performances that are skillfully directed, and yet he consistently goes overshadowed by greats such as Elia Kazan. Open City is no exception to this trend. The acting perfectly enhances the overall beautifully realistic attention to detail of the film and gives it a new dimension of subtlety. Take the scene where the German Gestapo commander is torturing Manfredi in front of the priest and confronting the priest about his lack of informing. Instead of attempting to create false tension through the artifices of montage, Rossellini keeps the camera in a medium shot on Pietro as the reaction to what he sees creeps into his face. Aldo Fabrizi as the priest allows us to see more than just disgust, more than just a generic dissatisfied expression, on his face, but in one of the more courageous moments in a remarkably courageous performance lets us see the deep pity that he feels, and even towards the end of the shot if we look into his eyes we see guilt. It is at this moment that the exceptionally cruel, unfeeling, repulsively racist Gestapo officer cuts in to capitalize on that exact guilt, and the dialogue is all the more powerful for us having seen it in Pietro’s face. He confronts him and accuses him of betraying his priestly duties by refusing to inform and thus save Manfredi from torture. He furthermore accuses him of helping atheists, who he declares his enemies.
At this point, Fabrizi delivers probably the most important line of dialogue in the film and the line that sums up what Rossellini is trying to say with the film. Slowly but confidently Fabrizi declares that the resistance fighters, though predominantly atheist, are on the path of God because they chose to help others. Through Rossellini’s slow camera movement that actually helps to center focus on Pietro as well as the stellar but unobtrusive use of shadow that not only draws the eye to Pietro but establishes mood also, coupled with the captivating, subtle delivery from Fabrizi, the audience is drawn into the line so much that the point is delivered effortlessly.
This moment really demonstrates one of the most admirable qualities of Open City and indeed the entire Italian neorealist movement: the films utterly reject artificial tools to create effect and instead rely on the strength of their image and portraying their image in a way that’s as direct and undiluted as possible. Rossellini clearly understands that the role of the filmmaker ought to be to create effect through technical wizardry but to supply information in the most clear and believable way and in the most effective sequence. Rossellini is clearly among the group of great filmmakers among whom are Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock, who in their films place us into a world and then let the world itself create emotion, effect, and impact.
The use of the film itself in Open City is a perfect example of this. Observing the way the film stock is used to create a more convincing, documentary-style image of the world serves as an incredibly timely reminder in today’s world where the use of actual film is slowly being abandoned for digital. Open City is an astonishing reminder that when a film is shot, in addition to on-set factors in construction such as lighting and camera movement, the actual film itself is vital in creating effect and creating the film’s world in a more immersive way. Although there are exceptions, most notably Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, there are few modern auteurs who give a conscious mind to the use of film stock.
One of the most interesting parts of Open City is that while it is often heralded rightly as a quintessential example of the Italian neorealist style, it is more psychological than most films of the movement, by which I mean that it features Rossellini more consciously using his construction to bring us into the mind of a character rather than an objective reality. This is probably best demonstrated once again in the scene at Gestapo headquarters. As I previously stated, Rossellini lights the scene in such a way that it allows the audience to come to understand both the character and the situation better as we observe the insecurity that Pietro is feeling and which he projects onto the walls of the room, an insecurity that could betray both fear and doubt. Coupled with the subtle use of upward-facing shots of the Gestapo officer, Rossellini once more accomplishes his purpose as filmmaker by not inserting himself like a prism and offering us his interpretation of the scene, but rather by giving us information, by allowing us to enter the world of the images Pietro sees and letting the images speak for themselves. Rossellini is able to show us a character’s mind through elements of shot construction in a way that is both informative, effective, and unobtrusive, with mastery surpassed in my opinion only by FW Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Hitchcock.
In addition to these influences from the German Expressionists, Open City demonstrates the massive influence that Jean Renoir had on the Italian neorealists. Renoir’s Toni (1934) has been called by some the first neorealist film, and that particular film did have an instrumental role in the birth of Italian neorealism not just because of its distinctive and highly influential style but because of the influence on Italy in particular through the use of on-location shooting in Italy and a cast and crew comprised on many Italians, most notably Luchino Visconti, later to be regarded as one of the greatest of the neorealists as assistant director. Rossellini in Open City is clearly indebted to Renoir in two main ways: the widening of the frame through panning and tracking shots as well as the precision and rhythm of his shots, both in his editing and how they are constructed. When one watches Open City, one observes a very Renoir-esque consciousness with regards to what is shot where the emphasis of a shot is as much on what is in the shot as on what is outside of it. As Renoir masterfully and importantly articulates in The Rules of the Game, the camera doesn’t so much reveal what it shows as mask what it doesn’t; camera movement in the best of Renoir as in Open City is a process of revelation, of unfolding a world in a specific, precise fashion but ultimately recognizing the futility of any attempt to go beyond showing the viewer what the director wishes them to see. As Martin Scorsese says, the purpose of the director is to translate words into images, to give the audience the images that are necessary to impart to them the director’s personal vision and the visual information necessary to create emotional impact. Renoir is rightfully well-known for the revelatory way in which he shoots, and Rossellini is clearly influenced by this. It should be noted that Hitchcock was simultaneously and independently developing these ideas concurrently with Renoir; ultimately it could be argued that in films such as Psycho and Marnie he even mastered them to a level not seen in Renoir. It merely is more likely that Rossellini would be more familiar and consciously influenced by Renoir due to factors described above.
The other significant influence of Renoir is in the humanism with which Rossellini portrays his characters. It is striking to see a film such as Open City which so boldly rejects the idea of an innate tendency for either good or evil in a particular nationality or religion: both explicitly and indirectly Rossellini demonstrates the potential of all to fight for justice. Not only does he do this in the key monologue by Don Pietro mentioned in the scene I describe in detail above, but in other instances as well. As mentioned above, he includes a depiction of an Austrian as a noble defector. He even goes so far as to include a scene at length where a high-ranking German officer viciously assaults Germany for her idea of a master race and her brutality, which he ultimately condemns as pointless. In this speech, sublimely directed by Rossellini to show that this drunk man is speaking his mind rather than engaging in drunk fantasies, Rossellini achieves a rare delineation between nation and nationals: while decrying Germany’s imperialist and racist policy over the last three decades, Rossellini shows a sympathy towards the people of Germany and even in the character of this officer the potential for the German military to “walk down the path of God”, in Don Pietro’s words. This sort of all-encompassing humanism is an omnipresent characteristic of Renoir’s work. This delineation that Rossellini makes in specific is a key feature of the genius of Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. Again, though, Rossellini might have been influenced somewhat by Hitchcock, whose Lifeboat, made the year before, includes a similarly sympathetic portrayal of a German.
Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City remains today one of the most moving, profound, and pure masterpieces of the cinema. It is highly recommended to anyone who has any interest in film, or is looking for an unforgettable artistic experience.

Les Vampires

In 1915, a French director named Louis Feuillade made a film whose influence and complexity and brilliance is only now fully being grasped. A crime film to rival, if not surpass, the likes of the Godfather, Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties, or GoodFellas, Les Vampires is a strikingly important source text for the cinema of the 21^st century. The plot is too complicated to accurately sum up, but each episode is another part of the chronicle of the investigation of an often hapless journalist, Philippe Guerande, into the crimes of a shadowy, sinister organization known as the Vampires.

A ten-part serial film, with each episode averaging around 40 minutes, it was made after the wild popularity of Feuillade’s 1914 serial Fantomas and was released in parts throughout 1915 and 1916. When one watches it, it’s remarkable to observe that Feiullade was pioneering many cinematic innovations contemporarily to DW Griffith, and applying them in an arguably more effective manner. Instead of just close-ups on faces, Les Vampires also uses close-ups on objects, or shadows, or locations to communicate information visually in a way that obviously had a remarkable influence on Hitchcock, and if a memorable sequence towards the end of Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is any indication, is still having an influence today.

Hitchcock was not the only major filmmaker influenced by the work. It had a tremendous impact on the German Expressionist movement with its dark worldview and use of chiaroscuro lighting with beautiful use of shadows in many shots; of all the filmmakers of that movement, Fritz Lang was undoubtedly the most indebted to the work, visible especially in his underappreciated Spione and more famous M. The offbeat, sly social commentary on the nature of the auteur’s home city and woefully ineffective police are just some of the features the latter film shares with Les Vampires.

It even anticipates both the more contemporary Greed and the later Citizen Kane with its masterful deep-focus compositions. At many points Feuillade’s command of deep-focus mise-en-scene is truly astonishing and lends to the work the complexity, subtlety and ambiguity that well-done deep focus shots can contribute. The contemporarily controversial sympathetic portrayal of criminals anticipates such works as Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux as well as lending a fresh modernism to the work that makes it engaging even today, almost a century later.

All of this is not to suggest that Les Vampires ought only be seen for the tremendous space it occupies in film history. It is a fantastic and highly entertaining work to watch on its own right. Daring chases over the rooftops of Paris are as suspenseful and thrillingly shot as the opening sequence of Vertigo, taut poisoning scenes told from the gangsters’ perspective creates a wonderfully unsettling moral ambiguity, and the ineptitude of Guerande and the police and the social extravagance of his friend Mazamette as well as the special treatment they receive from the police are bitingly satirical and still relevant and witty even today. In an age where blazen polemics like Griffith were rewarded, albeit for works as great as Intolerance and A Corner in Wheat, it’s refreshing to see that Feuillade had the courage to keep his social commentary subtle. And of course, it’s impossible to say too much about the brilliant performance from Musidora as the femme fatale leader of the Vampires, Irma Vep (an anagram for vampire).

It’s hard to make the time to see an eight-hour film nowadays, but thanks to our modern technology its possible to view the film per episode, which is much more manageable. The suspense, dark humor, and delightful Buñuel-like illogic that is nevertheless digestible, fraught with rings that kill, kidnappings, and secret passageways reminiscent of the film’s labyrinthine narrative are sure to reward your efforts.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are the two greatest films that have the courage to admit that they are just that: films. When one watches Discreet Charm one gets the sense of exactly how much fun Buñuel has making films. There’s a sense of joy, of exuberance at being able to do everything that the film does, in addition to the joy that he obviously gets from creating such sharp, brilliant humour. Ultimately, the film’s message is that we’re being fooled: by religion, by social structure, by ourselves, and by this film.

Buñuel once said that the only rule he and Salvador Dalí followed when writing that masterful short film Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel’s directorial debut, was that nothing could be included if it could be subjected to rational interpretation. Though he obviously had come along way from the days where he tried to make a film that didn’t mean anything, during many sequences in Discreet Charm it’s possible to see his lingering fascination with the essential meaninglessness of film as a medium. He uses nonsensicality and ridiculous events to draw attention to the fact that he always found so intriguing: just as there was absolutely no reason why the ambassador of the fictional country Miranda would pull a gun on a new acquaintance as a dinner party in his dream, at its heart there’s no reason why anything in film has to follow what came before. He especially loved the fact that when there’s a cut, all bets are off. In Un Chien Andalou, he has a sequence where a biker crashes, and a woman then looks out her window. He draws attention to the fact that there’s no way of knowing that the woman looked out her window because of the biking crash, it’s just as likely, he implies, that the woman is looking out her window for the hell of it, and just happens to see the man there. In the same way, in Discreet Charm, he mirrors his nonsensical events with manipulation of cutting techniques to subtly convey his message about film and let the audience in on what he sees as a brilliant prank. The best example of this occurs deep in the film. After the six friends who are the main characters of the film finally sit down for a meal after many failed attempts, a military unit bursts into the dining room, claiming that they came to the house a day early because of a change of plans.  After one point, there is a shot of one of the women standing, then a deep still close-up on her, then a shot of her sitting. You can almost hear Buñuel laughing and saying, “See, I got you there! You assumed that the second shot was right after the first, but you had no way of knowing that it wasn’t later, after she was seated.” In fact, you can “almost hear” Buñuel laughing many times during the film for a similar reason. My favorite is when the Mirandan ambassador springs awake from his dream that ended in him being brutally murdered while scoffing food cowering beneath the dinner table from the assassins who have already shot down his friends, a scene which provided absolutely no indication of its oneirologic nature, and is so captivating that you become glued to your seat. In the shot, the ambassador is reminded that he was only dreaming, and the audience is reminded that it’s only a film.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is probably Buñuel’s most  political film. In addition to the brilliant social commentary and humour, he also aims his camera at those in authority, and he does it with incredible sharpness and wit. He targets the police, with a horrific dream scene where the police chief sees a sergeant with a terrifyingly bloody face slowly drift through the prison and unlock every cell, freeing the prisoners. He targets those in administrative positions, revealing the hysterical antics of the Mirandan ambassador and his cocaine dealings with his friends, and his encounters with a young female would-be-assassin that include sexual advances and much pistol-wielding. But most brilliantly, above all, he targets the church, with his bishop character as his prime tool. Easily my favorite scene in the film is the scene when the bishop is summoned from his position as the estate’s gardener to give last rights to a dying old man near the main characters’ estate. He hears the man’s confession, where he confesses that he killed the bishop’s parents in a murder which the bishop previously had mentioned had never been resolved. The bishop quietly absolves the man, finishes the ceremony, walks up and over to the other side of the barn where the scene takes place, takes a shotgun, and fills the dying old man full of bullets. It’s jarring and hilarious simultaneously, with an idiosyncratic grace.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is obviously the work of someone who had dealt with hypocrisy so many times that he knew how to incinerate it. Luis Buñuel was clearly a man like that. After being expelled from his native Spain for many years, finally readmitted and told to make the masterpiece Viridiana, he saw it banned until the fall of Franco some time later. He clearly had a score to settle with establishment, and in Discreet Charm he settles it with a precision, cleverness, and wit that is still marvelous today. His technical mastery only seals the deal, using masterful too-close ups to disguise scene changes and to comment on the desire to be larger-than-life that his targets possess, and using Kubrickian receding shots in medium or close-up to disguise the nightmare into which one of his characters have wandered and to make the shock of its revelation all the more shocking. The key to his films is a key that was present, perhaps not as intentionally, in much of Leone: what the character sees is what exists, and what the character sees in what’s in the camera’s frame. Buñuel is very economical with how he shoots his scenes, he never tries to go for a sweeping overview of the characters’ world all at once, but he builds it bit by bit, letting the joke go on as long as it can by not giving it away too soon as a lesser director might do. Ultimately, he leaves us with the greatest joke of them all, one with no punch line, just a shot repeated for the nth time throughout the film, of the six friends walking down an unidentified path, toward an unidentified destination. That’s the brilliance of the film, though. By giving us questions without answers, Buñuel teaches possibly the most important lesson of the film: the question is what’s hear, now, and we should focus on that, instead of the intangible answer in the future.

Travis Bickle and Jesus

High-school age Martin Scorsese always had wanted to become a Catholic priest, but something got in the way: his love of cinema. So he left behind his aspirations to join the clergy, went to NYU to study film, starting down the road that eventually led him to Taxi Driver. Nowhere is the influence of Scorsese’s fierce Italian Catholic upbringing and priestly passion more evident than in this film (even more evident, it could be argued, than in The Last Temptation of Christ); it’s somewhat ironic that a film that is so notorious for its violence and disturbing film could be a masterful synthesis of Catholic religious images into a profound and unsettling depiction of the storms of a man’s turbulent soul.

Though if one is to examine screenwriter Paul Schraeder’s screenplay by itself, the primary influence is definitely John Ford’s The Searchers, both with a military veteran protagonist who goes on a violent quest to rescue a young girl from sexual mistreatment at the hands of those seen as morally and racially inferior, the influence on Scorsese’s final direction of the film is definitely distinctly Catholic, not as much theologically, but in the imagery and the themes. It’s fascinating how much can be gleaned from such a cryptic film by looking at it though this lens.

At its heart, Taxi Driver is a portrait of a single man, Travis Bickle, and his struggle in enduring a world populated only by those he sees as scum. He angrily wishes that someday God would send another flood to cleanse the streets, and pleads with the presidential candidate in his cab to, if elected, do something about the parasitic subhuman immoral filth that he sees dwelling all around him. By the end, he triumphs with an action traditionally seen as moral only when done by God: taking life. In a swirl of violence and death, he tries to achieve redemption, for himself and Iris. It doesn’t matter what she wants, or what anyone wants, because he has made himself a god, and he does what he sees as necessary.

Redemption is a theme that is present not only in Taxi Driver, but in practically every single Scorsese film. Taxi Driver is perhaps the film that embodies it most completely, because of Travis Bickle’s bizarre thirst for it. He wants redemption, not only for himself, who he sees as having done nothing significant and desiring to take some sort of action, not only for Iris, who he sees as enslaved by what he seems to view as the worst possible crime imaginable, prostitution, but for the city of New York as well, the whole human race, for that matter. He sees the whole human race a devoid of any sort of morality, any sort of compassion or sense of right and wrong. The only way that he can find to redeem himself, Iris, and the human race of sinners is with his massacre at the brothel. He kills for the sins of the world, and, in the deeply disturbing, infamous blood-soaked close-up near the end of the film, dies for those sins too.

That helps to explain the notoriously cryptic epilogue of sorts. The shots of the newspapers, accepting of Bickle for his “heroism”, the shot and narration of the letter from the parents of Iris, expressing their gratitude, all are a vision, whether dying, post-death, or actual, of Travis’ redemption in his mind. He has redeemed society, and they love him for it, he has redeemed Iris, hence the thank-you note from her parents, and he has redeemed himself, evidenced by his ultimate acceptance by Becky, who previously had rejected him because he took her to a porn film on their date, who now sees him as a man worthy of her, seen as an embodiment of perfection throughout the entire film. He was successful, in his mind, but as we survey the carnage, and imagine ourselves as the police officers gazing on into the room where he lies, we find it hard to grasp it. Is Scorsese making a Catholic comment about the necessity of sacrifice and violence to redeem sin? Is he making a human comment about the futility of all attempts to play god? Is he making an ironic comment about the ultimate failure of Bickle’s life, an objective failure, epitomized in the fact that he is oblivious that outside of his mind his ultimate goal, integration with society, was unsuccessful? We may never know.

The most fascinating part about Taxi Driver to me has always been the horrific inevitability of it all. Just as it was Jesus’ prophesized duty to die for the world’s sins, Bickle comments before he goes to his attempted assassination of the presidential candidate that his entire life had been building up to this moment, that this is his destiny. I think that here, there is little ambiguity: Scorsese is mocking those who believe so vehemently in destiny with his demonstration of such a brutally psychotic conclusion to such a belief, and also indicting society for bringing a man to a place where he has no point but to go ahead with his murderous rampage. Scorsese’s craft is to make the film so tight, so meticulous, that there is no other way, and we want to deny the inevitable conclusion, but by the end it is inescapable.

Taxi Driver is wonderful because it provides a worthy viewing experience regardless of whether or not you try to analyze it, probe it for the ever-elusive final statement, or just enjoy the film, absorbing Bernard Hermann’s beautiful score, the captivating cinematography, the colors of an urban wasteland as Scorsese presents it, the surrealist touches of water on a taxi cab mirror, the subtle brilliances that make a Scorsese film such a unique experience. Either way, it’s incredible.

I Vitelloni

Now here’s a fascinating film. I Vitelloni was Fellini’s first real commercial success, and it is one of his least known films. Greats of the stature of Stanley Kubrick have called it the greatest film ever made, and yet it’s constantly overshadowed by Fellini’s later films, especially La Dolce Vita and 81/2. It’s really a pity, because I Vitelloni is an absolutely brilliant film, every bit those films’ rival, and even (in my humble opinion) better than La Dolce Vita (though I still love it).

Part of the reason why I love it so much is its honesty. Few films nowadays are as unflinchingly autobiographical, and self-deprecating. And the self-deprecation isn’t always humour. The scene where Fausto is beaten by his father for having a one-night stand with an actress when he is married to another woman is every bit as beautiful and heartbreaking as anything in Truffaut’s equally autobiographical and equally masterful The 400 Blows (indeed, the best of the drama can be summed up as what would happen if Antoine Doinel found good friends in his early twenties). It is remarkable how easily Fellini can transition from neorealist drama to whimsical humour of the type that later became his trademark, and in the effortless blend of the two he is able to capture in a painfully sharp way all the joy and all the brutal suffering that is present in becoming an adult. The film is a comedy-drama, but none of the comedy seems false or present because it’s a comedy, and none of the drama feels like it’s there for false emotional effect. It’s there because humour and drama of the subtlety and depth that is present in I Vitelloni is present in real life, and by showing the good, the bad, and the ugly of his own young adulthood, he creates a portrait of universal life so rich and so true that he surpasses many of the Italian neorealists that he admired so much.

I Vitelloni does not fall into the trap that many so-called “comedy-dramas” do, the trap of treating each aspect of the film separately. Many members of the genre have stretches of the film where it is solely comedic, followed by a stretch which is solely dramatic, and so on and so forth, creating a remarkably disjointed and sometimes jarring feel when seamlessness is required. I Vitelloni is seamless. I noted before that the film’s brilliant realism comes from its ability to effortlessly transition between comedy and drama. But really it’s more than that. The film often contains both comedy and drama in the same shot; like most situations in life, the situations in I Vitelloni are both hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. Consider a shot, one of my favorites in the film, where Leopoldo, the artistic, poetic member of the band of friends, runs away from his idol, a far older man, because of romantic advances. You laugh, because of the situation, but at the same time, there is something inside of you that cannot help but feel sorry for the disillusionment of the young man at the shattering reality that his idol is not the perfect man that he imagines.

I Vitelloni is certainly a realistic film, but it is not realism. There is one major axiom that Alfred Hitchcock set out regarding his view of realism in the cinema: drama is life with the boring bits cut out. Fellini’s brilliance in this film is to give the viewer an incredibly entertaining experience by giving them life with the boring bits cut out, and yet at the same time give them something that is still unmistakably life, real life, true life, Fellini’s life, and as we laugh and cry at the piteous young men trying to find there place in the world, we realize that it is all of our lives as well.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Rebuttal

I know that many of you will inevitably hate me for this, but I have to come clean: I do not like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No, not just the 2003 remake, but the original film, the 1974 exploitation classic that has been termed the “Great American Horror Film.” I know that I am in the gross minority, and so I have seen fit to write something expressing my opinion, and defending that opinion. Here it goes.

What makes a film a great film? Influence, certainly. Craftsmanship, of course. Acting goes without saying. A great score? Yes. A great plot and screenplay? Most definitely. And now, here comes the thorny issue: morality. What? A film does not exist in a vacuum? No. I apologize, but it does not. When evaluating whether a film is great, a moral aspect must be taken into account. I have a hard time saying that, but when it comes down to it, it is what I feel. Now, there will be the inevitable cries of “What about The Birth of a Nation? The Battleship Potemkin? Aren’t these morally despicable films?” These are great films, and I dare you to disagree with me. The Birth of a Nation I can regard as great, and not just because of the Civil War sequences, pre-Klan. That from a technical aspect it is a great film is indisputable, as it was a masterful synthesis of everything that had come before into a universal Language of the Cinema, standardizing the tools in a directors box and making new innovations left and right. The moral aspect is more complicated, because while the film is certainly racist, it does not know it. In 1915, racism was not a household word. That DW Griffith made Intolerance a year later, which is an indictment of racism and was made in response to critics’ assaults on the Birth of a Nation to me shows that he did not understand what he was doing, or how racist he was being. Though it is painful to watch, it is still a great film, and it deserves to be seen more than it is, because it is fascinating, and brutally well-constructed. The Battleship Potemkin is more complicated. Is government controlled art still art? I think that it is, and this film is a great example. Yes, it was commissioned by the Soviet government to galvanize support for a regime that was guilty of millions of deaths. It was propaganda. But what propaganda! It was brilliant, and a great film, because content aside, it was Sergei Eisenstein’s experiment in his theories of montage technique, and in it he proved dramatically that juxtaposition and rapid cutting can create emotional effect, and he was able to use that later in his Ivan the Terrible films to indict tyranny and Stalin. It also hints at Eisenstein’s disagreement with the policies of the rising Stalin, when the man who cries “Kill the Jews!” is rebuked. Now, bringing content back from the side, it still is not necessarily a film that is immoral because it is just harmless anti-Tsarist, pro-Marxist filmmaking. It did not glorify the Holomodor, and it actually indicts injustice very, very powerfully using the incredibly technological innovations. It is very thought-provoking, which is always nice to have in a film. So, am I saying that all films that could be contrived to have a bad message are awful, detestable films? No. All that I’m saying is that if you make a film with an evil purpose, designed to communicate a message or create an emotion for which there is no need, and then leave your audience out to dry, not giving them any thoughts to contemplate, only blank emotion that will soon fade, no matter how well you make it, I will never consider it a truly great film. As will all absolute statements, there are exceptions, where a film must be considered great because of its historical importance, and I mean in general, not just in the history of film, but not great in the sense that it is commonly used, or the sense that I normally use it.

And now we get to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Can someone tell me the purpose of this film? Was it to horrify? I wasn’t horrified, because I was too busy being disgusted. Was it to disgust? If so, that’s a despicable purpose for the film. There is no deeper thinking that it provokes, there is nothing that captured my interest on a deeper level than the level of revulsion, there is nothing that I can find in it other than nihilism. I think that my point is best made through comparison with Hitchock’s Psycho, a film to which it is often compared, both because of influence and a killer loosely based on Ed Gein. That is not to say that I think that it is a bad film because it does not compare to Psycho, universally agreed to be one of the greatest films ever made. I merely think that the contrast with Psycho illuminates the source of my dislike of the film and why I think it is not a great film. Psycho is certainly the work of a technological master. The shower scene is an application, coincidentally enough, of the Soviet montage theory that Eisenstein pioneered that surpasses many of the achievements of the Soviet filmmakers themselves. Hitchcock, as he told François Truffaut, in Psycho was “playing the audience like an organ.” The audience, as he said, enjoyed the film because they were “aroused by pure film.” People enjoy films that make them think, as the psychological element of Norman Bates, captured in arguably the greatest villainous performance in film history by Anthony Perkins, certainly does. But more than that, people enjoy to feel a cold chill crawl down there spine, to be made to lean forward in one’s seat in anticipation, to be thrilled, and even horrified, shocked. The genius of Psycho is that its goal is precisely that, to thrill the audience, to give them food for thought and adrenaline, not to disgust. Hitchcock understood and was endlessly fascinated by the ability of a moving picture to impart such a profound emotional impact on his audience. And people enjoy being played like an organ. When one watches a great horror film, they should, somewhat counterintuitively, enjoy it. If this was not the case, then horror films would not be made, because people won’t pay to see a film that they cannot enjoy. I know that I love the feeling of being so horrified, held in such suspense by a master, that I have to keep watching, to find out what happens next, to get more of the thrill, the adrenaline that a good horror film or thriller promises. I love the aftermath just as much, where I am left to contemplate the psychological aspects of the film, to contemplate what exactly the auteur’s message was, to contemplate evil. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I did not get those feelings during the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Every time I actually decided to pay attention to the paper-thin plot, I felt pure disgust. It was painful to watch. Was the film effective? It depends on what is meant by “effective.” I think it’s most productive to treat that question synonymously with “was the director’s purpose accomplished?” Psycho is an effective film. Hitchcock’s purpose was to deliver a compelling dose of thrill, horror, and intrigue, with black humour to keep it from becoming too oppressive. Hitchcock practiced the Shakespearian tradition of requiring something to lighten the mood. Now, I do not necessarily agree that every dark film must have something to lighten the mood (if I did, I would certainly not rate the Shining my favorite horror film). In fact, I think it should only be done if it can be done in a way that does not shatter the emotional impact of a film, which Hitchcock always was able to do. It can be used, however, to actually strengthen a film’s impact by making it less overwhelming, a lesson the filmmakers behind the Texas Chainsaw Massacre obviously did not learn. But I’m getting off-topic. I think that judging on how apparently meticulously atmospheric and constructed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is, it is an effective film. If this is true, the filmmakers’ purpose was incredibly ignoble, detestable, even. It means that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a disgusting, nihilistic film that seeks to impart disgust and nihilism to the audience. There is nothing to enjoy about it, nothing that it makes you think about, and therefore no reason to see it. It is not like the Shining or Psycho, which captivate you and make you contemplate their psychological intricacies and moral implications. It is not like the Seventh Seal, which is not a very happy film, and does not seek to be, but is incredibly artistic and one of the most thought-provoking and beautiful films I have ever seen. It is disgusting, and all too effectively so.

Well, there you have it. I realize that many people will disagree with this, and it may cloud your opinion of me. Oh well. I needed to vent. Please note that while I appreciate comments, I would prefer if they weren’t like “Who are you to judge whether a film is immoral or has a bad purpose or not?” or “If the filmmakers did what they wanted to, who are you to say that’s a bad thing?” You are missing the point.

NB: If you comment with one of those now, you are not clever. You are stupid and have no friends.