Some Came Running
The full capability of CinemaScope is fulfilled through Minnelli’s classicism, which introduces an impeachable formal unity – bodies becoming focal points for the movements of camera and occupying the edges of frames without being out of focus – that confronts the ostensible social unity. Everyone in this utopian-like technicolor middle-western town knows about each other and are completely settled in their personal ideals. With the entrance of Sinatra and Maclaine as outsiders, corruptions within smaller social units are revealed and the larger milieu are barely sustained through pure mise-en-scène. There’s a degree of similarity to the materialist prison of Sirk – a comparison raised by Rivette when he claimed this film has no one behind the camera compared to Sirk’s works – through all the lavish decors inside mansions where the drama unfolds. But whereas the fatalist tragedies of Sirk are often accompanied by an humanist zeal trying to condemn the social prisons, Minnelli here seems to use the formal equilibrium to delineate the shape of this prison through an objective lens. Emotions do not suffice in dictating the images; the melodramatic dramaturgy is contained within a void formed through the consistent distance maintained between actors’ bodies and the camera, and the film’s fatalist path is obfuscated by a lack of narrative conflict. So in this sense, the absence of a voice behind the camera is what makes this film much more fascinating. It accrues to a feeling that everyone in this film seems to be afraid of touching upon what is the most dysfunctional within themselves. The long takes ultimately collapsed into the montages at the town fair that possess a completely quality to the rest of the film, and the ending is almost Mizoguchi like in its reliance on impermanence.
Run of the Arrow + The Big Red One
Two films by Fuller, both about the impossible it is to end wars. The axiom presented in my favourite of his, Crimson Kimono, that the eyes can never penetrate the heart, so we may all live in the purgatory of prejudice. In the opening of Run of the Arrow, Rod Steiger’s agony against reconciling with losing the Civil War was so intense that it was unbearable to watch. Then, in The Big Red One, Fuller filmed the unwatchable and the unfilmable, the concentration camp; it felt like the world stopped right there in those soldiers’ reaction shots.
Wife! Be Like a Rose! + Morning’s Tree-Lined Street
With the current ongoing season of Naruse on 35mm prints, it feels ironic that two of my favourites are ones watched on YouTube. The irreconcilable distance between hearts. Naruse externalizes the unspoken by blocking conversations with physical barriers and often cutting to low-angle shots outside homes in his découpage. The most visually striking example is how, through a wide shot of Oyuki’s home during nighttime, the emotional distance between Kumiko and her father’s other family is revealed through the physical distance between them. The middle section in the mountains is so beautiful and elegiac that it reminds me of Ford for some reason.
Morning’s Tree-Lined Street is kind of like the reverse of Wife! Be Like a Rose! that sees a young woman going from the country to Tokyo. The images of Tokyo take on a symphonic beauty as seen from Chiyo’s innocent, wide-eyed perspective. It then focuses on the dilemmas of becoming a bar hostess, a role in which work opportunities for women are extremely limited. But instead of a social issue, it is projected through Chiyo’s subjective lens, where fate has not yet been settled, unlike her cousin (or sister? I forgot) or those in the news. Naruse shows the complexity of the situation by introducing fractures within shot-reverse shots through intentionally breaking the 180-degree rule. The drama is quite slight until it develops into one of his most formally complex films. The ending is one of Naruse’s happier ones, but also one filled with ambiguity and dread for the precarious future. A flower petal afloat in the water, carried by the stream, directionless; the sky is wide open, so it also means that nothing’s given.
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