We’ve been absent from Arthur for a few weeks, but a lot has been happening. Here are the details on our upcoming screenings, this week and next.
Made In U.S.A.: Crime’s Reflection
We’ll conclude our series of crime films with a film that takes an entirely detached and self-reflexive position in relation to the conventions of the genre that it employs. Godard’s rarely-seen 1964 film Made in U.S.A. is, expressly, a political film, a labyrinthine mystery about the death of a leftist radical – the lover of Paula Nelson (Anna Karina), who takes on the persona of a private detective in her search for the truth of his death.
Godard constantly plays with cinematic conventions, diverting our attention away from the plot by treating it as a medium for reflection rather than as something to immerse oneself in. Narrative tension and drama are eschewed in favour of active reflection on the part of the viewer
– Brechtian distancing effects abound – and the film becomes less a detective story and more a reflection on the nature of the detective story. Later in his career Godard would speak of cinema as “une forme qui pense” – a form for thought, a form that thinks – and this film from Godard’s earliest period shows that Godard was already trying to realize what he saw as cinema’s ultimate potential.
Godard’s film is radically different from the two preceding crime films in our series, which are in turn widely divergent from one another. Hitchcock’s Rope is a filmic experiment and morality play which deconstructs the logic of the sophisticated criminal with the privilege of taking life. Melville’s Le Samourai grasps at the aesthetic perfectibility of crime, both in its lead character and in the film’s formal execution. Godard’s film uses cinematic aesthetics to make its audience reflect on our ordinary engagement with cinematic aesthetics, and in doing so it confounds all notions of what a film can and should be. But while it is a somewhat heady film, it plays at being the opposite: a Cinemascope, Technicolour extravaganza with big stars and bright colours.
The Young and the Damned: Luis Buñuel in Mexico
Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (aka The Young and the Damned, 1950) is driven by an exhibition of the lower depths of society, on par with Maxim Gorky’s play and Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of it. We see in Los Olvidados a group of Mexican youth forced into crime by their abject poverty, centering on Pedrito and Jaibo (the crab). Pedrito, unknown to him at the time, leads a young man to Jaibo so he can settle a score. The vicious Jaibo assaults and kills the young man while Pedrito stands a helpless witness. Jaibo then blackmails Pedrito, saying horrible things will happen if the crime is revealed to the authorities. The rest of the film then follows the innocent Pedrito and the indignities Jaibo inflicts upon him and his family.
With a glimpse of “anguish and despair” in the slums of Mexico City, Buñuel does not present viewers any sense of hope. Los Olvidados was filmed with hints of Italian neorealism and much like Nagisa Oshima’s Boy, screened earlier in the year, a cold, cruel amorality in regards to crime, class division, and exploitation. “[A]bove all and more noticeable than anything else,” notes J. Rubia Barcia, “is the absolute absence from the film of reason, of moral feeling, of true religion, as if the two thousand years of Christianity had not existed at all, even in its formal aspects.” So shocking was this production that the tragic ending needed to be reshot as a happy one, and further, Buñuel was scrutinized as a foreigner for painting Mexican life falsely, i.e., in its squalor and wretchedness, or so Mexican censor boards said.
“Los Olvidados is without a doubt the best of Buñuel’s pictures and only the future can say whether or not it is also one of the best of our time. For the general public, to see it once will be more than enough. The catharsis in this film can hardly be endured; it will remain a long time in the memory, like a nightmare.” J. Rubia Barcia wrote these words in 1953. A screening in 2012 secures Los Olvidados a spot amongst the best in the history of cinema.
Trent Film Society presents Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. on Wednesday, February 15, and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados on Wednesday, February 22, both at 8pm at Artspace, 378 Aylmer St. N. Admission is free.
