Horror = expressionism

Cat People (1942), is a seminal horror film for three reasons; it is the first produced by Val Lewton, and because it was produced by Lewton, a sensitive soul who eschewed Universal-style monsters, Cat People emphasized (a) scare sequences using the power of suggestion and (b) horror based on everyday fears, insecurities and neuroses.

Horror stories are always ridiculous, which does not make them less compelling. Nowadays, when we know longer believe in fairy godmothers, frog princes or walking mermaids, we happily exchange stories of vampires, zombies and malevolent space aliens, all of which are equally impossible and fantastical as the fairy story characters we've discarded. I suppose in the first half of the twentieth century, monsters were like wicked foreign countries declaring war from somewhere afar, and we need only kill them as soon as they get close enough. Today our worst enemies spring from our own families, or worse still, from the inside of our own heads, and we must not go outside, or up the stairs or fall asleep, lest we be overtaken.

And while Cat People is not the first psychologically based horror film (we know of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) at least, it brought the trend into the mainstream in the 1940s, interrupted briefly in the 50s for space aliens who represented communist invaders, only to roar back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the monsters were our friends and neighbors, lovers and spouses. Whatever, the theme, horror is the genre that takes the invisible, the unspoken, the suppressed, the unseen, the inner state and renders it into a visible, audible tangible form. Where the Lewton films broke away is by providing the least amount of visual and audio information possible and requiring the audience to supply more of the connection between the real horror inside and the melodrama outside.

Cat People is the great grandma of the modern style of horror. Put aside the fantasy element about turning into a cat--this is a story about a woman raised to believe that sex will destroy her and the man she makes love to. Seems contemporary, that "sex is bad" thing. It's the basis of almost every teen horror movie since the 1970s. The old horror films may not be frightening anymore, but they are disturbing and sometimes even shocking. (Certainly the lesbian undertones of Cat People are unmistakeable and unsettling even today.)

In the clip posted above, starting at about 4:55 or so is the beginning of the most famous sequence in the film, referred to in 1952's The Band and the Beautiful, excerpted in Martin Scorsese's Journey Through American Film and weakly imitated in the 1982 remake. A woman is terrified by her own fear that her sexual rival has the power to transform into a large killer cat. Note how benign each separate shot in the montage is, especially the shots of walls and corners. Also how ominous the echoing dripping water. Sadly, the person who chopped the film up for YouTube did not let this sequence run to its payoff, when the swimmer discovers that her terry robe has been torn to shreds, as if by the claws of an immense cat. This sequence made audiences scream aloud in 1942 and 1943. Maybe it won't have that effect on you, but viewed with the proper respect in the right circumstances, it should at least creep you out.

Under the definition "sophomoric"

I haven't seen many films by Godard, but I've stumbled over a lot of writing about him. Godard is a filmmaker about whose films it's better to write and analyze than to actually see. The fact that self-identifying intellectuals see them as important and ground-breaking speaks to the bankruptcy of modern intellectual life.

Godard is whining about the same banalities of the petit-bougeois life that his ancestors were doing 250 years earlier. And none of it is remarkably different than what most adolescents spew between the ages of 16 and 19. It's just that the rest of us grow up and develop a more balanced life (the adolescents would say we "sold out"--I should only have been so lucky as to have sold out), while intellectuals like Godard stay frozen.

Here are the themes laid out in Godard's best-known polemical film, Weekend (1967) (Breathless is better known and more popular, but it does not have a coherent political program): capitalism and the middle class worship possessions; materialism is soul-destroying; consumerism is death-obsessed; all of the above destroy relationships between people; we need to recognize our common interests in the class struggle; collective action may not work because of human needs and jealousies.

Is any of this news to you? It was to me when I was a teenager. And I still deplore the emptiness of capitalism and materialism to deliver true happiness, peace or understanding, but I'm no longer indignant about it, nor convinced that I have made an utterly unique discovery. This is the journey every generation makes, and how we accomodate those discoveries defines our era. I suppose in 1967, this was au courant, but it seems especially juvenile today.

Nonetheless, Weekend is mostly arresting to look at, until its last third when it dissolves into a series of long Marxist monologues that seem at first to be satirizing left-wing extremism, until it dawns on the viewer that Godard means it, and that he is just another crank on the corner, spewing that 9/11 was a goverment hoax, like the moon landing. But before that, there is the famous traffic jam, the casual and unexplained burning wrecks, the nursery rhyme characters, the burlesque murders, one of which seems to be burlesquing Psycho and a lot of fun collegiate nihilistic hijinks. As a prank, Weekend can be enjoyed as a bit of juvenalia. But as an art object to be enjoyed, savored and delved for its depth of expression--I leave that to the most trite and shallow people in our society today--college professors and film reviewers.

The illusion of synchronized sound

Watching What's Up Tiger Lily (1966) in Film Studies should remind us that everything we hear on the soundtrack of a film is contributing to an illusion--the illusion of continuous time and space. Virtually every American commercial film will have some dialogue replaced due either to technical or editorial considerations.

WUTL is just more honest about it. This is the film in which a producer hired Woody Allen to take a pre-existing Japanese-produced James Bond-type thriller, strip off the soundtrack and lay in a completely new one. The effect is similar to when you and your friends turn the sound off the TV and make up your own dialogue--provided your friends are really smart and funny.

I will not recite the jokes--you can read them elsewhere in the World Wide InterTubes and besides, you should just enjoy the movie on your own. But I am always struck by one of the smartest and most insightful jokes, which is itself both a comment on the nature of English syntax and our understanding of symbolic language. At one point, a villain points to a small diagrammed floor plan of a rival's home and says, "This is Shepherd Wong's house." Hero Phil Moscowitz asks, perplexed, "He lives in that piece of paper?"

There are symbols upon symbols here. Not only has the first speaker elided words when he actually meant, "This is [a map of] Shepherd Wong's house;" but the map itself is an extremely abstract object, being a two-dimensional representation of the house--not even the house as it appears to a viewer, but a representation of an imaginary view of the house, as if the house were being viewed from above with the roof lifted off. Yet we can communicate easily without having to explain all those levels of abstraction.

Which is appropriate for a medium which requires that you take a group of two-dimensional images and electronically recorded sounds, all registered at different times and places, observe them when they have been placed in proximity of each other, and interpret them as events which bear some relationship to reality as we experience it. Which is weird, right?