Six from the 60s: surfing the new wave in search of love, hate, jazz and jokes
For reasons too obscure to go into, I’ve spent the last six nights watching a film a night from the sixties. Specifically: six films from six different countries with — loosely — a bit of a nouvelle vague feel. Yeah man, I’ve been surfing the international new wave from the comforts of my very own sofa.
Anyway, this is what I watched (in this order): The Structure Of Crystal (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1969), Love Is Colder Than Death (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969), Accatone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961), Love At Sea (Guy Gilles, 1964), The Woman With A Knife (Timité Bassori, 1969) and Onibaba (Kaneto Shindō, 1964). Name six better films! Well, don’t, but still, these half dozen films were each great in their own way and, while I’m nothing but an ill-educated MUBI subscriber who never even goes to the cinema these days, here are some quick thoughts on these six films.
They run the gamut from neo-realist melodrama (Accatone) to a bleaker-than-bleak anti-humanism (Love Is Colder Than Death). I found Accatone excellent in many ways — Franco Citti’s slouchingly handsome performance, the dusty, rubble-strewn streets of Rome’s depressed outskirts, the cars whizzing about on a few new-looking roads — but messy and even slightly predictable. A “charming” pimp comes to a bad end after crashing from one disaster to another: who’d have guessed? But the film has some memorable moments which definitely transcend simple melodrama. There’s a particularly good extended section where Citti’s character (Accatone/Vittorio) dreams he’s in a sort of purgatory state, watching on as his cronies attend his funeral. He’s also one of the mourners. Suddenly decked out in his funeral suit and struggling to keep up with the mystfyingly inscrutable funeral cortège, he’s already dead but he doesn’t yet know it. Or maybe it’s his way of life that’s dead — the ducking and diving of his accatone (scrounger) habits? Meanwhile, Fassbinder’s Love Is Colder Than Death also centres on a pimp’s life but here it’s completley different. Whereas Accatone is hyper-emotional (he’s often shouting and cursing at his bad luck), Fassbinder’s pimp, Franz — played by Fassbinder himself with all his customary greasy, swaggering and thoroughly indolent anti-charm — is a fascinatingly emotionless thug. Via his virtually wordless sidekick Bruno (seemingly a rather brilliant pastiche of Melville’s Le Samouraï in his overcoat, fedora and ominously zoned-out ways), Franz oversees a little orgy of casual violence in the streets of Munich. Bang, bang — another dead person, no blood visible. While Accatone frequently rages and cries in Pasolini’s film, Franz is usually expressionless or icily sneering. It’s extreme and vaguely comic. Here I don’t think Fassbinder is just subverting Hollywood noirs — I think he’s also having some fun with Godard and Truffaut’s own parodying of classic gangster films.
So yeah, Accatone to Love Is Colder Than Death is quite a journey (most likely one being made in a stolen car). The other four films are, so I like to think, little diversions along the way. The Structure Of Crystal is nearer to Accatone in its realism, though far more polished and naturalistic. It’s a close study of two (nearly) middle-aged men hanging out and discussing high-minded stuff about how to live. It’s all very Chekhovian (a key reference point in the film) and it has nowhere near the “busy-ness” of any of the other films. But, and here I think there’s a link between all the films, there’s often jazz music playing on the radio in the isolated country house where the films set. And the film is quite heavily scored with jazz or stuff adjacent to jazz. Andrzej Żarnecki, who plays the visiting big-city professor Marek, also has a vaguely mod-ish wardrobe, which — to jump back to Pasolini — even the raggamuffin Accatone has traces of, with his almost feather-cut hair style, his scruffy but tightish suit trousers and his black knitwear top. Cut to Timité Bassori’s The Woman With A Knife and you’ve got some of the same things — a jazz score (the central character even listens to jazz in his bachelor pad in downtown Abidjan) and a thoroughly “cool” post-Blue Note vibe: narrow suits, white shirts and ties, dance parties, smoking aplenty.
OK, man, I’m in danger of going down a “all these films are indebted to Miles Davis” route. Madness! But still, even the magnificently gothic grotesquery of Kaneto Shindō’s Onibaba belies its fourteenth-century setting with a jazz score infused with taiko percussion — not to mention amazing electronic whispering and animal noises reverberating through the sinister high-rise reeds of the film’s unforgettable location. This film also pulsates with not-so-repressed sexuality (the erotic other to The Woman With A Knife’s uptightness) and I guess the film represents sixties sexual liberation (so-called), with its plentiful nudity and carnality — albeit a rather weird erotica amid all the murder, medieval spears and Noh masks. There’s no irony here though — it’s dark and deeply serious.
Finally, what about poor old Love At Sea, which I haven’t even got around to mentioning yet? Well, this another great — and apparently unsung — film. Featuring two men unsure of their directions in life (the opposite of the far more established Marek and Jan in The Structure Of Crystal) and a woman doomed to be disappinted by her infatuation with one of them, this is a heavily discursive film about life, love and … city life — namely Paris and Brest, which both feature prominently. Love At Sea has some classic nouvelle vague touches — multiple playful switches between black and white and super-saturated colour, those little camera-lens-closing-in-on-one-spot moments, and, yes, lots of jaunty music, including some lush horn-led jazz sequences. It’s equal parts nostalgia (though for what?) and in-the-moment sixties swing. The film is finally about an emerging bond between the two men (sailors stationed in Brest) which is shown to be greater than the flimsily conventional romance between one of the men (Daniel) and the secretary in Paris (Geneviève) who is besotted by him.
So there you have it — my six from the 60s. Final thoughts: there’s very litte humour in these six films. In The Woman With A Knife the central character (played by Timité Bassori himself) is disarmingly non-macho, self-critcial and almost amusing. The film is “light” in tone but it’s not actually comic at all. And nor are any of the six films with — dare I say it— the partial exception of Love Is Colder Than Death. Here, Franz — in his tight, zipped-up biker’s jacket and shoplifted sunglasses — is a chubby bully-boy who’d happily shoot you if it meant he he could get on the fairground ride ahead of you. With its Tarantino-esque indifference to violence (but without the horror-relish) and with a default setting at always-misanthropic, I think Fassbinder’s film is the one of these six that comes closest to the darkly comedic. Af the end of Accatone the unlucky pimp Vittorio is injured in a motorbike crash as he tries to flee the police and his final words are that he’s now finally at rest (sto bene), now that he’s apparently about to die. Soaring music from Bach brings the film to an abrupt but emotional end. In Love Is Colder Than Death, Franz the affectless pimp also ends the film trying to escape the police. Driving a getway car heading out of the city, his long-suffering girlfriend/sex worker Joanne (played by the amazing Hanna Schygulla) reveals she’s already betrayed him to the police. There’s then an immensely long pause before Franz finally spits out “Whore!”, the very last word in the film. Then, in the version I watched anyway, there’s peculiar jump-cut to the speeding car seen from some distance away, another pause and then a long shot of a bleak wintry countryside as classical music plays. The scene is sustained, not chopped off like Pasolini’s finale. Franz’s misanthropy is all-consuming but maybe there’s still something funny and even beautiful about it if you look at things the right way.
