Daisies (1966, Věra Chytilová)

Teeming with silent-era affectation and ebullient editorial handiwork, Daisies conceals political allusions beneath slapstick and stylistic extravagance, transforming mischief and chaos into egalitarian protest. Weaponizing art and femininity against the constraints of a communist state, Věra Chytilová championed technique and aesthetic as personal catharsis, deriding the feigned unity of collectivism by revealing the pleasure in independent creation.

Eschewing the conformity of narrative, Chytilová constructed a quilt of images and symbols, tampering with the origins of sound by replacing its natural cadence with clanging gears of war. The opening credits are powered by militant bugle and churning mechanism, punctuated by abrupt silences that lend an eerie calm to footage of detonating bombs and airborne fire fights. Her human avatars (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) are just as robotic as her machines, creaking like unlubricated hinges with each gyrating limb or swiveling head. She allows the ticking of a clock pendulum to spur her puppets into motion, shifting between lens filter and setting to mirror their physicality.

Transitions are jarring and without precedent, employing the score as onomatopoeia in an experiment with tone and texture. Pigments shift from pink to orange to green as jump cuts dash through dining sequences, condensing the superficiality of small talk into forgotten moments between sips of coffee and cigarettes. A postprandial train ride even transforms into an impressionistic painting, as radiant tones trail behind the caboose like bleary neon lights on the tracks.

Chytilová finds freedom in this artistic frivolity, utilizing semantic games buried within her images to impart meaning, applying sharpened scissors as the literal and a flatbed film editor as the figurative. Anarchic visions of rapidly-diced eggs, bananas and sausages act as an affront to the biological necessity of sex organs, defacing the pragmatic restraints of the nuclear family and demanding autonomy by force. Shears even dissect bodies into pieces like a butcher’s cleaver, leaving superimposed limbs and heads to ghoulishly dance about the screen, calculating human value by the sum of its anatomical parts. The transgression of the content is even strong enough to alter the form, resulting in a dissection of the image, dissolving it into contorted, rectangular blocks within the camera eye.

In a final act of defiance, the director and her fictional peers find transcendence through gluttony and vandalism, shuffling off the plow lines and coaxing the image to polychromatic life by gorging on pheasant and ripping the chandelier from the ceiling. Through this host of recurring symbols and mutinous declarations, ranging from the captive beauty of the butterfly to the vulgarity of indulgence, Věra Chytilová inserts her interchangeable pranksters into the harnesses of radical socialism, marvelling as their indomitable spirit prevails in the face of an automated society.

Daisies (Barrandov Studios, 1966)
Directed by Věra Chytilová
Written by Věra Chytilová (story/screenplay), Ester Krumbachová (screenplay) and Pavel Jurácek (screenplay)
Photographed by Jaroslav Kucera

Walker (1987, Alex Cox)

An act of transgression under the guise of truth, Alex Cox’s Walker adulterates textual history with spurting blood squibs and proleptic product placement, slaughtering the sacred cows of colonialism’s past with the media tactics of the distant future. Through William Walker and his thuggish Central American wanderlust, Cox unearthed the perfect preamble to U.S. involvement in the Nicaraguan Revolution, parading out every display of brutality as a sardonic analysis of military occupation and an erudite, if faintly smug, excoriation of celebrity.  

Revelling in the clash between the sincere and the sarcastic, Cox impregnates mannered performances and ornate parlors with screeching violin and shouted dialogue, mocking the propriety of period filmmaking by drowning it in its own embellishments. Every setpiece is slightly askew, contaminated by contemporary curse words and vivid fits of carnality, transforming the glory of war and grandeur of politics into a mess of strewn corpses and vociferous bluster.

The juxtaposition of this brazen artifice atop genuine moments of tenderness forges a tonal incongruity, accentuating the contrast between the director’s stylistic excesses and the intended progression of the narrative. When viewed in isolation, spirited signing and intimate gesture shared between soldier of fortune William Walker (Ed Harris) and the hearing-impaired Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin) fosters profound emotion, but seeing these passages interspersed with the overarching product’s stilted political rhetoric and sly spoofery exposes their dubious nature, squandering Martin’s disability as a facet of the film’s endless cavalcade of quirks.  

By sacrificing integrity in the name of symbolic innuendo, Cox better serves his obsession with popular culture, repurposing Walker’s sanguinary seizure of Rivas as an exercise in spaghetti-western parody. Through persistent use of extreme close-up and balletic violence, the chaos of battle is transfigured into a surreal soap opera, untethering further from reality with each subsequent double-cross and public execution.

As El Presidente struts through combat unharmed, like a spectre, backed by the disjointed piano and haunting throb of Joe Strummer’s score, Cox forces the chronology of time to fray, inserting modern commodities into antiquated scenarios. The shock of Walker gorging himself on his enemy’s organs and the folly of a silver Mercedes speeding past a horse-drawn carriage function to destroy the languor of the biography, corrupting cinema much like the protagonist corrupted language and politics. By fashioning an absurd presentation to match an equally absurd situation, Alex Cox exposed the barbarity of “Manifest Destiny” by dragging it into the limelight, making a belabored point even less subtle by amplifying it to a deafening volume.

Walker (Universal Pictures, 1987)
Directed by Alex Cox
Written by Rudy Wurlitzer
Photographed by David Bridges

A Knight’s Tale (2001, Brian Helgeland)

Blithe humor and a sense of chivalrous adventure exalt the whimsical A Knight’s Tale above the grim “realism” of its counterparts, capturing the zeitgeist of the Middle Ages without allowing the propensity for violence to overshadow the evolution of character. By substituting classic rock and contemporary arena culture for omnipresent barbarity, Brian Helgeland has transformed the period piece into pop confection, demonstrating the analogous nature of history instead of exploiting cultural differences at the behest of latter-day sanctimony.

Beyond his playful injections of anachronistic ephemera, Helgeland manages to insert his source of inspiration directly into the action, personifying Geoffrey Chaucer’s irreverent, innuendo-laden authorial voice through Paul Bettany’s magniloquent and sarcastic performance. Not unlike Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reinterpretation of Chaucer as amused overseer in The Canterbury Tales, Helgeland treats the father of English literature as charlatan and gambler, plying his poetry as master forger and hype man for a peasant in knight’s armor.

Masquerading as a jouster for filthy lucre and the affection of a modish sport enthusiast, William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) rides in place of his deceased liege, falsifying “papers of nobility” and a globe-trotting backstory with the help of Chaucer’s flowery boasting and a forward-thinking female blacksmith. Despite a painless ascension to the top of his field, conflict ultimately contaminates William’s “rags to riches” scheme, embodied by a ruthless blueblood (Rufus Sewell) keen to bed his object of affection (Shannyn Sossamon) and act as the classist thorn in his blue-collar side.

Spiking these well-worn narrative tropes with comedic levity and editorial flair, Helgeland avoids slipping into self-seriousness by allowing William’s squires to act as the chorus, their jests and squabbles furnishing the film’s bouts of slapstick and covert attempts at profundity. Their sincerest moments stem from immense loss, as recollections of fruitless affairs pepper William’s letters of love, revealing that a lifetime of servitude even renders memory as property of the kingdom.

This adherence to honest portrayals of fictional characters imbues the central romance with the self-absorption and cruelty common in youthful courtship, failing only when confusing submission with endearment. Bouts of dissent between the couple also merely function to intensify passions before a rousing Londonian finale, standing out as erroneous and overly emotional in the face of Helgeland’s jocular employment of cliché (see turkey leg vendors, joust hooligans, “the wave”).

Yet, for every familiar story beat and err in judgment, Helgeland boasts a marvel of imagination, epitomized by a ballroom dance sequence that fuses maneuvers of ancient refinement with the liberated, sensual grooves of David Bowie’s “Golden Years.” This marriage of organic majesty and conscious artificiality reflects modernity in thought instead of superficial appearance, drawing parallels outside of era, carried within the strands of our DNA.

A Knight’s Tale (Columbia Pictures, 2001)
Directed by Brian Helgeland
Written by Geoffrey Chaucer (“The Knight’s Tale”) and Brian Helgeland (screenplay)
Photographed by Richard Greatrex

We'd like to thank Kiss Them Goodbye for the high-res screengrabs!

Marie Antoinette (2006, Sofia Coppola)

Brimming with effervescence and ingenuity, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette fuses the lust of teenage rebellion to the baroque architecture and ideological rigidity of Versailles, building anachronistic parallels between punk-rock aesthetic and aristocratic opulence. Though power chords and petits fours bear little semblance, Coppola uses both to reveal the bonds inherent in juvenile frivolity, aligning Madame Déficit’s passion for pastries and champagne to 21st Century neophilia. By drawing allegiances between time, place and social class, Coppola has made a spirited recreation of Marie’s ascension to adulthood, satirizing female subordinance by viewing it through the archaic edicts of the French monarchy.

Emigrating from her native Austria to strengthen alliances with the Ancien Régime, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) stumbled into maturity at an accelerated rate, climbing from biological adult to queen to mother at the behest of a conflicted and impoverished France. Strapped with an often contradictory set of rules and utter lack of privacy, the Dauphine was stripped of her Germanic identity and canine companion, only to be occupied by a coterie of virulent critics, each spouting barbs like Macbeth’s hags, but draped in embroidered gowns and drunk on carbonated libations.

Her only defense against the monotony of the “morning dressing ceremony,” which bears an audience worthy of the theater, is a healthy dose of adolescent sarcasm, met only by context-deficient adherence to tradition or willful indifference. Her equally green husband, Louis-Auguste (Jason Schwartzman), shares this passive noncompliance, preferring a locksmith’s hobby and the morning fox hunt over fulfillment of his marital duties. Despite a shy demeanor and courteous nature, his puerile fear of mating puts Marie’s future at risk, making each evening of abstinence a step closer to annulment and expulsion. Coppola visualizes the future queen’s crippling anxiety from atop a balcony, panning back gradually to use the immensity of the structure to dwarf her diminutive form and symbolize her impotence in the face of sovereign ritual.

Forcing motherhood upon her with extreme prejudice, the royal court uses Marie’s femininity as a scapegoat for Louis’ cold feet, perverting their erotic coupling into a game of political cunning. Her budding sexuality is further confused by the Comtesse du Barry (Asia Argento), whose illicit relationship with Louis’ grandfather and open prurience are treated as taboos by the army of chambermaids that primp and perfume Marie for nights of restless sleep. Du Barry’s fashion sense even stands in stark contrast to Marie’s prude pastels and muted blues, boasting dark purples and pomegranates that threaten to upstage the exotic vibes of her primate companion.

Agitations provided by du Barry and the rumblings of gossipy servants only serve to strengthen the bond between our shrinking violets, elevating their fumblings with sexual congress to a more honest and modern point of reference. Their nervous interactions and pleasant quirks of character manifest flesh and blood from historical corpses, lending emotional resonance to Marie’s manic swings in temperament and Coppola’s passion for excerpts of atmospheric new-wave.

Coppola soundtracks our protagonist’s impetuous fits of spending with the fizzle of champagne and the teasing prance of Bow Wow Wow’s take on “I Want Candy,” transforming the extravagance of retail therapy into sexual placebo. As frocks and half-eaten eclairs are hurled to the ground in dizzying montage, polychromatic plates of macarons and rows of backless mules shake along with the drumbeat, gyrating in a jerky shuffle reminiscent of stop-motion animation.

Cinematographer Lance Acord ups the kinetic ante even further during the Parisian masquerade sequence, taking a page from The Leopard’s formal decadence and heightening the energy to a frothing lather through dazzling hue and subtle flirtation. Marie’s wandering eye echoes the motion of the camera and ecstasy of the evening, glancing southward and delicately stroking her bottom lip to communicate urges to a salacious Swedish count (Jamie Dornan).

Their brief tryst is pure schoolgirl fantasy and Coppola pairs their thrusting hips and vigorous kissing with throbbing percussion and soft, airy photography, tempering the authenticity of the set design with an oneiric, subjective haze. By gently removing the action from reality and avoiding overtly-modern edits and story beats, Coppola keeps her knowing glances on the score and screen as subtle indicators, allowing each metachronism to project, but never cloud the crux of the narrative. She masterfully handles spectacle and authorial theme, never allowing either indulgence to corrupt a lesson in innocence sacrificed at the altar of experience.

*Author’s Note: Kinetoscope Film Journal wouldn’t be possible without the support of my loving wife. I dedicate my 100th review to her and commend her for having such impeccable taste in movies (Marie Antoinette just so happens to be her favorite).

Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures, 2006)
Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola
Photographed by Lance Acord

Lincoln (2012, Steven Spielberg)

Awash in a handsome, sensualized nostalgia, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln flirts with a dramatic solitude outside of his repertoire, briefly nurturing a muted profile of the American Civil War from droll discussion and hazy bedchambers. Daniel Day-Lewis follows suit, capturing the man behind the monument through hung head and restrained sorrow, never bending into impersonation or synthetic mannerism. His humanization of the Abraham Lincoln legend feels like a succinct coda to a momentous career, tarnished only by Spielberg’s inability to remain evenhanded, diluting any attempt at urbanity through false solemnity and trite grandiosity.

Drifting off topic like a sentimental drunk, Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is far more reminiscent than present, decorating his diplomatic negotiations with riddles, quotes and jests, each standing in stark contrast to the gravity of the political climate and frankness of his advisors. Spielberg uses his emotional isolation to depict a life in extremis, forging a man of “semi-divine stature” before moonlight, eulogizing his achievements in the earnest recitation of Union soldiers and reverent glances of White House servants. Ironically, the strongest demurral to Lincoln’s piety stems from his own family, reflected in a son’s distaste for social class and wife’s overwhelming grief, which pools over into passive-aggression in the polite company of a White House gala.

Janusz Kaminiski delicately encapsulates Mary Todd’s (Sally Field) misery over a departed son into the mise en scène, morphing the sole candle flicker and scant rays of daylight in her boudoir into an eternal séance. His use of restrained lighting also repurposes organic spaces, using dusky blue sky as natural camouflage, alluding to the anonymity of battle by obscuring the faces of exhausted soldiers in charcoal shadow. Kaminski's troops are prisoners within the portrait, just like the weary Mrs. Lincoln, fenced off by acute angles and the stifling claustrophobia of hand-to-hand combat.

The narrative stride mirrors this restraint, diverting only in service of muddled montages, which repurpose bribery and deception as scoundrel’s adventure. Incapable of honing in on the studied pace provided by fascinating passages on presidential autocracy and legal duplicity, Steven Spielberg resorts to blockbuster cliché over deferential facsimile, obfuscating the artful endeavors of his script in favor of moralistic frenzy. His fits of comic relief are just as extraneous, reducing the staid gestures of cast and painterly focus of photographer into portentous wrapping paper on a tawdry gift. The profundity garnered through quiet exchanges, often whispered between forlorn parents and stoic generals, is smothered in crowd-pleasing melodrama, squandering an abundance of aesthetic beauty at the behest of awards and accolades.

Lincoln (Touchstone Pictures, 2012)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Doris Kearns Goodwin (book) and Tony Kushner (screenplay)
Photographed by Janusz Kaminski

Frost/Nixon (2008, Ron Howard)

Lifting the partition between legend and reality, Frost/Nixon treats archival footage from the Watergate scandal as living tissue, allowing snapshots of visual media to impart truth onto a fictionalization. As the film dances between journalistic montage, mock documentary and melodrama, Ron Howard extrapolates personal turmoil from the pages of history, reanimating the iconic figure of Richard Nixon into a reflection of late-century cynicism and human fallibility.

The politics surrounding Nixon’s presidential resignation and subsequent ostracization are merely a pretext for Howard’s fascination with the influence of television, transforming his infrequent fits of moralization into forgivable peccadillos. He structures his exposé like a broadcast news package, swiftly cutting between interview excerpts and meticulous period recreations before panning back to reveal a mirror image on an adjacent screen. By juxtaposing the camera eye atop the naked eye, Howard fashions a metaphor for the infinite access of televised media, evincing the power of the picture tube and its ability to reinterpret fact.

The irony of criticizing the subjectivity of the medium with a feature film isn’t lost on the production team and they reinforce Peter Morgan’s words with robust characterizations, escaping the cult of personality by way of interpretive nuance. Michael Sheen’s portrayal of talk show host David Frost avoids the “white knight” accolades, quivering delicately before the prospect of failing at his greatest endeavor: eliciting an apology from America’s crooked commander-in-chief on national television. Frank Langella’s Nixon is just as anxious and uncertain, paralyzed by his own paranoia, but willing to mask the pain beneath layers of camera-ready bluster.

Both men’s desires intersect at The Nixon Interviews, positioned here as Frost’s ploy for American celebrity and Nixon’s plea for re-entry into the political sphere. Howard parallels shots to draw the leads shoulder to shoulder, marrying glimpses of lifted cocktail glasses and furrowed brows, observing the pair in despondent states of self-medication and internal conflict. Contrarily, the external “battle” they conduct in conversation is tête-à-tête and thoroughly dominated by Nixon’s crude masculinity, elevating each verbal assault on Frost’s “effeminate” loafers and swinging lifestyle to the ferocity of chemical warfare. These hawkish “anecdotes” of militaristic rule, which occupy the lion’s share of their four-part series, only serve to make his undoing all the more tragic, ultimately playing out before his eyes as Cambodian fatalities flickering on an A/V screen.

In a bout of conscience or intoxication, the 37th President shows his hand to his opponent in an unsolicited phone call, compelling Frost to take their dialogue “no holds barred.” As each petty and furious word spills forth from Nixon’s salivant mouth, exposing a wealth of personal insecurities to an equally desperate listener, our empathy deepens, redeeming a black mark in American history by humanizing its culprit.

Frost/Nixon (Universal Pictures, 2008)
Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Peter Morgan
Photographed by Salvatore Tonino

W. (2008, Oliver Stone)

Released in the twilight of George W. Bush’s presidential term, Oliver Stone’s W. works best as an examination of the discord between father and son, exalting universal themes of jealousy and doubt to the theater of international diplomacy. Cursory viewings imply the depth of a crass joke, disfigured by parodic supporting performances and insulting punchlines, which prop up political paragons like statues in a wax museum. Further analysis reveals a cunning compositional strategy, one that fights to humanize the whipping boy portrayed in American media (see Fahrenheit 9/11), mining the depth of his vulnerability for mutual understanding. By draining George’s advisory team of their human properties and lifting his patriarch to the role of deity, Stone establishes the Bush family black sheep as an eternal outcast, confining his wealth of imperfections to an Oval Office inhabited by automatons and haunted by the ghosts of his old-man’s accomplishments.

Abandoning chronology in favor of atemporal editing, Stone constructs an ingenious logic outside of organized time, displaying Bush’s tumultuous past before sprinting forward to expose the resulting psychological bruises in the present. The amorphous nature of the story functions like memory, spawning subplots and tangents from W.’s wandering mind, allowing the triggered emotions of the character to plot the story’s progression. Each recollection even bears the subjectivity of personal experience, building on the transitory state of the figureheads in the opening bureaucratic pow-wow, transforming their enlightened banter into a monotonous drone.

Their topical roundtable discussions, covering subjects as broad as warfare, recoverable oil and terrorism, carry the cadence of sports commentating, dually operating as satire of political gamesmanship and peak into Bush’s creature comforts. By repurposing combat as pastime, the chameleonic George is able to insert himself into his father’s milieu, fabricating a “forever war” to eclipse H.W.’s lack of long-term vision and cement his dedication to global democracy.

Stone often snickers at Bush’s attempts to proselytize in the name of freedom, backing each naive monologue with bursts of the “Robin Hood” theme or hints of Alan Jackson’s honky tonk. These knowing glances are meant to discredit the man, but it’s impossible not to be swayed by W’s sincerity, especially when channeled through Josh Brolin’s ebullient performance and in contrast to the duplicitousness of his cabinet. Stone even relents in the face of Bush’s demons, using a harnessed camera to capture the paralysis of alcoholism and visual symbolism to illustrate religion’s warm embrace, supplanting the judgmental eyes of the parent with a healing glimpse of the divine.

His strongest metaphor is also his most persistent, observed from the outfield of “Dubya’s” dreams. As the Texan ascends the ladder from businessman to governor to president, his slumber finds him shagging fly balls before an adoring crowd, acting as victor in a world outside of class and lineage. The film’s closing passage perverts this fantasy into an ironic nightmare of nonfulfillment, revealing a solitary man scouring an empty stadium, scrambling for a forthcoming triumph that will never descend into his open glove. It’s a disturbing closing chapter for the leader of the free world, exposing power as a paper tiger before the cerebral snare of parental expectation.

W. (Lionsgate Films, 2008)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Stanley Weiser
Photographed by Phedon Papamichael

The Five Venoms (1978, Cheh Chang)

Benefiting from a refreshing lack of subtext, The Five Venoms treats the lore of the Wǔ Xíng as beguiling trifle, costuming its lethal assassins in polychromatic masks, each acting as avatar for the deadly strike of a predatory beast. By obscuring the identities of its malevolent forces, it channels the mystique of serial fiction, treating each minute detail of dress and technique as a building block of the mythology, garnering suspense from the urgency of battle and a sanguinary, gothic interpretation of the duality of man.

Modeling their craft after the fluid gestures of the snake and defensive dexterity of the toad, The Poison Clan possesses an unfathomable power, one so vast that any deviation from sectarial doctrine is a threat to national security. Seeking the hidden treasure of their former masters, the Venoms administer brutality in service of illicit desires, peppering a senescent tutor with enough blows to conjure blood from his lungs. As whirling fists thrust deep into his midsection, swaying in esoteric, indefensible patterns, the Clan paints the elder’s frail torso with purple palmprints, endowing the lifeless husk with a macabre calling card.

Anointing each distinct coup de grâce in opiatic slow-motion, director Cheh Chang repurposes sport as sacrament, heightening acrobatic feats and toxic blows with soft candle glow and pigmented lighting. Sonic cues and weightless wirework even transform the harsh, violent gesticulations into reverie, allowing arched hands to hiss like vipers and nimble figures to balance and repel from bamboo walls.

The fantastical elements only enhance the subtle echo of occult horror, which seeps into combat through the soundtrack, imparting a menacing chill to each ruptured eardrum and act of excerebration. The ascending and descending plucks of violin and deep, ominous fits of xylophone stoke atmosphere out of tight, stone quarters and flickering firelight, fashioning a hollow, chambered drone that would lend its paranoid bent to late-century hip-hop and cinematic homage (see Kill Bill: Vol. 1).      

Despite its bizarre and nearly incongruous pairing of action trope and diabolical dread, The Five Venoms manages to manifest a sustainable universe, one shrewd enough to treat violence as deviant behavior and not the primary language of a dominant protagonist. By bestowing the role of hero on a spectator, brilliantly disguised as the village idiot, Cheh Chang has astutely modeled his comic-book examination of good and evil on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, proclaiming the victor to be the strategist that permits the corrupt and pugnacious to vanquish each other.

The Five Venoms (Shaw Brothers Ltd., 1978)
Directed by Cheh Chang
Written by Cheh Chang and Kuang Ni
Photographed by Mu-To Kung and Hui-Chi Tsao

Heroes of the East (1978, Lau Kar Leung)

In an effort to subvert the single-minded phallocentrism of kung fu cinema, Heroes of the East employs marital strife and misogyny as thinly-veiled metaphors for Sino-Japanese relations, using rival schools of martial artistry as a vehicle for examining cultural diffusion and gender politics. Despite the intellectual heft of its narrative facets, the cataloging of contrasts functions to fabricate a screwball romance, treating sex and race as fodder for comic relief instead of a recipe for discord. The opening fragments even hint at the erotic gamesmanship of a “bodice ripper,” building arousal through playful competition and period-appropriate flute, basking in the bleary light of sconces that adorn its ornate decor. Unfortunately, this ardor builds, but never crests, as subtlety and lust are sacrificed before the tense rattle of combat, surrendering any emotional thrust to the appetites of a core audience.

Finding common ground between the bonds of matrimony and an artist’s devotion to craft, Kuang Ni’s script positions an arranged marriage between a Chinese playboy and gamine Japanese teen as an uncomfortable clash of customs, allowing their diverging forms of fighting to represent their domestic mores en masse. Beneath the patriotic superficialities of their verbal barbs and deftness of their art lies an inequality of the sexes, transforming each exposed inch of Koda’s (Yuka Mizuno) bustline into a libidinal blow far more dangerous than the impact of her judo strike.

Wielding his chauvinistic principles as a means to discredit the legitimacy of her body and budō, Ho Tao (Gordon Liu) treats taut flesh and aplomb as immodest traits for a submissive housewife, forbidding the practice of ninjutsu as a culmination of these duplicitous attributes. Though his rage may signify more about cultural inequality than racism, the plot avoids any cerebral exercises in emasculation, repurposing irreconcilable differences into an excuse for an olympiad of weaponry and technique. Ironically, the character dimensions provided for each tournament combatant, etched onto the screen like the menu of an arcade game, possess more depth than ascribed to Koda, left here to languish outside of the arena as a tertiary participant.

As pure entertainment, each kinetic vignette and magnificent physical contortion work as a distraction from authorial laziness, but abandoning its amatory core breaks faith with any high-minded attempt at sexual or global impartiality. By betraying its better judgment, Heroes struggles to reconcile its incongruous halves, concluding with a glib resolution that makes its stylistic vigor and acrobatic magnificence seem like vain narcissism.  

Heroes of the East (Shaw Brothers Ltd., 1978) 
Directed by Lau Kar Leung
Written by Kuang Ni
Photographed by Arthur Wong

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967, Cheh Chang)

Defining genre like a record label embodies a “sound,” Shaw Brothers Studios and their indelible “Shaw Scope” logo signify a distinctive product, commingling elements of ancient Chinese history and contemporary pop music into an intoxicating cocktail of pure fantasy and warm nostalgia. As the treble-laden reverberation of drum roll and bombastic wail of horn cue a separation from reality, the viewer is transported to a hypnogogic universe outside of time, constructed of ornamental colors and nurtured on archaic nobility, but spoken in an unnatural, asynchronous, English-language voice. The surrealistic properties of these divergent components thrive despite their modesty and artificiality, seamlessly coalescing with the anti-gravity choreography of the martial arts, spawning an action cinema fit for the theater and drunk on the sensuality of acrobatics and operatic gesture.

Distorting the rules of auditory perception, wuxia (Chinese sword-fighting fiction) benefits from an excess of foley work, boasting breathing, kicking and panting that resonate with the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer and guttural grunt of a wild hog. These hyper-realistic sonic properties are accentuated by tight zooms and swift editing, adding urgency to each overstated facial reaction and repurposing vivid fits of violence into the petit allegro of ballet.

Juxtaposed beneath this overstimulated and ceaseless aural onslaught are muted, cerulean scrims and hoary terrain, inspiring a glacial chill and morphing the bones of obvious sets into realms of otherworldly mystique. By constructing an insular environment through obvious artifice, art director Ching-Shen Chen manipulates hue and space to fabricate a broad expanse, using clean lines and deep purples to imply depth and add ceremony to humble surroundings.  

Changes in landscape also function to fracture the action into narrative signposts, condensing complex ideas into tight areas and aligning location with theme through subconscious hinting. Though plot progression isn’t necessarily the focal point of Cheh Chang’s work, often ending up as red herring in an endless parade of spirited sparring, he does understand how the mind operates and he treats each snowdrift and flickering candle as a subtle reminder of grief and loss for his angst-ridden lead.

Bearing his father’s sacrifices at the altar of honor, Fang Kang (Jimmy Wang Yu) wrestles between seduction and repulsion with the warrior’s code, using his confusion over his father’s death in battle as an excuse for continual confrontation. Crippled by seething rage and a desire for vengeance, Fang’s emotional handicap symbolizes the foolish pride of the powerful men that reared him and the severing of his right arm during swordplay externally manifests his cerebral maladies.

Chang’s idealized, nearly pastoral, vision of Imperial China romanticizes Fang’s dismemberment into a marvel of style and vision, simulating the dizziness and delirium of warfare into a swirling kaleidoscope of polychromatic tones, nestling horror just beneath the warm glow of hanging lanterns and frail outline of frostbitten trees. The contrast struck between the aesthetics of his shot composition and viscera of his combat mirror the mentality of his characters, reflecting their antiquated alignment of class, wealth and fighting prowess. By injecting the subversive element of sexuality, Chang signifies betrothal as the remedy for a history of violence, imparting the sentimental sweep of the Hollywood love story into androcentric cinema and giving brutality a fitting rebirth as benign, graceful motion.

The One-Armed Swordsman (Shaw Brothers Ltd., 1967)
Directed by Cheh Chang
Written by Cheh Chang and Kuang Ni
Photographed by Cheng San Yuan

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005, Robert Greenwald)

Eschewing subtlety in a manner that corresponds to the expansion methods of its subject, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price hammers home the ubiquity of the Arkansawyer megachain through rapid-fire montage, using a parade of jubilant adverts and stark parking-lot footage to summarize a clandestine economic coup. Approaching their antagonist through a distinctly subjective point of view, the documentary team obtains statements from ex-employees and disheartened small business owners, sourcing the legwork of economists and reporters through second-generation YouTube clips. The intimacy of the interview segments benefits the narrative progression, but the lack of independent research fosters a discernible imbalance between sentiment and truth, inadvertently transforming each passionate testimonial into fodder for yellow journalism and clickbait-style sanctimony.

Utilizing Middlefield, Ohio as a microcosm for America en masse, Robert Greenwald positions the strategic decimation of the Christian working class as an inside job, exposing Wal-Mart’s core value system as a grand misdirection intended to anesthetize the flock to predatory business tactics. By concentrating on the illusion of piety and contrasting hierarchy of power, Greenwald reveals a culture of intimidation, giving a voice to personnel that suffer through dashed unionization prospects and competitors that struggle to keep their businesses in the black. Through a taut assemblage of archival footage, the editorial staff paints an overarching portrait of collusion between political power and financial wealth, linking government subsidies and tax breaks to a monopolistic market and unemployed workforce.

Adopting community activism as the cure for this corporate cancer, Greenwald relishes in lively b-roll of peaceful protests and fervent oration, substituting a soundtrack of Americana and evangelical platitude for veritable statistics. Though conjecture makes for a compelling argument, insult is far more alluring, and Greenwald shapes his demonization of former CEO Lee Scott into an expeditious bit of character assassination, transforming a noble piece of nonfiction into blue-collar nightmare, replete with reclusive bluebloods and Dickensian misers.

Nevertheless, the passage of eleven years has enabled the affluent to inch closer to absolute power and the laboring class to further sink in a quicksand of mounting debt and misplaced blame, making the film’s penchant for vilification forgivable in the face of forthcoming mercantile turpitude. Virtual industrialization may be held accountable for the demise of the family-owned business, but Wal-Mart’s cheapening of the American workforce is far more conspicuous and rapacious, crippling the proletariat by stripping it of autonomy and agency. If only The High Cost of Low Price had the foresight to scrutinize this forfeiture of independence, instead of distracting from its central thesis by way of cheap melodrama and languorous direction.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (Brave New Films, 2005)
Directed by Robert Greenwald
Photographed by Kristy Tully

Africa Addio (1966, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi)

The macabre pageantry and audacious provocation of Africa Addio, transmitted in every authentic portrait of murder and despair, masquerades as the unflinching journalistic eye, deceptively shrouding racist ideology beneath sophistry and subtle insinuation. Employing technical skill to divert from their odious methods, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi create contrast through montage, juxtaposing snapshots of white stoicism with the frenzied streets of black Africa, attempting to vindicate Apartheid and validate European colonialism through staged footage and redubbed dialogue.

Keen to betray both of its subjects, this uncomfortable merger of travelogue and exposé uses violence as set dressing, repurposing riot scenes and armed conflict as the expense of progress and confirmation of black inferiority. Little context is given to elaborate on the visceral procession of images, permitting the narrator to act as omniscient voice and steer the discussion away from sociological study and into superficial comparison. Shown relishing in the grandeur of the fox hunt and cowering in fear of “Mau Mau” retaliation, the noble white African is hard to refute when held against unflattering portraits of native hygiene and an inferred propensity for brutality, legitimizing the ironic portrait of “justice” that acts as the film’s centerpiece.

Ostensibly filmed in Kenyan court rooms, trials of African mutineers held by their non-native sovereigns have an unintended effect, generating empathy instead of calculated demonization. As the filmmakers envision the defendants’ crimes in staged reenactments, wallowing in the details of their barbarous malefactions, the accused are paraded before the leering camera, made to widen their eyes and gawk like inhuman monsters.

The filmmakers are also complicit in the desecration of unwilling animal participants, treating mortality as fodder for their unethical geek show. Images of dead primates, rotting and hung from trees, are accompanied by grim synthesizer and shameless close-up, adorned with the same prurient fascination of a pornographic money shot. The inhumanity of sport hunting is also confused for artistic endeavor, as safari-goers are afforded the liberty of staging elephant executions and the crew posits their cruelty as harmless adventure.

Momentary bouts of conscience shift the focus to humanitarian efforts, though most lean heavily on sentimentality and prefer audience tears over actual insight. The crux of a sequence on anti-poaching efforts seems to be ignored entirely in favor of a grieving baby zebra, shown prodding the corpse of its dead mother before the lingering camera eye. A single, surreal image of the foal before the setting sun, carried on a harness from an ascending chopper, is exquisite and rousing enough to inspire a lapse of memory, but malice in the name of art overshadows fits of evocative photography and the closing din of the firing squad reaffirms Africa Addio’s vampiric motivations.

Africa Addio (Rizzoli Films, 1966)
Written and Directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi
Photographed by Antonio Climati

America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014, Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan)

Prescient in its vision of a society divided, the cinema of the 21st Century strayed from its vocation as mass-scale opiate, honing in on niche markets under the guise of grassroots rebellion. Employing Christian and conservative ideologies as an alternative to Hollywood’s prevailing mores, studios like Pure Flix Entertainment and Affirm Films have created a Second American Cinema, placing praxis at the forefront and abandoning the supposed superficiality of aesthetics, technical innovation and erotic stimulation.

As the marquee documentarian of this burgeoning movement, Dinesh D’Souza’s work strategically balances between prescribed doctrines, constantly contorting to maintain its position beneath its sacred benefactors, repackaging capitalistic ideals as contemporary morality. In a structural sense, his agenda-heavy essays only differ from those of his left-wing peers in their political outlook and Dinesh stretches beyond his pre-designated audience with obvious appeals to the tech savvy and surveillance weary, making attempts to increase the flock from the ever-swelling pool of the disenfranchised.

When not mired in pallid reenactments of the Revolutionary War, facets of D’Souza’s America: Imagine the World Without Her even border on plausible, nearly ushering revisionist history up to legitimacy from the philosophical ghetto of white nationalism and paleoconservatism. An inquiry into the perpetuity of the “conquest ethic” and a spiritual approach to the cutthroat world of free enterprise are the most compelling arguments, but precious few of Dinesh’s bounty of broad notions coalesce into a coherent thesis statement and the lopsided pomposity of his oversimplified logic winds up ostracizing the secular audience he so desperately wants to indoctrinate.

D’Souza’s abridgment of archival sound clips is also suspicious, betraying the integrity of the form by drawing parallels between antithetical ideals like armchair liberalism and Saul Alinsky’s methods of political extortion, illustrating all dissent as traitorous in contrast to his own rose-hued vision of patriotism. At his most dangerous, D’Souza is even willing to manipulate fact as a weapon against his opposition, treating the vitality of the abstract “American Dream” as a license to define the borders of free speech and whitewash injustice.

Utilizing a framing device to address and justify atrocities committed by the United States since its inception, D’Souza sketches a short outline of “Indictments,” treating his slant on historical evidence as a defense of the republic. Concentrating on slavery, theft of Native American and Mexican property, foreign policy and free market economy as points of contention, D’Souza uses sweeping generalizations to vindicate and gloss over malfeasance, treating Barack Obama’s presidency and expansionist rhetoric as a cure-all for the disgrace surrounding racism, consumerism and appropriation.

The key orchestrator of this “narrative of American shame” is Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States and D’Souza’s scapegoat for the ascendance of a self-loathing, immoral America. Labelling Zinn as a celebrity and opportunist (not unlike President Obama and Hillary Clinton), D’Souza excoriates his investigation of the elitist exploitation of the working classes as libelous smear campaign, favoring the dated and overtly-religious chronicles of Alexis de Tocqueville as the bona fide American origin story.

Though Tocqueville’s outsider status provides an even-handed depiction of the slave economy, it does represent the American experiment as one with religion at the heart of its politics, which is the antithesis of James Madison’s Establishment Clause and decidedly unconstitutional. Despite his amiable nature, D’Souza willingly buys into religious oligarchy, thinly masking bigotry beneath a self-righteous disdain for atheists and agnostics, whom he aligns with corruption and anarchism despite their ability to objectively consider his plutocratic rhetoric.  

As an educator and political journalist, Dinesh D’Souza acts a mouthpiece for a treacherous brand of ideology, but the singularity of his perspective can’t be denied or cast aside whole hog. Seeing “The New World” as sanctuary for the merchant class and project worthy of continued effort and adaptation are core concepts any viewer can empathize with, but his inclination to pervert social issues as a hinderance to progress is a diversion worthy of the craftiest slave master. By basing his argument on faith instead of fact, Dinesh D’Souza muddies the truth in favor of a “greater good,” smothering any flower of an inspired idea beneath the edicts of his prevailing “isms.”

America: Imagine the World Without Her (Lionsgate Films, 2014)
Directed by Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan
Written by Dinesh D’Souza, John Sullivan and Bruce Schooley
Photographed by Ben Huddleston

The Wild One (1953, Laslo Benedek)

Acting as antecedent to the lurid motorcycle cinema of the 1960s, The Wild One constructed a template for its forthcoming homages, particularizing the parlance, fashion and customs of the “one percenter,” fostering conflict from a delicate balance between allegiance and anarchy. Its throng of acolytes were hip to the chaos and street slang, revelling in willful criminality and broad characterization at the expense of ambience and authenticity, furnishing product that exploited the outlaw lifestyle without interpreting its desire for detachment. Through Johnny Strabler, Marlon Brando imparted a vulnerability and coy sexuality that evaded his crudest imitators, winnowing away at a coarse, macho exterior to expose the wounded, betrayed child at the heart of the American malcontent and the hypocrisy inherent in social order.

As commander of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Johnny upholds his cabal’s zealous belligerence with a dispassionate shrug, veiling his discontent for the whole lot beneath a brooding pose and pounds of creased leather. Championing delinquency over politics or moral agenda, his clamorous outfit is comprised of smart alecks and anti-authoritarians, sustaining themselves on the promise of cold swill and the adrenaline rush of a street fight. Standing in stark contrast, Johnny is nearly mute and rarely animated, gazing boyishly from beneath his conductor’s cap with an immiscible coupling of hubris and insecurity.

Nervously spinning quarters on a laminate countertop and flirting with the subtle roll of his eyes, Johnny captures the attention of a lonely sodajerk, alluring her with erroneous tales of second-place victories and the guise of individualistic freedom. His sarcastic smile acts both as erotic fantasy and escape plan for the stir-crazy Kathie (Mary Murphy), functioning as a diversion from a self-imposed prison of small-town servitude and counterpoint to the concessions of her spineless, police-chief father. Sadly, her swell of hormonal desire can’t compensate for Johnny’s inferiority complex and any attempt at sexual compatibility leads him into a frenzied surge of physical aggression and verbal dehumanization.

Brando’s gesticulatory performance wavers between this nuanced stoicism and domineering irascibility at a whim, finding verity in a range of unbound emotion, transforming manic episodes from disorderly conduct to juvenile defense mechanism. This structural flexibility extends from his performance to the narrative, jettisoning conventionality for a moody and capricious exchange of loyalty, fluctuating between biker and burgher based on their capacity for corruption.

Reinterpreting the generation gap as a grave miscommunication, Frank Rooney and his screenwriters use codified language as cultural currency, treating outlaw argot as underworld passport and bourgeois rhetoric as justification for malefaction. The fact that both parties only share a figurative vocabulary in the midst of transgression elucidates the bond of brutality between “upstanding” citizen and non-conformist, aligning humanity under an umbrella of its basest instincts. If unity through barbarity seems like the bleakest of philosophies, the slightest glimmer of hope blossoms from Johnny and Kathie’s awkward attempts at coupling, demonstrating that transcendence survives despite our solipsistic nature.

The Wild One (Columbia Pictures, 1953)
Directed by Laslo Benedek
Written by Frank Rooney (story), John Paxton (screenplay) and Ben Maddow (screenplay)
Photographed by Hal Mohr

Scorpio Rising (1964, Kenneth Anger)

Without the benefit of dialogue or the progression of plot, Scorpio Rising unearths the spirituality at the center of American biker culture through its iconography, detecting the substance inherent in the process and attributing religious significance to the swivel of a socket wrench and tautening of a belt strap. By transmogrifying mechanical rigor into divine ritual, Kenneth Anger forges a sacred communion between the erotic and the morbid, conjuring the mystique of the outsider through the contours of tight jeans and the lingering threat of the quietus. The result is a hallucinatory and orgiastic windfall of imagery, powered by the oneiric resonance of nostalgia and its accompanying sexuality.

Objectifying polished metal like the subject of a pornographic centerfold, Anger’s camera lingers on fragments of glistening motorcycles and shirtless men with a synthesis of the salacious and reverent, ameliorating the sex object to the stature of the theological totem. Overlaid with the ornate and gently melancholic sounds of Little Peggy March’s “Wind-Up Doll,”  the camera evinces the literal and the figurative from its photographic portraits and soundtrack selections, scanning and observing vehicular maintenance with the delicacy of a slow dance, treating each wrenching motion and burnished fender as a metaphor for the song’s unrequited love and an eroticized representation of physical labor.

Anger expands upon these variances between connotation and denotation through subliminal editing techniques and visual juxtaposition, insinuating an equity of symbols through jarring comparisons between celebrity and sexual identity. As his subjects model for the camera, resembling flesh-and-blood mannequins adorned in skintight leather jackets, Anger draws parallels between their affected carriage and the defiance extolled on the silver screen, identifying a direct line between Marlon Brando’s slouched demeanor in The Wild One and the languorous posturing of his bonafide iconoclasts.

These bonds between the corporeal and spiritual are further strengthened by provocative collages of stock footage and ideological emblem, invariably imbuing the sacrosanct with danger by stitching together portions of an educational short on Jesus Christ with snippets of chapped asses, swastika-adorned flags and scowling grim reapers. It is at this intersection between idolatry and blasphemy that Kenneth Anger reveals the essence of biker chic, defining their flirtation with death as a dogmatic principle and superficial fashion statement. Scorpio Rising’s lurid obsessions possess a similar polarity, occupying the rift between bewitching occultism and ghoulish nihilism, impregnating each glossy image of piety and apostasy with unabashed prurience and childlike wonder.

Scorpio Rising (Puck Film Productions, 1964)
Directed by Kenneth Anger
Written by Kenneth Anger and Ernest D. Glucksman
Photographed by Kenneth Anger

Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970, Yasuharu Hasebe)

A trippy, pop-art riff on noir’s criminal underbelly, Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss replaces pulp’s grim sensibility with dreamy bursts of pastel, surrounding its starlets in color-filtered lights and brightly-stenciled panels like feminist superheroes. Fetishizing fast bikes, tight denim and dense smoke, Yasuharu Hasebe’s vision adopts a distinctly gamine aesthetic, identifying more with its leads’ fashion sense than their common spirit, compensating for its absence of character development through self-conscious cool and a subtle, androgynous eroticism. By catering exclusively to this artistic excess, Hasebe sacrifices narrative backbone at the altar of photographic fluff, smothering the Stray Cats beneath a blanket of overpowering, kaleidoscopic visuals.

By devoting the lion’s share of the storyline to the inner workings of an all-male criminal cabal, Hasebe positions the Cats as supporting players in their own myth, focusing instead on a fixed boxing match and the existential distress that comes with a surrender of masculine integrity. Sequestered to the sidelines as a clichéd, distraught sweetheart, de facto gang president Mei (Meiko Kaji) sticks her neck out to protect a stool pigeon suitor, inadvertently exposing her sisters to the retaliation of the politically-intertwined Seiyu Group. In an effort to balance the scales, the Stray Cats take on a nonnative member, one as tall and tenacious as their macho opponents, but brimming with ambiguous sensuality.

Sporting cigarette jeans and a wavy, bobbed coiffure, Ako’s (Akiko Wada) mode and mettle afford her a position of carnal and martial authority in the club, galvanizing the strung-out membership into gender-fueled reprisal. Intoxicated by sapphic insinuation and the croon of a Janis Joplin-esque wail, Ako’s army splatters the halogen-lit Shinjuku streets in crimson corn syrup, snuffing out their enemies with an absence of fear and a jewelry box of switchblades and razor-tipped brass knuckles. If a flair for accessorizing seems like a sorry substitute for sexual politics, chalk it up to the comic-book tradition of transforming minutiae into meaningful talisman and Hasebe’s willingness to exploit femininity as a prop.

Despite this lack of emotional marrow and accountability, the photographic technique is irreproachable,  playfully tinkering with foreground and background through tactfully-employed split diopter and blurred pools of twinkling color. Utilizing shadow for contrast and cramped close-up to infer intimacy, Muneo Ueda conjures a claustrophobic humidity, lending fisticuffs and gunplay a naturalistic tension that diverges from the histrionics of slow-motion and thundering buckshot echo. His eye coaxes out the pinkish hue of flesh and resonating glow of artificial light, fabricating a complex visual world that is forsaken as wallpaper beneath Yasuharu Hasebe’s vapid montages.

Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (Nikkatsu, 1970)
Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe
Written by Hideichi Nagahara
Photographed by Muneo Ueda

Lemonade (2016, Kahlil Joseph and Beyoncé Knowles Carter)

An exercise in contrast and duality, Beyoncé’s Lemonade carries an existential weight uncommon for a music video, manifesting humanity in toto through the dissection of a broken marriage and its spiritual fallout. Portraying conflict by wavering between melancholy and antipathy, Ms. Knowles wrestles with her conjugal bondage through penetrative visual metaphor, utilizing infidelity as the MacGuffin on a sociological quest to unravel the gnarled roots of sexual and racial persecution. By experimenting with an unorthodox fusion of Christian clemency and vulvar eroticism, she spawns a daring artistic provocation, esteeming cultural unity beyond the boundaries of melanin and championing intellectual rebirth in the face of phallocentric morality.

Despite the bellicosity at its center, Lemonade’s prologue is notably stoic, somnolently drifting through empty tunnels and solitary bandstands, expressing desolation through intoned poetry and the sway of nodding wheat stalks. Echoes of Antebellum architecture are employed as a backdrop, lingering behind the action as constant reminder and object of oppression, swept away only by an act of symbolic renewal. Captured in an evocative transformation shot, Beyoncé’s limp figure plunges to the earth from a lofty roof, only to sink into water instead of splatter on stone, each of her delicate subaqueous actions reverberating with psychedelic trails.

The digital images that accompany her ponderous introduction are expressive and precise, maintaining cohesion despite an impatience with lens and technique. Natural environments are met with fluid and observant cinematography akin to Alexis Zabe’s work in Silent Light, taking inspiration from his majestic rising and setting suns and limitless patience. Utilizing steely, monochromatic color, the camera stares heavenward, detailing every ray of sunlight as it peeks from beneath a halo of flora, illuminating the Spanish moss as it sags from drooping branches.

Slow, roving steadicam and bleary neon signal a change in tone, picking up layers of reflection in metropolitan puddles and rear-view mirrors. Beyoncé, stepping out from her aquatic slumber, struts in a sun-kissed yellow frock, smashing vintage sedan windows as a radiant dynamite blast brings up the rear. Playing proxy for a cheating beau, the camera suffers the brunt of her aggression in first-person point-of-view, getting struck point-blank with a baseball bat and careening to the pavement with a protracted thud.

The cycling through style and perspective continue by way of extreme juxtaposition, as the reggae-inflected buoyancy of “Hold Up” slips into the soft tinkle of Swan Lake, each pluck of a music box acting as sonic substitute for an on-screen monster truck, decimating a line of street-side automobiles. This destruction signals a catharsis and subsequent variation, moving to spartan parking structures and a voyeuristic shooting style, employing blinding spotlight to channel the masculine gaze as it ogles the “second sex.”

Beyoncé uses this discomfort as a forum for antagonism on “Sorry,” playfully flashing a middle finger and appropriating male vulgarity into righteous rallying cry and significant artistic statement. Marrying modern, bass-heavy electronics and haute couture, Bey molds each of her personas and genres into timeless artifacts, incorporating the empowered, Lilithian aura of Claudette Colbert and Grace Jones into an anthem for autonomy.

Yet, despite its wealth of visual and structural innovation, Lemonade still speaks in the language of its adversaries, muddying the fragility of its poetics through patriarchal obscenity. This boorish posturing renders otherwise exquisite emblems of menstruation and orgasm inert, revealing a dated dichotomy that compartmentalizes woman into two roles: Madonna and whore. By accepting these limits, Beyoncé cheapens fidelity into a battle between one “bomb pussy” and another, distracting from an array of complex parallels that draw psychological lines between her father’s love, her lover’s lies and the perpetuity of the domestic quarrel.

Lemonade (Good Company, 2016)
Directed by Kahlil Joseph and Beyoncé Knowles Carter
Music by Beyoncé
Poetry by Warsan Shire
Photographed by Khalik Allah, Par Ekberg, Santiago Gonzalez, Chayse Irvin, Reed Morano, Dikayl Rimmasch and Malik Hassan Sayeed

The Work of Director Spike Jonze (1993 - 2000)

Discovering the happy medium between homage and critique through gleeful duplication, Spike Jonze composes giddy and celebratory visual confections out of mid-to-late century kitsch, enlisting the artist as co-conspirator in a venture to repurpose the past as high art. Employing Georges Méliès-inspired camera tricks and optical illusions as built in selling points, Jonze’s shorts evade the cultural graveyard of spoof by championing their artistic subjects, sprucing up sitcom sensibilities with contemporary power chords and technical innovation. By avoiding a self-righteous wink, Jonze makes postmodernism personal, reinventing the music video as a catalog of sacred items, interlacing stylish nuance with reflective nostalgia.

Encapsulating the sensory overload of a Manhattan childhood into a song’s length, Jonze packages “Sure Shot” as a love letter to the Beastie Boys’ encyclopedic knowledge of ephemera, utilizing subliminal shots as a visual representation of their rapid-fire references. Abandoning narrative in favor of artist-appropriate hyperactivity, Spike shifts photographic methods as swiftly as his edits, rifling through reverse motion, submarine shooting and fisheye lens with a childish exuberance. His infectious impetuousness galvanizes the band into fits of inspired mugging, etching their contorted gestures into the public consciousness through the quirkiness of jagged jump cuts and stop-motion animation.

“Drop” ushers this excess to its ne plus ultra, compelling The Pharcyde to spout their rhymes in reverse, then inverting the footage to reveal the disparity between their unnatural poses and the lyrics that pour from their lips in sequence. The band’s exaggerated physicality and forward motion confuse the mind into assuming the action is linear, that is, until bandmembers rocket from the street to the sky without warning and clothing leaps from puddles onto their bare backs.

Jonze treats the elaborate conceit at the center of his work as a sacrament, bonding with the artist through the labor-intensive process and extolling their virtues in the finished product. This is never more evident than in “It’s Oh So Quiet,” where Spike adorns Björk’s gorgeous rendition of a jazz standard with an equally blissful choreographed dance number. As the songstress prances through the drab decor of an auto body shop, the environment blooms around her, displaying mechanics in full twirl and umbrellas fanning out like flower blossoms, bearing all the hallmarks of a Busby Berkeley musical, but adapted to the tarmac.

Despite the diverting hullabaloo, the sea of hoofers are only the chorus, functioning to sing the praises of the jubilant chanteuse as she ascends into the clouds. Jonze wields these gimmicks exclusively in service of his artists, a policy that affords him free rein to indulge in elaborate ruses, whether it be guerilla performance art or the retrofitting of modern power pop into an iconic television property.

The contrivance in question is Spike’s “Buddy Holly” exercise, which implements modern footage of Weezer into a 20-year-old episode of Happy Days with chroma key technology, misleading the viewer into perceiving interaction between the band’s performance and members of the cast. The concept reads like a hollow stunt on paper, but Jonze’s sentimentality mutates the art of his youth into a vessel for his musical taste, eulogize the sincerity of the 70’s and repurposing it as 90’s fashion sense. His bookish attention to detail and spirituality spawns transfigurative images of nostalgia, exuding passion and heft that mirrors the vigorous riffing and crooning of the band, who share in his participatory excitement. It’s as if, by modifying epochal fragments of culture, Spike Jonze and his fellow outsiders can enter the zeitgeist and stake their claim on it, resculpting pop art in their likeness.

The Work of Director Spike Jonze (Palm Pictures, 1993 - 2000)
Music by Beastie Boys, The Pharcyde, Björk, and Weezer

The Work of Director Jonathan Glazer (1995 - 2000)

Conveying a wealth of information in limited intervals of time, the music video functions like subliminal stimuli, churning out provocative imagery in momentary bursts, serving as optical interpretation of intangible sound. Its thematic and temporal constraints, all of which are dictated by outside sources, seem to be at odds with author-driven filmmaking, leaving a director to fabricate contrivances at the behest of an employer. This textual rigidity limits most examples to the scope of a press release, relinquishing attempts at experimentation to the trash bin of ephemeral advertising.

Accepting the challenge of commissioned artistry with a wink and a snicker, Jonathan Glazer exploits the limitations of the form as a springboard into equally restrictive spaces, morphing the sterility of hotel hallways and cramped back seats into deceptive games of sight and sound. Reveling in shadow and distorted motion, Glazer fashions simple visions of tossed feathers and flailing bodies into poetic waltzes, perfectly fleshing out musical motifs through painterly compositions and cross-over diegesis.

Delighting in the bondage of claustrophobic widescreen, Glazer shoots “Rabbit in Your Headlights” in a squint, mounting tension through swift edits and the bleary illumination of passing headlights. His subject is a drifter (played by Denis Lavant), haplessly staggering through a high-traffic tunnel, fueled only by the rapidity of his rambling gibberish. Awash in the glow of overpass bulbs, our walker is propelled into flight by the bumpers of indifferent motorists, wiping his face of blood each time he hoists himself from the sodden pavement.

Glazer stops the track to give his subject a brief respite and expand the length of his narrative, a technique that interrupts the flow of the music, but brilliantly draws parallels between Lavant’s shuffling feet and the stomping drum track sampled from David Axelrod’s “Holy Thursday.” His closing snapshot is just as epiphanic and rhythmic, glorifying Lavant as he sheds his coat like a dead skin and repels an oncoming sedan with his stiffened back, each shard of glass and metal drifting in the air like a passing constellation viewed in time lapse.

The artist continues his studies in unnatural movement with “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” taking Maya Deren’s work as a model for ruminations on the intoxicating anti-gravity of suspended beings and objects. Shot in a broader, 4:3 aspect ratio, Glazer entombs this abundance of space beneath a stark black scrim, further obstructing the plain of vision with flickering white bits of flesh, reflected in beaming spotlight. Though the perpetuity of the edits renders each portrait temporary, the use of double exposure and overlay spawns a magnificent richness that conjures forth the grace of the music, culminating in a trio of grands jetés that fuse into an orb of ascending limbs.

“Into My Arms” expands on this graceful simplicity by slowing the pace, reproducing concise images of sorrow on crisp, black-and-white film stock. Glazer sustains a penitent and regretful ambience, his succession of shots showing only Nick Cave and the faces of his spiritual victims, each word crooned acting as a plea for forgiveness before the series of quivering, tear-stained countenances. As a hand peaks from behind the camera and gently strokes a trembling cheek, Glazer discards any ironic distance, transcending the machinations of his craft and inserting the celestial into a commercial medium.

The Work of Director Jonathan Glazer (Palm Pictures, 1995 - 2000)
Music by Unkle, Radiohead, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Photographed by Stephen Keith-Roach

White Men Can’t Jump (1992, Ron Shelton)

Imparting poetry and philosophy onto the physicality of pick-up basketball, White Men Can’t Jump weaves an illusory beauty from perpetual motion, morphing passion and arrogance into a scrappy concrete ballet. The hypnotic game footage, lingering behind the rush of sound and emotion, boasts a delicacy that stands in contrast to the rivalries at play, lending a certain mystique to a tragedy of an almost Shakespearean gravity. By refusing the fleeting fantasy of competitive glory, Ron Shelton transforms his heroic athletes into thieves and hustlers, perverting their talents into an external representation of wounded masculinity.

Banking on pride and prejudice to cloud their opponents’ judgment, Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) and Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes) construct elaborate ruses to align themselves on the court, using Billy’s pallid skin and Sidney’s persuasive patter to swindle their inadequate adversaries out of cash and credibility. The ironic twist is that both men bear the fatal flaws of their befuddled marks, permitting unbound narcissism and irresponsibility to propel them into an ever-growing abyss of self-destructive machismo.

Shelton employs their braggadocio as a vehicle for his waggish monologues, peppering each player’s vocabulary with an uproarious array of jibes and barbs. Snipes’ improvised adjective selection is the most scathing, each well-placed “momma” joke and shouted slight exuding a confidence matched only by the peacock’s plumage of his flipped-up painter’s cap. The lithe loquaciousness of his forked tongue couples well with the mobility of the camera, supplying a lived-in scrappiness to tight close-ups and a sense of exhilaration with each exaggerated pan and boastful remark.

Tender whispers are just as competitive and verbose as the trash talk in Shelton’s universe, conveying intimacy and hostility through spirited gender debate. Playing the perfect foil to Harrelson’s plain-spoken and volatile banter, Rosie Perez bestows complexity and sensuality onto Gloria, defiantly chomping gum and jawing back at Billy as he reveals his latent misogyny and incapacity for vulnerability. Sidney even picks up on this emotional unavailability, perfectly elucidating Billy’s faults by explaining the difference between “listening and hearing,” utilizing Jimi Hendrix’s music as a metaphor for romantic comprehension.

Sadly, Hoyle’s insecurities sour each athletic and amorous victory, pushing him to gamble on pride in the face of logic and love. Ron Shelton has built a career out of exposing the frailty of stubborn men and Billy Hoyle is at once his least hopeful and most sentimental subject, acting as our avatar for the narcotic joy of sport and the emptiness that lies out of bounds. Despite the comic nature of his downfall and the jocularity of the dialogue, Billy’s sorrow yields an unforeseen profundity, exposing the truth inherent in failure and the inadequacies of the alpha male.

White Men Can’t Jump (20th Century Fox, 1992)
Written and Directed by Ron Shelton
Photographed by Russell Boyd