Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/17/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, September 17, 2017

The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984)

Michael Elphick, Me Me Lai, and Lars von Trier in The Element of Crime

Fisher: Michael Elphick
Osborne: Esmond Knight
Kim: Me Me Lai
Kramer: Jerold Wells
Therapist: Ahmed El Shenawi
Housekeeper: Astrid Henning-Jensen
Coroner: János Herskó
Coroner's Assistant: Stig Larsson
Schmuck of Ages: Lars von Trier

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Niels Vørsel, Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Tom Elling
Production design: Peter Hølmark
Music: Bo Holten

Film noir becomes film jaune. The sulfurous hues of Lars von Trier's first feature-length film were apparently achieved with the use of sodium-vapor lamps not unlike the ones used in some cities as streetlamps and parking-lot illumination to cut down light pollution. The nightmarish monochrome so pervades the film that an occasional irruption of blue light comes as a welcome relief, especially since the determined grunge of the settings gives the eye no place to rest. The Element of Crime is, in short, an assault on our expectations that a film will involve us in either its characters or its story. It's a detective story, in which Fisher, a former police detective now living in Cairo, visits a therapist to help him in remembering his last case -- the one so disturbing that it caused him to go into exile from Europe. Under an induced trance, he returns to the scenes of the crimes committed by a serial killer who murdered and dismembered young girls who sold lottery tickets. But the Europe -- no specific country, but though everyone speaks English, the place names are German -- to which Fisher returns in the trance is not the one his conscious mind recalls: It's a trashed-out land where the sun never shines and it always seems to be raining. There is a conventional film noir plot at work throughout the movie, but von Trier is less interested in it than in crafting a sinister dreamworld. He succeeds at that exceptionally, but fails to create a film that lingers in the mind as more than a tour de force in giving you the creeps.

Filmstruck Criterion Collection