2. Govindini Murty – Page 9 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: As Egypt Fights for Democracy, New Documentary 1/2 Revolution Goes to the Front Lines

[Editor’s Note: This post appears today at The Huffington Post and at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Govindini Murty. As the Egyptian military government prepares to put nineteen American employees of pro-democracy NGOs on trial, and thousands of Egyptians continue to demonstrate over the stalling of democratic reforms, the new documentary 1/2 Revolution offers a striking look back at the Egyptian revolution of one year ago.

Premiering recently at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, 1/2 Revolution depicts the revolution through the eyes of a group of Egyptian activists directly involved in it. Using cell phone cameras and hand-held camcorders, the filmmaker-activists capture dramatic footage of clashes between average Egyptians calling for freedom and the repressive government forces attempting to stop them.

As co-director Karim El Hakim said after the film’s recent Sundance screening, “You can’t get any more cinema verité than this.”

Danish-Palestinian director Omar Shargawi and Egyptian-American director Karim El Hakim live with their families just a few blocks from Tahrir Square in Cairo. When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians take to the streets on January 25th, 2011 to demand the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, Omar and Karim head down from their apartments to record the events. Viewers are immediately thrown into the visceral experience of the revolution. Crowds of protesters run through the streets shouting “Egypt! Egypt! “Join us! Join us!” “Freedom! Freedom!” When gangs of government-paid thugs and police start beating and shooting the protesters, the protesters shout “No violence! No violence!” This call to non-violence is one of the early strong points of the documentary. To emphasize the theme, Shargawi points out a crowd of demonstrators who surround a group of police yet refrain from assaulting them.

Over time, though, these commendable calls to non-violence are drowned out by the tide of chaos and bloodshed that overtakes the demonstrations when the government attacks. Police fire into the roiling crowds of protesters with live ammunition, loud booms announce the launching of tear gas canisters through the air, and demonstrators and counter-demonstrators fight back and forth with truncheons, rocks, and knives. Demanding to see their passports, secret police harass Karim and Omar as they attempt to film the events, and Omar pulls a scarf around his face to disguise his identity.

Later, Karim is gassed in the face and stumbles home partially blinded, while Omar is severally beaten in a dark alley, barely emerging alive. Government snipers start shooting people through the windows of their apartments in the blocks around Tahrir Square – making viewers fear for the safety of the filmmakers in their own homes, particularly as one of them has a baby who keeps wandering close to the windows. Late in the film, government thugs even take over the street below the apartment building and start harassing the residents, which is what finally forces the filmmakers to question staying in the country.

revolution_a — Omar Shargawi filming "1/2 Revolution."

In capturing the tumult of the Cairo protests, 1/2 Revolution depicts more violence than most Hollywood action movies – but tragically, the mayhem here is all too real.

The seemingly intractable rage captured in the film – both from democratic protesters righteously angry over the suppression of their human rights, and from entrenched government elites determined to hold on to power at any cost – highlights the central challenge facing the Egyptian people today. How will they overcome this bitterness and anger – these scars from decades of violence, repression, and authoritarian rule – in order to build a peaceful democracy?

In his seminal 1947 study of German film, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer pointed out that the details of life captured in a film often reveal a country’s unconscious predilections. The details captured in 1/2 Revolution are ominous: activists repeatedly declare their willingness to die and become martyrs, the camera dwells on shattered heads and limbs, bodies on stretchers being rushed away, a man lifting up his shirt to show a bullet wound in his back, a pool of blood on the pavement with the word ‘Egypt’ traced in Arabic. Even more ominous are the anti-American and anti-Jewish symbols scrawled onto anti-Mubarak protest signs. One particularly ugly sign depicts Mubarak as the devil with pointy ears and a Star of David stamped on his forehead.

SundanceRev — The filmmakers at the Sundance screening.

Sadly, the filmmakers and their friends engage in implicitly anti-Israeli rhetoric themselves. Co-director Omar Shargawi, whose father is Palestinian, says with pride of the demonstrations, “It was like being part of the intifada or something.” One of his friends, a woman also of Palestinian origin, expresses fears that “the Israeli army is massing at the border” and worries that the U.S. might invade. Given that Israel’s population of only 7.8 million is vastly outnumbered by Egypt’s population of 81 million, and given that the American government was generally supportive of the Egyptian revolution, these kind of fears come across as over the top. But this is the dark side of the revolution: the urge to look for blame in outside bogey-men – in this case, America and Israel – rather than look internally to ask why so many Arab states have failed to achieve lasting democracy. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: As Egypt Fights for Democracy, New Documentary 1/2 Revolution Goes to the Front Lines

The Cinema of Liberty: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2011 + LFM’s Jason Apuzzo to Blog at The Huffington Post

[Editor’s Note: this post appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post. Jason is very pleased to now be blogging at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. Freedom is one of the most important prerequisites of artistic excellence. 2011 was distinctive for producing a number of critically acclaimed films that celebrated the history of the arts and of the cinema itself – from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, to Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Yet filmmaking never takes place in a vacuum, and these superb, literate films – which value knowledge, humanity, and civilization – are nonetheless the outgrowth of a free society, and would have had difficulty being made under circumstances of political tyranny.

It’s therefore worthwhile to celebrate the notable movies of 2011 that took the risk of advocating for democratic freedom, the political principle that makes so much film artistry possible. Some of these are foreign films created under the most difficult circumstances, while others are mainstream Hollywood productions made within the freedom of democratic society. Whether spectacular or intimate, tragic or comic, these films dramatized to audiences around the world the importance of liberty. With the revolutions of the Arab Spring, citizen protests in China, and the recent democracy demonstrations in Russia, 2011 was a remarkable year for democratic action and this year’s pro-freedom films often reflected this.

Given that many of these are foreign or independent films with multi-year releases, we thought it fair to include films that had their first theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. in 2011, or that screened in a U.S. film festival in 2011. Also, this is merely a list – not a ranking – so please consider each film on this list to have its own unique value.

1. This is Not a Film – Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran

This is Not a Film depicts in heartbreaking detail the house arrest of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was accused in 2010 of making a film critical of the Iranian government. Panahi vehemently denies the charges, yet he currently faces six years in jail and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking. Nonetheless, in This is Not a Film Panahi not only documents his own house arrest, revealing how the banal details of daily confinement can crush the human spirit; he also reveals how the creative impulse can survive even the most repressive circumstances, and inspire hope.

2. The Way Back – Peter Weir, U.S.

Starring Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess, and Saoirse Ronan and directed by Peter Weir, this epic and moving film based on real events tells the story of a group of Polish, American, and Russian political prisoners who escaped from a brutal Soviet gulag in 1941 and walked 4000 miles from Siberia to India and freedom. An extraordinary paean to liberty, The Way Back‘s courageous protagonists repeatedly affirm their willingness to die in freedom rather than live out their lives in the slavery of Soviet communism. The film’s concluding montage depicting the events of the Cold War is a long overdue acknowledgment from Hollywood of how the fall of European communism freed millions of Poles, Czechs, Russians, and Eastern Europeans.

TheHelp32 — Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer in "The Help."

3. The Help – Tate Taylor, U.S.

The civil rights drama The Help reveals how the struggle for freedom is equally urgent when it comes to racial equality in America. With gripping performances from Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and a powerful ensemble cast, The Help portrays the plight of African-American women who labored as house maids in the American South of the 1960s. The Help depicts the daily humiliations and injustices that grind down the human spirit and that form an ‘internal prison’ of despair that can be as destructive as any war, or act of violence. Taking place within recognizable domestic circumstances, The Help shows that our respect for civil rights in America is as important as our fight for human rights around the world.

4. Petition – Zhao Liang, China

A member of the ‘Digital Generation’ of independent Chinese documentarians, Zhao Liang depicts in Petition the Kafkaesque struggle of the Chinese people for justice from their own government. Petition follows real citizens, often poor and powerless, who travel from all across China to Beijing to petition the government for redress against local injustices. Zhao Liang goes into the petitioners’ shanty towns to hear their tragic tales of official malfeasance: unlawful imprisonment, confiscations of property, torture and death at the hands of local authorities. The petitioners wait months and sometimes years for their cases to be heard, and in the meantime eke out miserable existences in cardboard hovels on the sidewalks of Beijing. Following on Zhao Liang’s powerful Crime and Punishment, Petition is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to understand the abysmal state of human rights in communist China.

5. The Red Chapel – Mads Brügger, Denmark

In one of the bravest films in recent memory, director Mads Brügger and Danish-Korean comedians Simon Jul Jørgensen and Jacob Nossell risk their lives traveling to North Korea to tweak/punk that nation’s tyrannical communist regime. Ostensibly visiting North Korea for the purpose of putting on a Danish socialist comedy show as an ‘inter-cultural exchange,’ the filmmakers’ true purpose is to document the censorship and inhumanity of the North Korean government. Referring to the communist dictatorship as “the most heartless and brutal totalitarian state ever created,” Brügger and his comedians repeatedly make fools of the authorities in this blackly satirical, poignant and insightful documentary. All the more relevant after the demise of Kim Jong Il, The Red Chapel follows on the heels of North Korea-themed films like Kimjongilia, Yodok Stories, and The Juche Idea in illustrating how the cinema can advocate for freedom by exposing tyranny. Continue reading The Cinema of Liberty: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2011 + LFM’s Jason Apuzzo to Blog at The Huffington Post

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Twilight and the Return of Women’s Blockbuster Films

[Editor’s Note: The post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hits movie theaters on December 21st, it will be the second major female-led franchise movie released in just over a month. The first, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part I, has already earned over $640 million dollars worldwide since its November 18th release and has become the third-highest grossing movie of 2011 (after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon – and on a lower budget than those films). The remarkable success of the Twilight film series, with over $2 billion in worldwide ticket sales to date, proves that audiences will show up to see tentpole movies built around women. Now with the upcoming release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the spring/summer 2012 openings of Mirror Mirror, The Hunger Games, and Snow White and the Huntsman, audiences are being offered a run of female-oriented big-budget films unlike anything they’ve seen in recent years. After decades of lavishing resources on male-led action and comic book movies, Hollywood is finally making an effort to give women and their stories the blockbuster treatment.

garbo — Greta Garbo in "Queen Christina."

In doing so, the film industry is hearkening back to what was once a strength of classic Hollywood: the blockbuster women’s film. Such films were high-quality productions that elevated the unique psychology, heroism and romance of women’s lives to the level of epic entertainment. The great era of this kind of women’s film was in the ’30s and ’40s when movies like Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina, Vivien Leigh’s Gone with the Wind, Marlene Dietrich’s The Scarlet Empress, Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce, Greer Garson’s Mrs. Miniver, and Bette Davis’ Jezebel enthralled audiences. Whether they told historical or contemporary stories, such films offered a ‘blockbuster’ vision of women’s lives – both in terms of the resources the studios devoted to them (A-list directors and casts, big budgets) as well as in the importance they placed in their heroine’s emotional journeys. Such films were a mainstay of classic Hollywood, filling box office coffers and building the careers of talented actresses. Further, these films inspired both women and men, for they successfully transformed the unique emotions and experiences of women into works of art with universal significance.

The success of classic women-led films is reflected in their status as some of the highest grossing films of all time. According to Box Office Mojo’s list of the all time highest grossing films (all figures are domestic, adjusted for inflation), Gone with the Wind (1939) is still number one with an astonishing U.S. theatrical total of $1.6 billion dollars. The Sound of Music ($1.13 billion), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ($867 million), and Titanic ($1.02 billion) also figure in the top ten list – and one could argue that Dr. Zhivago ($988 million) and The Exorcist ($880 million) owe much of their success to their strong female characters, as well. The success of these films shows that women and their stories have been a compelling draw in many of the biggest movies ever made.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the action movie rose in prominence – and a genre that naturally favors men over women took over Hollywood. The success of the male-oriented action film was used to justify spending less money on women’s films, and women were increasingly relegated to lower budget romantic comedies and dramas. This led to a vicious cycle in which the modest budgets given to women’s films led to modest box office returns that were then used as an excuse to spend even less on women’s films – completely contradicting the evidence of the successful women’s films of the classic Hollywood era. While some fine movies were made in this period – Norma Rae, Julia, An Unmarried Woman – much of the heroism, glamor, and romance that had characterized the great women’s films of the ’30s and ’40s was lost.

winslettitanic — Kate Winslet in "Titanic."

There was a brief resurgence of the blockbuster women’s film in the ’80s with Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment, and comedies like Romancing the Stone, but this promising trend petered out in the early ’90s. By the late ’90s, the film industry’s downgrading of women’s importance in the movies was such that when Titanic became a massive hit in 1997 – a film very much built around Kate Winslet and her emotional journey – the film’s success was instead credited to Leonardo DiCaprio and to the film’s special effects.

This mindset has led to another trend in contemporary Hollywood: the rise of the comic book movie. With the comic book movie, the film industry has became preoccupied with producing a never-ending stream of films based around male adolescence and coming of age. That’s fine for men, but there’s little there to relate to for women. On the rare occasion when a woman plays the lead in a big-budget comic book or video game movie – say Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider films, or Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films – her role is little different from that of a man. This is a shame because women are capable of a lot more on the big screen than simply wielding violence.

Women’s life experiences are different from those of men. We wish to be leaders and to achieve success in the world, but in our entertainment we also want romance, adventure, and emotional catharsis. When the Twilight movies came along, they answered this need beautifully. Twilight‘s highly traditional storyline of a young woman falling in love with and taming a dangerous man has appealed to women for generations and dates back to the 19th century Gothic novel and beyond (as I describe in my analysis of the literary and mythological themes in the Twilight series). One sees this storyline in everything from the fable of Beauty and the Beast to novels like Jane Eyre and Gone with the Wind. Ultimately, this storyline serves as a metaphor for a woman’s heroic quest to overcome the forces of evil and find love and fulfillment in the world. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Twilight and the Return of Women’s Blockbuster Films

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part II: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Avatar, & The Hostility of Nature

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. In Part I of my interview with Werner Herzog, we discussed his new movie Into the Abyss and its searing exploration of evil in human society. Now in Part II we turn to the world of nature, which Herzog sees as even more dangerous. In Les Blanks’ documentary Burden of Dreams, Herzog famously spoke out on the “obscenity” of the jungle, its “harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” In Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World, he expressed skepticism toward “tree huggers and whale huggers,” while in Grizzly Man, he documented the fate of a man literally killed by his unhealthy obsession with wild nature. Herzog has even criticized the romanticizing of nature in Avatar, calling the film “an abomination because of its New Age schlock and bullshit.”

Obviously Werner Herzog has strong feelings about the proper relationship between humanity and nature. One sees this, for example, in Herzog’s stunning documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, released this week on DVD. Cave of Forgotten Dreams offers an extraordinary look at the 30,000 – 32,000 year-old Paleolithic cave paintings inside the Chauvet Cave in southern France – currently considered to be the oldest cave paintings in the world. As Herzog told me in Part I of our discussion on the concept of “the abyss,” “I’ve always tried to look deep inside of what we are – deep into the recesses of our existence, of our prehistory – like in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. So it is some sort of a theme that runs through quite a few of my films.”

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog speaks eloquently of the Paleolithic cave paintings of Chauvet and their relationship to the surrounding landscape:

“These images are memories of long-forgotten dreams. Is this their heartbeat, or ours? Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artists across such an abyss of time? [Camera shows a massive natural stone arch in the landscape.] There is an aura of melodrama in this landscape. It could be straight out of a Wagner opera or a painting of German Romanticists. Could this be our connection to them? This staging of a landscape as an operatic event does not belong to the Romanticists alone. Stone Age man might have had a similar sense of inner landscapes …”

And yet despite these poetic sentiments, Herzog vehemently denies being a Romantic; rather, he defines his approach to nature as being similar to that of the artists of the late Middle Ages.

Ultimately, if one were to search for a theme that unites Werner Herzog’s diverse body of work, it would be that respect for human life and its limits is what holds us back from the brutality of amoral nature – the abyss into which humanity’s natural instincts might otherwise plunge. As Herzog told me, he is concerned above all with civilizational breakdown – with how humanity can abandon its own heights to descend into unfathomable depths of madness and annihilation. Equally importantly though, Herzog’s love of art, of literature, of joyful exploration of the world and its peoples points to a hopeful way out of the abyss and into the light of day.

Kinski2 — Klaus Kinski treks into the Amazon in Herzog's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God."

Thus, in Part II of this interview, we tackle such colorful subjects as Herzog’s anti-romantic views on nature, why he can’t help ranting about Avatar, his excitement over his Rogue Film School (in which he teaches such crucial skills as “lock picking” and “neutralizing bureaucracy”), and his belief that Wrestlemania and reality TV offer vital clues to understanding civilization. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: There is this sense in all of your films, whether they’re historical dramas or contemporary documentaries, that you wish to explore the extremes. You go from examining the molecular world in scenes from Encounters at the End of the World to these broad vistas of Antarctica or the desert or the Himalayas in your other documentaries. Do you feel that you’re part of what could be termed the German Romantic tradition in terms of having this approach to nature – seeing it both as a place of danger and a place of inspiration?

WH: I think that’s a common misconception [that] I had an affinity to romantic culture – no I don’t. I do not feel much affinity with it. I don’t feel at home with it. I’m much closer to poets like Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner who wrote Woyzeck – in the early 1820s he wrote literature that belonged to the early 20th century, that was almost like Expressionism. Or Hölderlin the poet, and he’s not a Romantic poet either. He’s somewhere completely unique. He’s like a continent of his own – not really comparable to other Romantic writers of his time…

And when you look at how I depict nature – wild nature for example in Grizzly Man, it’s quite evident that it’s a completely anti-Romantic view. Timothy Treadwell who was protecting bears and who was killed and eaten by a grizzly bear together with his girlfriend, he has this kind of watered down Romanticism … that’s what I’m completely against. I would stop the course of the film even and in my comment I would have an ongoing argument with Treadwell: “Here I differ from Treadwell.” I do not see wild nature as something benign and beautiful and the bears fluffy like little pets. No, they are dangerous and aggressive and nature itself looks rather chaotic and hostile. You look at the universe – it’s very, very hostile out there.

For example in Les Blanks’ Burden of Dreams I deliver a speech/rant about the jungle and you’ll never see anything so clearly against Romanticism and the romanticizing of landscapes, romanticizing of wild nature. … It’s funny because being a German everyone immediately thinks yeah yeah he must have an affinity with Romantic culture. No, I don’t.

GM: I think I see multiple sides to Romanticism. It’s such a complex movement. What I was thinking of was not so much the warm, romantic with a small ‘r’ approach to nature but the approach that sees it as terrifying and overwhelming. For example, even going back into 16th century German art I think of Albrecht Altdorfer with his landscapes towering over very small figures, or of Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus with the human figures very small in the distance, on through Caspar David-Friedrich’s work [in the early 19th century] where you have the two extremes – you either have humanity dwarfed by nature, as in The Monk on the Seashore or you have humanity standing titanic over nature, as in The Wanderer over the Sea of Clouds. So it was in that sense I was asking about nature. Your quote was very striking [in Burden of Dreams] where you mention the jungle as being “full of obscenity … nature here is vile and base.”

Kinski3 — From Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo": Kinski in nature.

WH: Yeah. Obscenity – that was because Kinski kept saying everything is erotic. And he would hug a tree and fornicate with it. [Laughs] Which is really against my inner convictions.

GM: But this comment about the ‘harmony of overwhelming and collective murder’ – setting aside Kinski’s comments, is that how you would see that particular jungle, or nature in general?

WH: No, you would have to be a little bit cautious. It’s a rant ‘against’ the jungle, but it came at a time of enormous strain on me – weeks and weeks and weeks where there was every single day a major disaster. And when I speak of major disaster I mean disasters like two plane crashes. Two consecutive plane crashes, and on and on and on. So, yes you have to see it in the context. But otherwise, thinking about the jungle, it’s not completely wrong what I said. But the ferocity of the rant is in a way a result of enormous pressure of disasters one after the other. … And it’s OK, I still like my rant.

GM: It’s achieved a cult status on-line. People enjoy it a great deal.

Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part II: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Avatar, & The Hostility of Nature

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Charlize Theron’s Young Adult and the Crisis of Narcissism in Our Popular Culture

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Charlize Theron’s new movie Young Adult offers one of the most striking depictions of narcissism to hit movie screens in some time. Directed by Jason Reitman, Young Adult tells the story of Mavis Gary (Theron), a self-absorbed writer of young adult novels who returns to her hometown to steal back her happily-married former boyfriend (played by Patrick Wilson). I had the chance to see Young Adult recently at a screening hosted by The Huffington Post and AOL. HuffPost Founding Editor Roy Sekoff moderated the colorful Q & A that followed at Arianna Huffington’s home with screenwriter Diablo Cody and actor Patton Oswalt. In the most memorable exchange of the evening, actress Sean Young (Blade Runner) asked Diablo Cody why she had decided to explore the subject of narcissism in the film. Cody wryly responded that perhaps it was because Young Adult was the first screenplay she wrote upon moving to LA. This drew a big laugh from the crowd, but the implication seemed more serious: what is the ever-increasing narcissism in Hollywood entertainment doing to our broader culture?

Charlize Theron’s Mavis embodies all the narcissism of modern popular culture. She’s obsessed with reality TV (the Kardashians drone on in the background of several scenes), a medium that has elevated the navel gazing of minor celebrities to the level of major entertainment. Mavis writes young adult novels that are only thinly-disguised relivings of her own high-school glory days, and she’s otherwise obsessed with appearances and shallow celebrity status. The film repeatedly shows Mavis studying herself in the mirror – either in depressed self-loathing after an alcoholic bender, or with vain self-satisfaction as she puts on makeup to impress her former boyfriend.

In keeping with the instability of identity that goes with modern narcissism, Mavis also adopts different personae as it suits her: at home she plays the dumpy writer in baggy jeans and t-shirts, but when she wants to seduce her old boyfriend she dresses in a low-cut black dress and adopts the manner of a big-city sophisticate. Later when Mavis is invited to a baby’s naming ceremony, she takes on another guise: that of a sober career woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a high-necked dress and conservative spectator pumps. Her various outer guises fail to impress the people of her hometown, though, for Mavis has neglected to develop any sustaining character traits. Mavis is the classic narcissist: cut off from objective reality, lacking any concern for other people, insecure in private but willing in public to ride roughshod over anyone and everything in order to gratify her whims.

Interestingly enough, Young Adult is one of several upcoming films that explore the dangers of vanity and narcissism. For example, two new adaptations of the Snow White fairy tale, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, depict vain queens willing to kill to maintain their beauty – with Charlize Theron even playing the villainess in the latter film. In keeping with the original fairy tale, the wicked queen’s obsession with her own appearance in both films is so extreme that she literally has a spirit residing in her mirror that she calls on to affirm her own beauty – this spirit acting as the exterior personification of her own vanity.

In Young Adult, Theron’s Mavis may not literally kill young women in order to remain beautiful, but her narcissism leads her to disregard all moral standards as she attempts to destroy the marriage of her former boyfriend and undermine the happiness of his wife and baby.

Vain Queens: Charlize Theron in "Snow White and The Huntsman" and Julia Roberts in "Mirror Mirror."

Young Adult vividly depicts what happens when self-love crosses the line into monstrous solipsism. This type of narcissism is becoming a defining trait of our modern cinema, and is taking on ever more baroque forms. It extends into the trend of psychological thrillers like Inception, The Ward, Dream House or Sucker Punch that take place almost entirely within the mind of a character, often one who is mentally unstable. Although these thrillers depict elaborate action, they recast this action as being the involuted imagining of a diseased mind – or of someone who has lost the will to live. Indeed, in Inception the hero’s wife becomes so confused between reality and delusion that she commits suicide. Such films are symbols of a culture in decay – like the passive Narcissus of Greek mythology, so intent on gazing inwardly at himself that he loses the will to engage productively with the outside world.

The last time such narcissistic themes appeared en masse in Western culture was during the late 19th century Decadent movement, just before Europe collapsed into the conflagration of World War I. Decadent novels like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray portrayed self-absorbed aesthetes who cared only for their external appearances, using them as cover to commit the ugliest of crimes. Dorian Gray’s portrait is the functional equivalent of the “double” seen by Mavis as she stares into her mirror – or of the reflected doubles that feature in Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, or even The Devil’s Double or Black Swan. Like Narcissus gazing at himself in the forest pool, all these reflected doubles signify the modern split psyche – alienated from humanity, from moral values, and from objective reality.

Icon of modern vanity: Kim Kardashian at the mirror.

In the old days this destructive narcissism was known by another word – vanity – and it was considered one of the seven deadly sins. However, in the twentieth century with the rise of photography and the cinema, Western culture has become ever more dominated by the visual image – and vanity has ceased to be stigmatized, instead being outright celebrated. Of course, there is a glorious life-affirmation inherent in appreciating the beauty of the physical. It would be just as perverse to denigrate beauty as to overvalue it. Nonetheless, Western culture has become so over-preoccupied with outward appearances that it is neglecting the important moral and intellectual qualities that give those appearances any larger meaning.

Perhaps dramas like Young Adult represent a healthy effort to deal with the problem of narcissism. After all, the movie shows how Mavis Gary’s self-absorption only leads to heartbreak, as relationships with family and old friends prove more difficult for her to manage than she expected. Reality eventually comes crashing into the hermetically-sealed world of Mavis’ narcissism and she is forced to deal with it.

This is as it should be. We can only evade objective reality for so long before being faced with one of two choices: either retreat into the reflection in the mirror and go mad, or look outside of ourselves and reestablish a healing connection with humanity and the larger world.

Posted on November 29th, 2011 at 10:17am.

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part I: Into the Abyss

Herzog12 — Werner Herzog directs "Into the Abyss."

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Few directors are as willing to venture into the abyss as Werner Herzog. His prolific body of work has ranged from intense dramas like Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Woyzeck that plumb the depths of the human soul to documentaries like Encounters at the End of the World and Grizzly Man that examine humanity’s fragile place in the miraculous and terrifying world of nature. The astonishing breadth of Herzog’s filmmaking conveys the humanist’s sense of wonder at the world – what he describes as the “ecstasy of observation.”

Herzog’s latest film, Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life (opening this Friday, November 11th) is a compelling look at the contentious issue of the death penalty. Producer Erik Nelson has stated that the film is intended to inform the current Republican presidential debate over the death penalty, in particular with regard to the candidacy of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Herzog himself has issued a Director’s Statement expressing his opposition to capital punishment – though in keeping with his lifelong aversion to political interpretations of his work, he has also asserted that Into the Abyss is not a political film. These apparent contradictions point to the enigma of Werner Herzog himself – on the one hand a sensitive humanist with strong moral convictions, yet on the other hand an artist who resists being defined by political activism or party ideology.

Into the Abyss embodies these contradictions. The film tells the true story of a brutal triple murder committed in Conroe, Texas. Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, intending to steal two cars owned by Sandra Stotler, killed Stotler in her home and then lured her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson into the woods and executed them. Perry and Burkett subsequently went on a joy ride in the cars, before winding up in a bloody shoot-out with the police. Perry and Burkett were convicted of the murders, with Perry receiving the death penalty, and Burkett receiving a life sentence.

Herzog interviewed Michael Perry just eight days before his execution, and also interviewed Jason Burkett in prison. Other interviews include those with Burkett’s wife Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who contacted Burkett while he was in prison and subsequently married him; Fred Allen, a prison captain who worked in the execution chamber and who assisted in over 125 executions before resigning in moral crisis; and most significantly, the relatives of the victims themselves: Lisa Stotler-Balloun, the daughter of Sandra Stotler and sister of Adam Stotler, and Charles Richardson, the brother of Jeremy Richardson. Stotler-Balloun and Richardson in particular provide the most heartbreaking testimony of the film, as Herzog does not shy away from depicting the shattering effect of the murders on their lives. As a result, Into the Abyss exists in a complex tension between Herzog’s avowed position against capital punishment and his impulse as a storyteller to depict both sides of the story and allow readers to make up their own minds.

I had the opportunity to meet with Werner Herzog in Los Angeles recently and discuss with him Into the Abyss and his extraordinary body of work. Part I of this interview appears below.

GM: I’d like to ask you about the title of your movie, Into the Abyss, because I’ve seen you refer to the concept of ‘the abyss’ quite a few times in your work. In Woyzeck you have a line “Every man is an abyss, you get dizzy looking in,” and in Nosferatu you have a line “Time is an abyss profound as a thousand nights.” This is a concept you keep referring to – what does ‘the abyss’ mean to you?

WH: It’s a good observation, and when I came up with the title Into the Abyss – it dawned on me that it could have been the title of quite a few other films. Like Woyzeck could have had that title, or The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner or even the cave film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, because I’ve always tried to look deep inside of what we are – deep into the recesses of our existence, of our prehistory – like in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. So it is some sort of a theme that runs through quite a few of my films.

GM: I want to ask you about the relationship between humanity and the universe. There was a wonderful quote at the end of Encounters at the End of the World where Dr. Gorham asks, and I paraphrase, “are we the means through which the universe becomes conscious of itself?” This reminded me of a quote from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées:

“A reed only is man, the frailest in the world, but a reed that thinks. Unnecessary that the universe arm itself to destroy him: a breath of air, a drop of water are enough to kill him. Yet, if the All should crush him, man would still be nobler than that which destroys him: for he knows that he dies, and he knows that the universe is stronger than he; but the universe knows nothing of it.” (Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer)

This seems to apply to Into the Abyss and its depiction of human beings within this world. In the film you go driving down country roads and you show the trailer parks, the run-down stores, the boarded up gas stations, the bars. It looks like a wasteland that God is somehow absent from, and there are these people in the midst of it who are in a terrible state of pain and confusion – in an apparently indifferent universe.

WH: Let me address Pascal first. Yes, I like him very much. I even invented a quote for the film Lessons of Darkness. It starts with a Pascal quote “The collapse of the universe will occur like the creation in grandiose splendor,” and underneath it says Blaise Pascal, but I invented it – and of course Pascal couldn’t have said it better. [Laughs.]

But, it’s interesting. The wasteland, this forlorn landscape, has become fascinating for me – this lost kind of Americana. And one of the death row inmates with whom I spoke – not in this film but in another film I’m already finishing – he said to me how he saw on his very last trip forty-three miles between death row and the death house where they are being executed in Huntsville. And in this cage in the van he sees a little bit of an abandoned gas station, he sees a cow in the field, and all of a sudden for him, everything is magnificent, and he says: “It looked like Israel to me, it all looked like the Holy Land.” And I immediately grabbed my camera and I did this voyage of the forty-three miles and indeed the most forlorn landscapes all of a sudden look like the Holy Land. So I look at these forlorn landscapes all of a sudden with fresh and different eyes. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part I: Into the Abyss