Kubrick on the Guillotine 'Screen Women' Column: Abel Ferrara's The Funeral

         Cross-posted from Kubrick on the Guillotine 's Screen Women Column,   HERE. 

Abel Ferrara – the man responsible for the aggressive psychosexual blunt trauma of The Bad Lieutenant – does not initially appear to be a director overly concerned with progressive feminism. Much like James Toback and Martin Scorsese, his seedy New York is a masculine world, rife with criminal denizens racked with Catholic guilt. They are men living with the darker impulses of the soul, struggling with sin, guilt, and retribution. Ferrara’s films are at once both deeply moral and seemingly enthralled by men in the throes of addiction, degradation and violence. Yet, Ferrara’s relationship with women proves increasingly complex in his 1996 genre piece, The Funeral. 

A mid-budget feature shot nearly back-to-back with The Addiction, it is a largely underrated and forgotten exercise in seamless performances and genre subversion. Set in 1930′s New York, it centres around an Italian-American family consisting of three gangster brothers: Ray (Christopher Walken), the coolly detached oldest, Chez (Chris Penn), the hot-headed drunk, and Johnny (Vincent Gallo), the idealistic, rebellious kid brother with strong Communist inclinations. Johnny has been shot to death in a sudden, mysterious murder, and the eponymous funeral, casket being carried back to the family home, comports the opening shots of the film, soundtracked by the hazy, druggy, melancholy torpor of Billie Holliday. The Funeral is one of Ferrara’s mid-90′s ventures received as neither cataclysmically poor nor with any particular fanfare. His frenetic editing style is absent; the narrative is steadily-paced and cohesive, shot with the softly-lit, nicotine stained mise en scene of rooms, bars, and corridors in a period setting.

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Only God Forgives (2013)

                                Only God Forgives (2013) 
                               Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn 
              Starring: Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vithaya Pansringarm 

                       

Nicolas Winding-Refn's highly anticipated follow-up to 2011's Drive has the same smooth assurance and striking directorial style as its predecessor; but Only God Forgives moves with such silent impassivity through its hellish scenery that it proves a far more difficult, abstract exercise in grotesque violence.

Many films are tagged with the label 'nightmarish' but rarely do they so very literally fit the bill. Only God Forgives is hardly more substantial than most other nightmares; it just hangs there, with its deep red lighting and tableaux decor, on the surface of one's thoughts. The surreal, meaningless and often nonsensical set of occurrences give the impression of something unpleasant lingering just beneath the subconscious; fitting, perhaps, for a film and director so taken with Freudian notions.

                        Read the rest at Kubrick on the Guillotine. 

 

              

Kubrick on the Guillotine 'Screen Women' Column: Anna Magnani

     Originally Posted Here for a Friday film column on Screen Women at Kubrick on the Guillotine.

   

 Today begins Christina Newland‘s new column, which concerns the portrayal of women in the cinema (with reference to the works of scholars Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell and others). Screen Women is intended to provoke discussion and debate about particular films or issues surrounding women. This column is interested in films that appear or have been cast by critics as traditional, retrograde, or even misogynistic, in films that are considered stone-cold feminist classics, and in films that are tellingly silent when it comes to the subject of women, ignoring female subjectivity in favour of the masculine concerns of their story or genre. In this essay, Christina gets the ball rolling with a few brief thoughts on the body of work of one of the greatest actresses to grace the screen, Anna Magnani.

In the interest of foregoing cliché, I’ll try to avoid expounding on the fact that Anna Magnani is one of the most prominent actresses of European art house cinema, one that stands proudly and unabashedly as a feminist icon. Needing neither auteur backing nor a particular star vehicle to make evident her elemental, formidable talent, she is difficult to compare to her contemporaries.

A woman born into abject poverty in working-class Rome and not reaching wider fame until her middle age, Magnani not only managed the crossover into English-speaking films, but worked with several Hollywood luminaries like Sidney Lumet and George Cukor. Her most famous role was the tragic young partisan of Rome Open City (1945) – but she also worked with Jean Renoir, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luchino Visconti. In short order: she was the woman Rossellini left for his infamous affair with Ingrid Bergman; she befriended Tennessee Williams and he decided to write The Rose Tattoo for her; and it was rumoured that Marlon Brando feared her outshining him. Onscreen, she was steadfastly ordinary in appearance – a woman neither voluptuous nor beautiful in the traditional sense of the Italian movie star, like Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale. And yet, she is so wildly self-assured, so fiercely confident, that she radiates an almost-queenly power.

                  

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