Watched: Kes, Hooper, Kuroneko, Adolescents in the Universe
I’m hunting and pecking - old film prints and new Criterion disks, not a bad way to burn off the tail end of a bad month. I caught up to Hooper at last, which was satisfying after all the Buddy Joe Hooker love at ActionFest last year, but I found the film inconsequential and broad. I pushed from there to Kuroneko from the Criterion Collection, having been quite thrilled by Onibaba several years ago, but must mark Kuroneko as a disappointment. It’s beautifully photographed, and with some moments of genuinely unnerving, ghostly sensation… but does not come together into anything so fascinating as its more sensual predecessor.
Yet, days later, its images linger. For the life of me, I cannot imagine why all ghost stories aren’t shot in high contrast black and white; the inky depths, and snowy surfaces, of Kuroneko make a strong case. The photographic scheme simplifies the argument, and consolidates the power of the ghosts: there is only what is, and what isn’t; only the frame, and the effect.
After the Woman in Black fracas I popped a sacrifice fly - or something - and ended up in only the second half of the Moscow Cassiopeia double-feature, Adolescents in the Universe. It was still probably enough to get the gist of the whole thing. Adolescents was entertainingly daffy, and demands an American remake someday (the sexual tension! The completely unconsummated sexual tension!), but otherwise doesn’t leave much on the tongue besides impressions of halfassery and strangeness.
Which brings me to Kes, another Criterion selection, and now possibly the best-looking blu-ray I own. This is helped along generously by the fact that I think Kes is one of the best movies I have ever seen. It enthralled me. Every movie should look like Kes. When in doubt: make it look like Kes. Kes is the finest running argument I’ve yet discovered for the continued life of celluloid: nothing achieved in that film, from the gentle gradations of the grey-green palette, to the diffuse curtain of grain that softens every frame, could be achieved in the digital universe. Even the planes of focus, and the manner in which the distances beyond Billy and his schoolmates and the adults that populate his landscape fall off into haze, seems to me an artifact of the collusion of lenses and shutters and emulsion and so on. Oh, I could reach out and touch it. I could chew it. I hope I get to see Kes projected on a big screen some day.
The movie digresses away from itself and back to itself wonderfully. The arrival of, and lengthy sequence with, football coach Brian Glover is a scream – there is a true-to-life character, writ large! So, too, is there a hearty helping of truth in the extended scene in the locker room afterwards; even if it does conclude with naked Billy wriggling his way through a window to get out of a shower, which to my knowledge never actually happened, nor anything like it, in my entire life, it seems to me like the real thing. That our hero finds a kestrel and trains it for himself, in a movie that might just as easily hold forth on the fussiness of the newspaper man or the bawdy songs down at the pub, evokes a full, substantial world. In fact I don’t think I have ever been in a world like the one in Kes, but when Billy stands up in front of the class and, ever faster, tells them breathlessly about training his hawk – his gigantic blue eyes glowing like the depths of the sea – my breath was taken clean away. There aren’t many sequences of Billy actually training Kes in the course of the film, but each one got gasps out of me.
Movies like Kes are, to me, the real deal. They are the reason I parse these stacks of old reels, both literal an figurative. All cinema thrills me, and when one example peeks its head above the rest, the totality thrills me only more.
Watched is a regular blog series catch-all of non-reviews of films I see in any given week. It posts on Mondays, though not every Monday.
