Mathematical Riddles

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Peter Greenaway is not the sort of director who has ever tried to appeal to the average moviegoer or make a mainstream film but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t enjoyed a long and successful career in the cinema. In fact, his 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was a surprise box office hit, grossing more than 7.7 million dollars in the U.S., which was highly impressive for an art house flick. Still, his filmography might seem intimidating or of little interest to most American viewers but several of Greenaway’s feature films from the 1980s are quite accessible, if only curious movie lovers would give them a chance. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and The Belly of an Architect (1987) are good places to begin but my personal favorite is Drowning by Nights (1988), which is a subversive black comedy involving murder, game playing, and a fascination with numbers.

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The Year the Music Died

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Most musicologists and historians of popular culture generally agree that rock and roll is an American creation but, as a lifetime music lover, I particularly love hearing and seeing how that pop culture movement influenced other societies around the globe. You don’t think of a country like Cambodia as a fertile breeding ground for innovative rock and roll but it was – in the late fifties through the mid-seventies – until the Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975. At that point rock and roll (and all music and culture considered “foreign” or western to the communist regime) was outlawed and any evidence of it (albums, tapes, etc.) destroyed, effectively erasing almost twenty years of pop culture…or so, they thought. John Pirozzi, director of Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (2014), discovered enough missing pieces of that forgotten music scene to put together a fascinating and deeply moving portrait of a particular place and time that should appeal to rock and rollers everywhere.

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The Game of Adultery

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The Spanish film poster for THE GAME OF ADULTERY (1973).

Giallo thrillers and spaghetti westerns are generally considered genres created by the Italian film industry but producers and filmmakers in other European countries also created their own versions in these categories, especially in Spain. Director/Screenwriter Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, a native of Madrid, is best known for his Spanish take on wild west oaters but he did make a film that could be classified as a giallo. El Juego del Adulterio (English title: The Game of Adultery aka The Deadly Triangle, 1973) is blessed with a title that sounds like an erotic melodrama or maybe a softcore soap opera for the grindhouse crowd. It definitely has elements of that but is actually a psychological thriller crossed with a murder mystery.

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The Big Bang

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Why would a scientist create a weapon of mass destruction that was capable of destroying the planet and ending life as we know it? J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan project and is known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” would later become guilt-ridden over his invention but his original intention was altogether different. He wanted to create a weapon so powerful and dangerous that it would intimidate all world leaders into putting an end to war but, of course, that idealistic concept ended in failure because human beings are flawed creatures. This same scenario is mirrored in the Czech sci-fi drama, Krakatit (1948), in which an engineer named Prokop (Karel Hoger) creates a powder that can become explosive and release atomic energy when activated by radio signals or other means. Like Oppenheimer, Prokop quickly comes to regret his discovery but a case of amnesia caused by an accidental explosion complicates the engineer’s desperate search for an associate, Jiri Tomes (Miroslav Homola), who stole the formula.

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Kafkaesque

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In October of 1970, the Canadian government was thrown into a state of turmoil by the actions of Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), a terrorist group that wanted to achieve independence for Quebec and make it a socialist province. After the FLQ first kidnapped British diplomat James Cross on October 5th and followed it up with the abduction of Quebec Cabinet Minister Pierre Laporte five days later, Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, called in the army and invoked the War Measures Act, which gave the police complete authority to arrest and interrogate anyone deemed suspicious, regardless of whether there was any evidence or not. Over 400 people were rounded up and subjected to numerous human rights abuses before being released, some after more than 21 days in jail. Les Ordres (1974), a cinema verite dramatization of this incident by Canadian director/cinematographer Michel Brault, follows the travails of five suspects, based on the actual transcripts of their incarceration.

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Yma Sumac: Inca Goddess

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Yma Sumac, that rarest of exotic songbirds, officially became an extinct species on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008 in Silver Lake, California. Her passing was barely noticed by the media despite the fact that her impact on pop culture in the early fifties had an international impact. From her first U.S. album release, Voice of the XtaBay (1950), and Hollywood film debut Secret of the Incas (1954) starring Charlton Heston, to everything that followed in her curious career, Sumac has been many things to many people.

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Unholy Alliances

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The Italian film poster for the 1994 film THE ARCANE SORCERER

Ever since the international box office success of The Exorcist in 1973, horror films dealing with religion and priests have usually focused on demonic possession. This trend even continues today as witnessed by the release of The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) and The Exorcism (2024), both starring Russell Crowe. A refreshingly different approach to this often formulaic subgenre is L’Arcano Incantatore (English title: The Arcane Sorcerer), a sadly overlooked but richly atmospheric period thriller from Italian director Pupi Avati, which premiered in 1996 but never received an official theatrical release in the U.S.

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Edward G. Robinson is Wolf Larsen

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Edward G. Robinson on the set of THE SEA WOLF (1941), in which he plays the maniacal captain Wolf Larsen from the Jack London novel.

Among the many tales about ill-fated ocean voyages, obsessive and tyrannical sea captains are usually at the root of the trouble. Some of the more memorable ones include Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, and Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. But none of these misguided authority figures can match the sadism and brutality of Wolf Larsen, the megalomaniac captain of Jack London’s novel, The Sea Wolf, who was famously portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in a 1941 Warner Bros. production directed by Michael Curtiz.

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It Came from Brazil

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What are the circumstances that lead to the formation of a new film movement? For the pioneers of the neorealism movement in Italy, it was the need to address the problems of the country in the aftermath of WW2 when commercial films seemed irrelevant in comparison. In France during the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was the desire by the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers to break away from the aesthetics of studio made films in favor of new and more relevant subject matter and production methods. And, in Brazil during this same time period, it was also a generational response by young filmmakers to their country’s cinema, which became known as the Cinema Novo movement. Yet, it wasn’t just a revolt against the traditional commercial movies of Brazil but an effort to address, discuss and critique aspects of the country’s national identity on the world stage. Cinema Novo (2016), a documentary by Eryk Rocha (son of director Glauber Rocha), is a non-traditional approach to the genre which immerses the viewer in a visual and aural whirlwind that captures the power, passion and creativity of the movement. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a pure bombardment of the senses” and that’s a compliment.

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The Watcher and the Watched

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The Polish film poster for A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988)

A lonely nineteen-year-old boy watches his neighbor Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska) through binoculars as she moves about her apartment across the courtyard in her underwear. Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) has been spying on this alluring older woman for almost a year and he has his routine down to a fine science, which includes setting his alarm clock to go off at the time she comes home from work so he won’t miss a thing. He soon graduates from binoculars to a telescope he stole from a local school. He also calls her up occasionally on the telephone but never has the nerve to say anything. His obsession, however, has come to the point where he requires more direct contact and so he begins to manipulate some face to face encounters with Magda through his work as a postal clerk and a milk delivery man for the apartments. While this basic premise for Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Krotki Film o Milosci (English title: A Short Film About Love,1988) sounds like the set-up for a creepy voyeur thriller in the vein of Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960), or Peeping Tom (1960), the movie that unfolds goes in a completely different direction, depicting two lonely souls – one cynical, the other naïve – who forge a unique connection through unlikely circumstances.

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