[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Despite having its copious array of montage and staging techniques pilfered by hundreds of music videos and commercials over the years, Kenneth Anger's incantatory envisioning of a sacred rite spanning the world retains a hypnotic spell untouched by its imitators. Unabashedly sexy and hypnotic as hell, the film joyously embraces its libidinal energies and demonic inspirations, channeling an arcane series of references to Egyptology and the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and expressing their power in purely cinematic terms. Summoning Lucifer as the bringer of light, the film celebrates that same light and its infusion into a rich, sumptuous cinema of opulent color schemes and geometries of clairvoyant precision. Superimpositions, associative flash cuts, venetian wipes, seesaw tracking shots, a complex, oddly moving rock score by Bobby Beausoleil, and the special effect known as Marianne Faithfull (aka the saddest eyes in the world) are all woven into an effortlessly lucid stream of violence, sex, death and cosmic consummation. As far as mythic worldmaking goes, Anger's work conveys a richer imagination and mystic wonder—never mind cinematic resourcefulness—in 30 minutes than the entire Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series combined.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Lauded by the likes of Susan Sontag as one of the greatest works of 20th century art, while reviled by many both in Germany and abroad as a work of depraved reactionary nostalgia, Hans Jurgen Syberberg's epic rumination of Germany's Nazi past remains as troubling and troublesome today as it was thirty years ago. (Two top German critics I met in Berlin admitted to not having been able to sit through the film.) Syberberg takes the old adage of confronting the mistakes of the past lest they be repeated and puts it to an extreme test, immersing its audience in seven-plus hours of Naziana drawn out to such length and breadth that it suggests a morbidly intractable fixation with its subject.

A historical zombie movie for intellectuals, the film fixes an unwavering gaze on reanimated Nazi figures like Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler (whose obsession with a mythic Germany Syberberg seems to share), Hitler's personal valet, and Hitler himself, toga-clad and rising from Richard Wagner's tomb, as they deliver endless monologues amidst a landscape of kitschy Third Reich paraphernalia and atmospheric dry ice fog. The film itself creeps like a mist, heavily influenced by a Wagnerian aesthetic of total immersion and seductive stasis whose registers of portentous yearning shift gradually from one motif to the next. Other monologues delivered by contemporary performers often teeter into tedious, sermonizing self-absorption and effete irony (as if to counterpoint the passionate conviction of Nazi orators), bringing out an anti-cinematic element that denies pleasure and resists rapture. The film comments on cinema itself through a series of rear projections of paintings, newsreel footage and other iconic imagery. Sets cluttered with stuffed animals and uniformed mannequins suggest the basement of a Neo-Nazi taxidermist, the detritus of the past splayed out haphazardly yet betraying a precision of design, and an overall funkiness that becomes perversely appealing.

Also telling is the film's dual attributions of Nazism as both a precursor and an antidote to the 20th century American capitalism that, according to Syberberg, threatens the freedoms of the world. It's an argument often waged on the battleground of cinema, with Hitler posited as the greatest filmmaker of all time, and Syberberg actively deconstructing the "movie" that was the Third Reich, that massive production that was able, however temporarily, to break capitalist Hollywood's industrial and cultural stranglehold on world cinema. This thorough disenchantment with contemporary film culture is what has Syberberg reaching for his Nazi revolver, loading it with the ammunition of mythic enthrallment and redemptive cultural pride—and yet not quite willing to pull the trigger. It's a deeply ambivalent work, both longing to return to an eden of enthrallment to a German ideal while cautious of the consequences that such an impulse has already wrought on the world.

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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

[Editor's Note: This entry is cross-published with Shooting Down Pictures.]

For the first video essays I've published since the YouTube fiasco, I am honored to have Kristin Thompson as guest commentator. Not only is she the author of The Frodo Franchise and co-author with David Bordwell of those ubiquitous textbooks Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction, she is also author of the first report on the fair use of film frames, sponsored by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Read her invaluable article on the use of film frames in scholarship.

These videos are published in conjunction with Kristin's illustrated entry on La roue, which can be found on her and David's blog.

SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS: If referencing these videos for scholarship, please cite as "Kristin Thompson and Kevin B. Lee. Shooting Down Pictures video essay on Abel Gance's La roue / E.A. Dupont's Variety." and attach either the URL for this page or the YouTube links.

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La roue:

Variety: