Return of the Repressed: Revived Treasures of 2021
Arrebato (1979)
Each year, any number of lost or overlooked films get re-released, sometimes with theatrical screenings. I make a point to try to attend as many revivals as I can. Many organizations around the world, dedicated to the remastering and restoration of long-unseen or forgotten films, continue to do noble and vital work in bringing these movies back to us. Last year, I saw all three of these features in theaters with live audiences and the sense of appreciation for that work was palpable, like an entire secret echelon of film history had been brought back into the light.
I’ve noticed one common theme that links these three films. They all defied the traditional notions of their respective national cinemas at the time. They all feature outsiders at odds with restrictive, tedious or prejudiced societies. They are stories of repressed people breaking free, confounding stereotypes, transcending their restrained social positions. This identification with the outsider or challenging of the prevailing status quo is likely what may have impeded their success upon original release and it's wonderful to have them added to contemporary film culture, where new audiences can discover them:
The Story of a Three Day Pass
Melvin Van Peebles, US/France, 1967
Like so many black artists unable to work in a segregated Hollywood where Ronald Reagan’s discriminatory hiring and casting practices were still in play long after his tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild ended, Melvin Van Peebles left the US for France in the 60’s, seeking a more tolerant and fertile environment for his brand of edgy, confrontational art. He found French attitudes about race contradictory at best.
Four years before returning to the US to make the seminal Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, Van Peebles made this semi-autobiographical account of his time abroad. Like La Permission, the book it’s based on (one of many written by Van Peebles in French), it’s a lively and lacerating exploration of the psychology of racism from an entirely new vantage point.
In The Story of a Three Day Pass, Van Peebles looks to have fallen in love with some of the flashier stylistic reflexes of the French New Wave. Like Brian De Palma’s early comedic features with Robert DeNiro in this period, it’s heavily influenced by Jean-Luc Godard. Van Peebles uses jump-cuts (cutting within a moment to the same moment), freeze-frames, dizzying staccato montage, a cacophony of layered soundtracks and an amazing split-screen sequence depicting a schizophrenic mirror conversation (meant to illustrate the fractured black identity in argument with itself about its sense of worth, tainted by the insecurities wrought by its white peers).
Turner (Harry Baird), a black US soldier stationed in France, is given a three-day leave by his causally bigoted commanding officer. In Paris, he meets a spritely white woman (Nicole Berger) who accompanies him on an improvised tour of the country. Their glaring differences as a couple are explored with suggestive cutaways and dreamlike sequences that serve to illustrate the magnitude and implications of these differences, bound up as much with notions of class and homeland as they are with race.
The tragedy the film slowly begins to illustrate is that it may only be outside of the US, within the confines of a (slightly) more racially evolved society that a true exploration of the difficulty of navigating an interracial relationship is possible. The gulf separating the two lovers is immense, the psychological and emotional barriers between them as imposing and dangerous as the national and racial ones. On top of that, Turner is exposed by his fellow soldiers, who report him for being with a white woman, which costs him a promotion. And his woman.
For 1967, this is all pretty amazing. The landmark ruling in the Loving v. Virginia case had only been handed down a year before the film was made and what’s so sophisticated about Van Peebles’ critique is in how much it has to say not just about white racial hatred, but about black self-hatred and its pathology of isolation and doubt in this context. Turner likewise finds no connection from black French citizens who avoid interacting with him. There appears to be very little black solidarity in this part of Europe and ironically, the US may be better equipped for social dialogue, agency and reform because of it. And is Turner’s assimilation into elite whiteness a worthy goal?
It’s a film made by an understandably jaded American, about an American abroad. But in its visual experimentation, the wistful melancholy at the heart of its playful surface, the sense of failure and loss at the inescapable, hidebound fate of its hero, it is a French New Wave film through and through and I submit this as a compliment.
Chess Game of the Wind
Mohammed Reza Aslani, Iran, 1976
A film screened publicly just once before it was banned in its home country and then lost for decades, Aslani’s stunning tale of greed, murder and betrayal in a foreboding candlelit mansion is an absolute treasure. Visually evocative and expressive, intricate, and mercilessly attacking the venality and materialism of the upper class. Thanks to Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, its resurrection is something of a miracle. I had been following for some time the story of this completely unseen masterpiece, lost for nearly half a century before a can containing a print was found in a junk shop by the director's son in 2014. I remember reading that story and thinking the treasure that can contained could prove to be a real treat for film lovers when it saw the light of day. And it doesn’t disappoint.
I can see why Chess Game of the Wind must have hit a nerve within the Islamic Republic upon its release. It calls out the empty privileging of money and status that had begun to take root in that part of the world. It defies what it sees as the empty Western values embodied by the Shah of Iran, who was installed by the US in a brutal coup in 1952 and who would be overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeni in 1979, just three years after the meager release of Chess Game of the Wind.
The film’s stinging portrait of an aristocratic family coming apart at the seams threatened the Iranian status quo’s assertion of hierarchies, monarchies, patriarchies, and entrenched aristocracy that keep everyone miserable and beholden. What’s remarkable is that this critique is delivered in the manner of Hitchcock-style thriller, complete with its own system of different floors of a manor house representing layers of psychological or spiritual malady, staircases which prove to be terrific devices for character dynamics or suspense, and dead bodies which refuse to stay hidden.
Aslani gives you so much. The superb cast includes Shoah Aghdashloo, who would be introduced to international audiences with her Oscar win for 2003’s House of Sand and Fog. The complex and richly nuanced photography by Houshang Baharlou makes use of color and light in a way that does full justice to the symmetrical compositions that feel borderline oppressive in their imprisonment of the contemptuous occupants of the house and its servants. I was impressed by Sheyda Gharachedaghi’s innovative score, which takes traditional Persian music and places it in a modern context. The clash between traditional Persian instruments and foreign, contemporary ones (like synthesizers) nicely underlines the tension between two clashing eras, each on a desperate, bloody collision course.
Arrebato
Ivan Zulueta, Spain, 1979
Ivan Zulueta’s singular masterpiece was regarded as an underground cult classic for decades but thanks to the Criterion-led 4k restoration - which does full justice to the rich colors that bathe the film - it’s rightly being reconsidered as one of the defining post-Franco Spanish films. It spoke to a sense of emptiness - a void - in younger generations that could be filled with drugs and media, which are one and the same thing in Arrebato.
The moment at which the infantile and awkward Pedro (Will More) is fully subsumed in “Rapture” of his creations as he films time lapses of his humble apartment and various environments is what fuels his addiction, with the clicking of his Super 8 camera like a sort of inhuman heartbeat. With the mailing of an audio tape, a reel of film, and a key, Pedro draws his friend, listless horror director José (Eusebio Poncela), into the world of his addiction.
Then the film itself seems to veer into another realm where terror and adoration are the main ingredients of a hallucinatory form of reality enabled by the scary new frontier of consumer grade video. We follow the characters on an adventure that leaps backward and forward in time with reckless abandon. The phenomenal cocaine-and-heroin-fueled night on the town sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
Made four years after Franco’s death, Arrebato would kick off the Movida Madrileña - the countercultural explosion in 70’s Spain. Zulueta’s frank depictions of sex, queerness, hard drug use and nudity throb with the energy of liberation from decades of fascist censorship. Director Pedro Almodóvar cites Arrebato as a major influence and would go on to cast many of Zulueta’s actors (chiefly Cecilia Roth as José’s heroin-addicted ex-girlfriend) in his own films, for which Zulueta, who never made another feature, was frequently employed to create the dazzling poster art.
Personally, I would place this disorienting and sensational film as a forerunner to a movie like David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). Arrebato does what Cronenberg and other emerging Canadian filmmakers did during this period in interrogating the audience’s role as spectators in a mass media age, and the ways in which we lie to ourselves about our bodies, our sex, our lives and our values. It too sees new technologies (specifically video technology) as entities which can make us whole, lead us to the sublime, or conversely as something masturbatory for losing ourselves in. To substitute for human love in spite of our loneliness. A kind of fetishization of our solitary relationships with screens and cameras. Could anything be more prescient than that?
At this time, The Story of a Three Day Pass and Arrebato are available for streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy. Sadly, Chess Game of the Wind is currently unavailable for streaming.
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