Don't Make a Scene: The Diary of Anne Frank

I planned on putting this up after Hallowe'en, anyway—a way of lighting a candle in the darkness. But, after the last couple weeks, I found it imperative to put this up, now more than ever.

The Story: The economy of the images is key.

Director George Stevens had made his mark with light comedies and period dramas before World War II. Entertainments. Afterwards, his films changed. They became more formal and mannered. Thought out and psychological.  Contemplations on good and evil and how they affect and shape our lives. Diverse in subject matter—A Place in the Sun, Shane, Giant—they all seemed to beg the question: how did we get there? How could human beings turn so evil, capable of such accomplishments and yet capable of atrocities, as well.

The Diary of Anne Frank was his direct statement on that war, which he'd covered as a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he'd photographed the Normandy invasion and the opening of the Dachau concentration camp.  Given such assignments, how could one not come away changed?

But, look at these images, very, very carefully composed and spare in their effects: the last carefully composed shot of the cast awaiting their moment of discovery; the haunting shot of Anne, prefiguring her short life in the camps, looking ghost-like and moving away, seemingly on the same breeze the ruffles the pages of her diary; the stark image of the broken window with its limited field of sky, a mocking glimpse of freedom; looking back through that window as Otto Frank tells his story; the disquieting edit to his close-up that begins with him staring out that window, then at us, as if accusing, before he returns to his story; the final, processed shot (courtesy of L.B. Abbott) of seagulls cast against a sky...like crying souls.

I think about this scene and movie—a lot—especially when dealing with the public. Yes, there is evil in the world, and given the opportunity, people can sink to their lowest level. But, for the most part... For the most part....

She puts me to shame, too.


The Set Up: After years of hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, the collection of Jews, including the Frank family, have been discovered. Otto Frank, the only one surviving, returns to the scene...where he has been given something left behind—his daughter Anne's diary.

Action.

ANNE (VO): And so it seems our stay here is over. They've given us just a moment to get our things.

ANNE (VO): We can each take a bag...and whatever it will hold of clothing.

ANNE (VO): Nothing else.

ANNE (VO): So, dear diary...that means I must leave you behind.

ANNE (VO): Good-bye for awhile. P.S. Please, please, anyone, if you should find this diary...will you please keep it safe for me. Because someday I hope that—

FRANK: No more.

MIEP: I had gone to the country to try and find food. When I got back the police were in the building.

KRALER: We made it our business to learn how they knew. It was the thief who told them.

KRALER: We know the thief. He was...
FRANK: It seems strange to me now. But we were so full of hope in the camp in Holland where they first took us. The news of the war was good. The British and Americans were sweeping through France. We felt sure they would get to us in time to--

FRANK: But--

FRANK: In September we were shipped to Poland. The men to one camp. The women to another. From there, they were sent to Belsen. I stayed in Auschwitz. In January, we were freed, the few of us who were left.

FRANK: The war was not yet over, no. It took us a long time to get home. Each time the train would stop, we'd all get out, you know, at a siding or a crossing, and...walk from group to group.

FRANK: "Where were you?""Were you at Belsen?" "At Buchenwald?" "At Mauthausen? Where?

FRANK: "Is it possible that you ever knew my wife? Did you ever see my husband, my son?" "My daughter?"

FRANK: That's how I found out about my wife's death...Margot's, Van Daans, Peter, Dussel.

FRANK: But...

FRANK: Anne...

FRANK: I still hoped.

FRANK: Yesterday I was in Rotterdam. I met a woman there. She'd been in Belsen...with Anne.

FRANK: I know now.

ANNE (VO): In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

FRANK: She puts me to shame.

The Diary of Anne Frank

Words by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (and Anne Frank)

Pictures by William C. Mellor, Jack Cardiff, L.B. Abbott, and George Stevens

The Diary of Anne Frank is available on DVD from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)(2015)

Written at the times of the films' releases...

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...Spy"

Investigative reporter Mikael Blomqvist (a nom de plume purloined from the fictional detective Kalle Blomqvist) has just been found guilty of libel for an article he wrote about a powerful Swiss industrialist. In six months he's set for the barry hotel, but in the meantime, he has down-time. He gets an invitation for a job—the coldest of cases, literally and metaphorically—on the remote wintry island that serves as a compound for the Vanger family.

The Vangers are the Swiss cousins of all the encrusted old-money families of British and American detective fiction. Be they Baskervilles or Armstrongs or Sternwoods, the "storied" elite families stood in for the Rothschilds and Lindberghs and Morgans and Rockefellers in a literary class warfare that assured the punters that bad things happened to the rich, as well. In fact, it was more than likely to happen to them as money is the root of all things evil. Perhaps.

Money was on the family's mind that Children's Day weekend on the Island, as a family board meeting was taking place, when one of the daughters disappeared, and her father drowned in a boating accident. One of the patriarchs wants to know, finally, forty years after the fact, what happened to the girl, who killed her, and charges Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) with the task. 

For the disgraced newsie, it's a case of interviews and solitary visits to the caked-in-dust morgues of newspaper offices and libraries. But, though isolated on the Island, he's being watched, not only by the family, but by a security investigator who's hacked his computer.

She's Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,* a 22 year old full-time goth-punk chain-smoking, bisexual, PTSD'd borderline schizophrenic, sociopathic, fire-fixated security-investigator-computer-hacker...and part-time judge, jury and executioner. And where Mikael is dusting off old store-rooms, she's mining hard-drives through the back-door for any information that might be useful, like, say, on the creep who's been appointed her guardian. Life has rumpled Mikael, but it's deeply scarred Lisbeth, and the two tarnished angels are linked by more than cyberspace in a mutual interest making peoples' forgotten pasts their field of play.

They were made for each other, and, as both are incapable of seeing a mystery without inserting themselves, fated to team up to solve the question, if it is to be solved.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of those whodunnit's much in love with every squeaking trope, and dangling aringarosa of the detective literary genre, and the puzzle is of the classic "Closed Room" variety—a traffic accident cut off the one exit to the bridge when the skull-duggery happened, so the scope of the search is limited to who might have been on that island to perpetrate it. The clues are varied in sources and nature, an old diary the girl kept with no entries that might lend suspicion, the few photographs taken that week-end...and Blomkvist's own memories—the girl was his nanny on Island holidays—provide nagging evidence, as does a single portrait that haunts him, like the Mona Lisa.

There are so many referrals to past films noir and sleuth-cinema that one could get lost in many a blind-alley (not that there are many on a rural Swedish island), but there are more than enough cousins and butlers and drawing rooms to go around—as with the best mysteries, no one is a suspect, but everyone is.

It is violent—there are two upsetting rape scenes that are essential to the plot, ultimately—but there is a cross-running sub-theme of sexual tyranny equating male sexism and domination as a form of fascism (it's an in-bred cousin to the feminism issues that made The Silence of the Lambs more important than a "boogey-man" story) that makes the film interesting philosophically in the genre. Director Niels Arden Oplev stages those scenes in a brutal manner that divorces them from any sexual act and makes them sadistic acts of violence, but one should be warned that there is rough stuff, far beyond cloak-room murders and high tea. The film is unrated, but consider it a hard "R." 

It's a cracking pastiche, with the best thing about it being the (English version's) titular character. A product of the very brutality embodied by the mystery itself, the stakes are personal for Salander (and Blomkvist, certainly), but, like the Hannibal Lecter character in Silence of the Lambs, she is such a wild-cannon on deck during the proceedings that her motivations keep your thinking cap distracted from the mystery at hand. As played by Rapace, she is a kabuki-like presence than can turn ninja on a dime, a literal smoking gun, who can make things better or worse, depending on her buried mood, making the film categorical as "Suspense" as well as "Mystery."

The other films in the trilogy will be released later in the year. Then, an American remake is planned...at this writing starring Brad Pitt and Carey Mulligan.

(Yeah, well, not so much...see below)

* That's what it is known as in English-speaking publishing circles where mysteries series need a unifying "hook" like John D. McDonald's colorful titles for the Travis McGee novels, or "Cat" series of Lilian Jackson Braun. In its native Sweden, the title—"Män som hatar kvinnor "— translates to the more straight-forward and to-the-point, "Men Who Hate Women." The popular series of novels, dubbed the "Millennium Trilogy" (for the publication Blomqvist works for) stopped at three due to the untimely death of its reporter/author Stieg Larsson of a heart attack at age 50, before the first could be published.

Michael Nykvist, who starred in the Swedish films, died June 27, 2017

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"The Girl With the Dragon, Take Two"
or
"Once More...with Feeling"

"We come from the land of the ice and snow
from the midnight sun where the hot springs FLOW
How soft your fields so green,
can whisper tales of gore,
Of how we calmed the tides of war.
We are your overlords.
On we sweep with threshing oar,
Our only goal will be the western shore."

"Immigrant Song"  Led Zeppelin

The American production of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo advertised itself (amusingly) with the tag-line "The Feel Bad Movie for Christmas."  Compared to the Swedish-TV version (with Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace), it's actually, if one can believe it given the subject matter, a "kinder, gentler" version.

So, what's different?  For those familiar with the first version, many of the locations reveal themselves to be the same. Resolutions are slightly different. The casting certainly is (and more on that later). Editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall keep things moving very fast, sometimes abruptly, and scripter Steven Zaillian delivers punchy dialogue dripping with icyclic irony, while keeping the circumstances equally savage and shocking (what else can you expect from from a murder mystery involving in-bred families crusty with krona, corruption, Nazi affiliations, serial killers, sexual violence and "men who hate women"—the original title of the book when published in Sweden?). 

It's how director David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network) approaches the tone that's slightly different, and though still mordantly frigid, this version is a bit more clever in presentation, adding a darkly humorous slant. Sure, the violence is still sickening, but blunted, even handled at times more discretely, making the impact contrarily even more squeamy, while, at the same time, counter-pointing with sly musical choices.*

But, it's the casting where the main differences occur. Daniel Craig, no less intense, but muted and reduced to human scale with a world-weary familiarity, plays Mikael Blomqvist, co-publisher and chief reporter for an investigative magazine, Millennium. Disgraced by a libel suit gone against him and to shake off the publicity and the hit to his reputation and bank account, he takes on a murder investigation for the patriarch of the industrialist Wanger family (Christopher Plummer)—a literal cold case of the forty year old disappearance of the elder Wanger's granddaughter, although distinctive clues point to her either being alive, or the killer is cleverly taunting the old man.

It's soon clear that Blomqvist may be over his head and he calls on an "assistant"—the same background investigator who cleared him for the job for the Wangers. She's the titular "girl with the dragon tattoo"—Elisabeth Salander and "she's different."  "In what way?" asks Wanger's lawyer, Frode (Steven Berkoff).

"In every way," says her employer.

Too true, not only in terms of Society, but also from the actress who previously took the role (Noomi Rapace, currently starring in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows).  She's still the same Salander, the goth-punk, vegan, pierced, bi-sexual hacker-savant who becomes the focus of the series, zipping around the bleak Swedish countryside on her black-on-black motorcycle, but this movies version, in the form of Rooney Mara, is slight (she had to be starring opposite the 5'10" Craig), tiny and even more startling in appearance than Rapace.

There's still the same shock of hair, but with her elfin face, shaved eyebrows and eyes sunk deep into her face, she has the appearance of the walking dead, her head looking often like a skull, and speaking in a dull, listless monotone.  Rapace looked like she could kick serious ass (and did in the Swedish productions), but Mara is deceptively tiny, even looking sickly frail, so when she goes on the attack, it's doubly alarming. 

We learn more about the little spit-fire in the second and third books of the series (hopefully they'll have their own versions with this cast—as with the Swedish films—because this cast is too good to waste, but the film's poor box-office showing—"The Feel-Bad Movie of Christmas," remember?—may make that unlikely), but Mara's dead-inside interpretation, that only slightly blossoms through the film, is an interesting take, doubly tragic, keenly felt and puts both her character and Blomqvist's into an interesting perspective.

I actually like this version better than the first.

The main title with the Trent Reznor/Karen O version of the Led Zep song.

* The best being what was used in the initial trailers—Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," subtly adapted by producer-composer Trent Reznor (the perfect guy to score this film) for female vocal, while keeping the brutal orchestrations of the original intact.  The Main Title sequence accompanying it, is visually arresting, suggestive and creepy, almost a mission statement in tone—black and white, reflecting the film's dark muted color scheme—while suggesting minds, trapped, tortured and squirming like toads. 

Black Swan (2010)

Written at the time of the film's release....

"The Red Shoes Diaries"
or
"Losing Control (She-Bop, Sh'Bop, Sh'Bop)"

Black Swan is a head-trip, alright. Darren Aronofsky's latest of his films exploring the limits of obsession—the pursuit of it, the need for it, and its cost—never travels too far afield from the whirling dermis-dome of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman—brave). A "girly-girl" to the nth degree, Nina still lives with Mom (Barbara Hershey—even braver) in a 12 year old's bedroom, blushes in embarrassment when sex is brought up, and still pursues the girl's version of what the Bible calls "childish things"—prima ballerina.

And like the dervishes who spin to achieve some form of religious ecstasy, she is looking for an epiphany in her pursuit of perfection. Be careful what you wish for.

From the loges, it all looks so elegant, but on stage it's a board-thumping, sinew-stretching, bone-popping athletic performance, practiced to such an extent to be made to seem easy.  The body takes a beating.  Callouses form, bones snap, nails bear the brunt of the quest for perfection.  It's beautiful but brutal. And, as any athlete will tell you, it's as much a challenge of the mind, as well. There's the discipline to do the job unerringly, but there's also physical acting, as well. Synapses fire to work the muscles, but those same synapses are under assault psychologically, fraying from the pressures on-stage and backstage.

For Nina, it's an obsession for perfection.* Her director (Vincent Cassel) knows she can nail the star-part of the pure white swan in "Swan Lake," but the vixenish back swan is more of a challenge. "Perfection isn't about control.  It's also about letting go." For the more sensuous black swan, Nina is at a loss, so bottled up in being perfect, she's afraid to open up from the discipline. "Live a little," he suggests, telling her to touch herself.

As if there isn't enough self-abuse going on.

The pressures start getting to her. Given to obsessively scratching her shoulder, she develops a rash at her shoulder blades. Toe-nails split. Her fingernails turn bloody (at one point she tears off a length of finger skin down to the second knuckle). She seems to be coming apart at the seams, and if she can't bear up, she'll be replaced like the departing prima Beth McIntyre (Winona Ryder**).  The number one candidate for the job is Lily (Mila Kunis), an earthy dancer from San Francisco, who typifies the black swan, and who becomes something of a paranoid obsession to Nina from their first glance. By the time Nina actually pulls the bud of a black feather out of her scraped-raw shoulder, it's pretty apparent Nina has crossed a line and, like an exquisite ballet, fantasy has disguised reality.

It's scary, almost a horror film. Aronofsky keeps the film taught, his restless camera taking a position directly behind Nina's head, clod-hopping behind her, seeing what she sees, agitatedly cutting out the dull parts. Then it spins as she does, picking out the neck-snapping details that Nina sees in the blur. Fully a quarter of the film involves a reflective surface (even a shot of Nina looking at her mother's obsessive portraits of her—of course, Mom is trying to "get" daughter perfect, too), even if those mirrors don't always behave well.

And, as he did with The Fountain, Aronofsky proves himself a master of subtle sound-work, using extreme fields to further enhance the disorientation the audience feels inside Nina's head (more than once, I looked to see if there was someone behind me in the theater), and altering reality—making a toe-nail clipper sound like a guillotine, making you feel the gristle of toe-bones as they snap.

And he gets the best out of Portman.  It's a technically tough performance—she's in every scene, and her face, typically beautiful in serenity, is constricted in constant struggle, disrupting the planes of her face into a worried mask that seldom shows her at her best, veering into moments of hysteria.

For the sacrifice of art, she's not pretty, nor is the film, despite its subject matter and occasional forays into the dance-fantasy. How can it be? We're not sitting comfortably in the audience, but perched precariously in Nina's whirling head, dizzy with the spin, that even braking to a screeching stop, continues the momentum in our own minds long afterwards

* I don't want to get too far into this, although I'm sure Aronofsky and his scripters (Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin) probably did. There's something called the "Black Swan Theory," about large, unexpected events and their shock-wave effect on human psyches that must come to grips with it. What's most relevant about it are the ten principles the theory's author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, concocts to create a more predictable world: 

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become Too Big to Fail.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence".
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible "expert" advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

Hmmm.  Some of this relates. 
  
** A glance at the four lead actresses, Portman, Ryder, Kunis, Hershey, and most of the supporting ballerinas reveals that they are all similar-looking women—a long line of raven-haired ingenues, like their own organic mirror images.

The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes (The Archers, 1948) A film considered by many toilers in the field (including Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese) to be the most beautiful film ever made. It's also one of the most ingenious and ambitious (typical of of the writer-director-producer team of Powell and Pressburger), combining Hans Christian Andersen's story of a compulsively dancing set of ballet slippers (told in dance form) that takes over the soul of a woman, and couching it in a modern re-telling of the story, where magic is replaced by ambition, and the story parallels the real-life story of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his relationship with a British ballet dancer, Diana Gould. Fantasy becomes psychology, and the Fates stay the same; that's a pretty bold statement on the power of myth and myth-making, both in the worlds of fairy-tales and The Arts. And it's the kind of Deep Thought that Powell and Pressburger brought to the conception of their films.  Modern audiences may find them overwrought (and TOO "British?"), but that's missing the forest for the trees. Let's agree to call it hyper-theatricality.  The Archers made exquisite films of subtlety and sophistication, and imaginatively bridged the fine cinematic line between reality and fantasy...and sanity and madness.*

The story is an expansion of Andersen's tale of a woman who loves to dance, is given a pair of magical shoes that fulfills her desires...only too well...finally dancing her to her doom. Here, Vicky Page (the vivid...there's no other way to say it...Moira Shearer) is a dancer of great ambitions, but circumstances bring her into the orbit of ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who, impressed by her devotion to "The Dance" brings her into his company. 

Given the chance to be a prima ballerina, she is also torn by her love for young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), who composes her signature ballet ("The Red Shoes", natch') for her, specifically. The pressures of touring, and the constant strains both physical and emotional, spurred on by the controlling Lermontov, conflict with her love for Julian, but it's a metaphor, as much as The Red Shoes is, she is conflicted between her love of dancing and her love for the man. 

And then, there are the images:

They are startling.  Each frame could be hung on the wall of a gallery. With the deep tones of a black-and-white film, but in eye-popping, arresting Technicolor, composed with equal attention to composition and detail. Each advances the story-line, but moves deeper into the very psychology of the actors on stage.

But, they're moving in three-dimensions, and each edit to another shot is a new revelation that startles and pleases the eye.** This is incredible, sumptuous film-making using the combined skills of art and photo-chemistry. Every time I hear someone extolling the virtues of today's digital bleaching and leeching of color, I know they haven't seen this film and its full-to-dripping palette.

Choices that hurt the brain: In the middle of a performance, reality and fantasy merge in the conflicted heart of dancer Victoria Page (Moira Shearer). The stress in the face is manifested by the dancer's physical exertions by beads of sweat and welling tears.

In one of the most startling images/special effects in The Red Shoes Vicky, in performance, imagines an image of her composer-lover, which she rushes to and falls through, a dream-like nightmarish image of the traps of love.

Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), a dark figure in the shadow of the wings

Helen's conflict in a single image

The body of a dancer must be that of an athlete's. Strong, focused, and tough, as tough as the soles of their feet...as calloused as their toes. But what can come of that pirouetting figure, spinning, when it is in mortal conflict between a romantic heart and an artistic soul for possession of the self? Which ever way the music turns, love conquers all. That is the heart of The Red Shoes, and like the cautionary folk-tale that inspired it, that does not necessarily mean that everything ends "happily ever after."

One of those movies you should see before you kick, balletically or not.

* I can't help but think that Darren Aronofsky's Natalie Portman ballerina psycho-drama Black Swan (which we'll look at tomorrow) has also been massively influenced by this film, as well (although, given the trailer's theme of "You Must Find Your Passion," it sounds a bit more like "Red Shoe Diaries"), but one hopes Aronofsky's dark sensibilities (and dabblings in theory, both mathematical and sociological) will be the dominant underpinnings.

** Yeah, yeah, I know. The previous sentences are as generic as they could be; that is what film-making SHOULD be, after all. Unfortunately, as the better the technology has become, the fundamentals of film-making as ticked off in those sentences seem to be lacking in most product. The Red Shoes is a shining (one might even say, glowing) example of taking the art to a new level.