by Michael Montag

It’s with some reservation that I call Out of the Past a textbook film noir. All of the signature noir iconography is in the picture, of course: a virulent femme fatale, a terse detective, complex narrative structure, poetic voice-over narration, an overwhelming sense of doom, expressive photography, doppelgangers, and so on. But it's only in retrospect that we identify all of these motifs as being indicative of a “noir” style. What’s most fascinating about Out of the Past is its darkening mood and tone. By 1947, the fate of noir detectives had grown increasingly grim. In pictures like The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946), the characterization is, as always, in the hard-boiled, anti-heroic tradition, but the noir hero is mostly in control in these films. The Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes prevail. As the years passed, however, the noir hero became more unhinged and self-aware. Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past is one of the pictures that helped pave the way for the crazed, heated-up noirs to follow in the coming years. One notable exception is Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), which could contend with any noir picture for being the darkest and most sardonic.

by Michael Montag

Alone is the kind of film that adheres to a narrative logic that’s all its own. At the outset of the picture a documentarian unwittingly photographs a murder on a distant rooftop. Within moments he himself is seemingly killed. What ensues is a dark trip through the labyrinthine corridors of time and memory. Using a ‘live-die-repeat’ formula to structure his film, the director Park Hong-min explores the dark repercussions of psychological trauma. The film is set in Seoul in a desolate maze of alleyways, corridors, and spiraling staircases. Park compliments the noir iconography with long handheld takes that weave through the maze-like neighborhood. This setting is as much a character as the documentarian, Su-min, who’s ultimately entrapped in an unending nightmare within a nightmare.

by Michael Montag

by Michael Montag

by Michael Montag

by Michael Montag

Texas Chainsaw Massacre
They took my baby away from me
But she'll never get out of there
She'll never get out of there
~ The Ramones

The low-budget shoddiness of Texas Chainsaw Massacre creates an eerie sense of verisimilitude that verges on snuff. Unfortunately for the viewer, the picture is about as interesting and imaginative as its title. And yet it remains a favorite among horror cultists forty years after its release. It is without a doubt one of the most influential low-budget slashers—a genre that flourished throughout the 1970s—but as a piece of filmmaking it has few cinematic virtues. The highest compliment you could pay the picture is that it has a degree of historical importance as an independent film; made for around $83,000 the picture earned over $30 million at the box office, and ended up the biggest cult phenomenon of 1974. In this singular regard, it's exemplary of the model of filmmaking that defined the Vietnam era, much like Easy Rider, another low-budget-indie that was a phenomenal success.

Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper
Producers: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper, Jay Parsley, Richard Saenz
Cinematographer: Daniel Pearl
Editors: Larry Carroll, Sallye Richardson
Music: Wayne Bell, Tobe Hooper
Cast: Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Edwin Neal

Runtime: 83 minutes
Genre: Horror
Country: USA
US Theatrical Release: October 1, 1974
US Distributor: New Line Cinema

by Michael Montag

Jerry Schatzberg was once a hip name to drop. These days the man responsible for snapping the famous, slightly out-of-focus portrait of Bob Dylan for the Blonde on Blonde album cover has been mostly lost to obscurity. Schatzberg began his professional career as a fashion photographer of sorts in the ‘60s and began directing pictures when, to quote Peter Bogdanovich, the best way to get into Hollywood was having zero directorial experience. His first feature, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, starred his former still-camera subject Faye Dunaway and was a critical and commercial flop. To this day the film continues to elude any form of home video. Fortunately for Schatzberg, he garnered critical acclaim with his second film, Panic in Needle Park, a harrowing street picture about the lives of junkies in NYC. It also introduced audiences to the young, unknown Al Pacino. It’s an incredible achievement, but his masterpiece was still to come.

Director: Jerry Schatzberg
Producer: Robert M. Sherman
Writer: Garry Michael White
Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond
Editor: Evan A. Lottman
Cast: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Richard Lynch, Eileen Brennan

Runtime: 112m.
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
US Theatrical Release: May 26, 1973
US Distributor: Warner Bros.

by Michael Montag

On Dangerous Ground is not only a sleeper in the canon of Nicholas Ray but is also one in the larger canon of film noir. In a sense, noir almost defies classification because it’s always been more of a style than a genre. The first wave of noir ran roughly from 1941’s The Maltese Falcon to 1958’s Touch of Evil, the latter of which is the culmination of its sweaty seventeen-year run. With the exception of Welles’ film and a few other notables like Kiss me Deadly, Hollywood directors weren’t consciously making films to be “noirs.” As Andrew Sarris noted, the term noir was something of “a critical afterthought in film history.” Of course, the shadowy stylistics of the films can be traced back to German Expressionism, the dark tonality to French Poetic Realism, and the flashback structure to Citizen Kane, but it wasn’t until the mid to late ‘40s that the French actually coined the term to describe the ever-increasing paranoia and doom that had begun to creep into Hollywood in the years that followed Kane. Over the years audiences have come to associate noir mostly with femme fatales, terse-talking investigators, convoluted plots, and an overwhelming sense of fatalism.

Directors: Nicholas Ray, Ida Lupino (uncredited)
Writers: A.I. Bezzerides, Nicholas Ray, Gerald Butler (novel)
Producers: John Houseman, Sid Rogell
Cinematographer: George E. Diskant
Editor: Roland Gross
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Cast: Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond, Charles Kemper, Anthony Ross, Ed Begley, Ian Wolfe

Runtime: 82m.
Genre: Crime/Drama/Film-Noir
Countries: USA
US Theatrical Release: December 17, 1951
US Distributor: RKO Radio Pictures, Warner Bros

by Michael Montag

Westerns are nearly as old as the cinema itself. The first western—Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery—arrived in 1903, about a decade after the invention of moving pictures. It was a watershed moment in the cinema’s history. The film may look like a simple good guys vs. bad guys shoot ‘em up today, but its famous ending probably frightened audiences as much as the Lumiere Brothers’ Arrival of a Train, which according to legend sent people running out of the theater, fearing the train would actually hit them. In the final shot of Porter’s film, one of the bandits draws his gun, points it at the audience and shoots. 

by Michael Montag

Cannibal is not the kind of gruesome exploitation film you might expect, nor is it the kind of intense character-study you might hope for. It’s something of a sly variation on the Jekyll and Hyde tale. The title character (played impassively by Antonio De La Torre) is a demented dandy: a tailor by day, a killer and cannibal by night. The director veers away from explaining his character in psychological terms or hardly any terms at all, which means we’re spared the heavy-handed ending of Hitchcock’s Psycho but left with a character who’s quite simply an enigma. This creepy fop listlessly cuts fabric, drinks wine, and eats women—his hands both a curse and blessing. To the director’s credit, most of the film is a remarkable example of pure cinema. The picture is directed in the stark, atmospheric tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville: wind, rain, and silence pervade the film, communicating more than the spare, almost unnecessary dialogue. The film’s highlights are two eerily quiet sequences that seem to have floated right out of Zodiac in somewhat mutated states: one occurs on a darkened stretch of highway and the other on a beach. Throughout the picture, the framing is impressively sly and the elliptical editing keeps us guessing until, finally, a downbeat dénouement that brings to my mind both Wages of Fear and Jules and Jim in different, twisted ways.

MSPIFF
Saturday, April 5, 9:50pm
Monday, April 14, 9:45pm

Director: Manuel Martín Cuenca
Producers: Fernando Bovaira, Rafael de la Uz, Simón de Santiago, Tudor Giurgiu, Alejandro Hernández, Manuel Martín Cuenca, Sergey Selyanov, François Yon
Writers: Alejandro Hernández, Rafael de la Uz, Humberto Areal (novel)
Cinematographer: Pau Esteve Birba
Editor: Ángel Hernández Zoido
Cast: Antonio de la Torre, Olimpia Melinte, Delphine Tempels, Manuel Solo

Runtime: 116m.
Genre: Thriller
Countries: Spain/Romania/Russia/France
Premiere: September 6, 2013 – Toronto International Film Festival
US Distributor: Film Movement