Szindbád (1971)

From https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/21/
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Director: Zoltán Huszárik

Screenplay: Zoltán Huszárik and János Tóth

Cast: Zoltán Latinovits (as Szindbád); Margit Dajka (as Majmunka); Éva Ruttkai (as Lenke)

Synopsis: As he dies alone, dragged along in a cart across the countryside door to door, Szindbád (Zoltán Latinovits) a libertine upper class womaniser, and his life are presented as a kileidoscope of memories which skip back and forth in time, all the women he's ever loved, the ingulgences he has partaken in, and all the ennui and dissapointment he has felt with the modern world of turn-of-the-century Hungary.

Szindbád begins like a Stan Brakhage short, a series of images of plant life and nature in extreme close-up which prepares a viewer not for a conventional narrative but a work entirely structured around sensation. In Szindbád, as one Criticker user by the name of Lepra perfectly summed up, you get Marcel Proust on film, where objects and motifs trigger new memories of old events for the protagonist, bleeding into each other and disrupting conventions of how time is usually depicted in cinema. Events early in Szindbád's life meld with those from the future, with only the grey in his hair to visually differentiate events, the viewer as unstuck in time as he is throughout the ninety minutes  running time.

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Based on short stories by Hungarian writer Gyula Krúdy, the film emphasises the importance of all five senses to fully appreciate it's tone. Szindbád, an utter womanising cad who is yet also compelling to follow because of Latinovits' performance as him, lives in a fully fleshed out world, one that is not so in terms of content only but also the tangibility of it. Rarely do films actually go further in adding tactility to their worlds but here it's a vital part of Szindbád's life in terms of his experiences being played in front of the viewer.  The interchanging of the natural world, from spring to summer, against the man made world in all its sights and sounds. The fashions and decor of turn-of-the-20th century era Hungary. Food depicted as more than mere nourishment but both visually stunning, close-ups turning it into alien shapes and colours, but also in a prolonged dining scene between Szindbád and a waiter an intrinsic part of human behaviour in how it is consumed and how people interact around eating, even the choice of mustard used for flavour painting details on the protagonist and others. Rather than a clear narrative trajectory to guide one, or the ghastly nature of biopic where events in a character's life from birth to death follow clearly signposted event markings, its instead a series of little intricacies which become the centrepieces for the protagonist and how we learn more about him, the type of details usually ironed out as insignificant in many others films but widen perspective of Szindbád the figure here.

From https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/572004943.jpg?
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Because of this Szindbád builds a protagonist with greater depth but also with significance for everyone surrounding him even if they have a single scene, brief apparitions who still have a greater importance in their details and effect on Szindbád's life. Highly sensual, whilst it has countless moments from the perspective of Szindbád fetishing women, in gowns and dresses, in states of undress usually placed against nature, like a nude woman rolling in snow in a constantly reoccurring memory, it like Proust's In Search of Lost Time emphasises has even a figure only seen once has a pronounced effect on Szindbád's entire view of reality. These women's visages and words literally embedded in the memories depicted on the celluloid, becoming more than more idolised figurines. The wife of a chemist, older, contrasted against a youthful self who wore old hats, cut against each other in the editing. The flower girl who jumps off her window in a top floor apartment. The matriarcal figure of Majmunka (Dajka) who Szindbád is constantly with and has befriended, reading his diary and as much contributing to his reflections as the one solid foundation of happiness in his life. The old women who help him when, as ill health and possible mortality leans ahead, Szindbád struggles between religious salvation and his disdain for modernity.

From https://assets.mubi.com/images/film/23057/
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An utter bastard at times, even bribing a familiar friend at one point to go to confession at a church with his sins, Szindbád the character in nonetheless behind this all a compelling figure. Without chronology dictating where the moral compass should be, a viewer is left instead with a much more complex as a real human being is. Like how one is constantly at odds with the protagonist of Proust's monolithic tome, (at least for myself), as much as sympathetic for them, the protagonist here is the same. Stripping away any crass chauvinism of the type found in a lot of these sixties and seventies films, period or not, about decadent men who wooed women, instead you have a figure who's as much a loner who has lost his glory days, sulking around, as you have a man of possible virtue when he's able to actually think of others or muse about the world. Knowing that its explicitly based on the author's own life, thus leading a sense of self criticism of himself with the sharpness of a scalpel, the director/co-writer Huszárik is able to translate a figure who's more than just a Casanova stereotype.

From http://www.moviemail.com/img/still/30672/Szindbad-30672_5.jpg

Technical Detail:

Hungarian in origin, Szindbád takes a page however from its cousin films from the former Czechoslovakia. Extensive editing and densely constructed montages of images are used that, like Stan Brakhage, force one to re-judge the visual textures of the world, where a kitchen preparing food is turned into an alien one and, in the case of oil floating on top of soup, into even cosmic qualities like a coffee was in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967).  One is forced to linger on the textures and sensations of said texture, even if scent and taste have to be improvised from the visual images only, with great emphasis unlike many other films on the notion of space and sensation, something absolutely vital for a film like this entirely about little details like the decor of a nightclub or the various delicacies that ultimately help, alongside too much wine and womanising, to Szindbád's death by (likely) cardiac arrest and also providing the paints to compose a picture of him for us as viewers.

From http://www.moviemail.com/img/still/30672/Szindbad-30672_1.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Avant-Garde/Expressionist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Because of a lot of cinema ignores depth to the visual and sensual image in favour of surface gloss, without being forced to for a lack of a better term to open one's eyes wide and take in detail with them, a film like Szindbád which emphasises the small interactions of life right down to the clothes is far more of a visually stimulating work and also absolutely startling to tackle at first when one is used to images being edited together rapidly without time to absorb them. Strangely, despite the fact that in real life outside a cinema one is constantly aware and engaging with one's environment in the exact same way, this is rarely transported to cinema, a literalisation of the notion of cinema as escape which however means that, when it is transported, it leads to alienation for those not willing to adapt to it, and going beyond being glossy numbness of many mainstream films to a full aesthetic palette for those viewers willing to adapt to it. This is not merely to make the film look gorgeous only, which is absolutely is anyway, but also to present a tangibility, pronounced and rewarding in a great deal of Eastern European cinema of the time but pronounced here, which creates a fully formed world onscreen with every object having touch to it and evoking additional emotions alongside the main emotional drive as a result. Aptly, a film of memories swirling and intersecting together at once, creating what is felt as an actual period between life and death, where the tactility of its content further enforces the Proustian context of each little detail evoking whole periods of life for Szindbád. The result is overwhelming but completely in context of full tangibility.

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Personal Opinion:

Even amongst the heavy weights that came from Eastern European cinema at this point between the sixties and seventies, as experimental and bold as you could find in the medium in spite of the dangers of censorship in communist Europe, Szindbád is a bold entity in itself, a one-off rightly acclaimed for a director in Zoltán Huszárik who tragically was not able to venture forth further into feature length films, baring one other work after, before his death. It took years of reflection, first unable to gauge with it fully, but now upon greeting each other, apt for this film's content, it evokes a great deal of warmth and reflection for me. 

Vertigo (1958)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
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Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor 

(Based on the novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac)

Cast: James Stewart; Kim Novak; Barbara Bel Geddes; Tom Helmore; Henry Jones

Length: 129 minutes

Synopsis: When he develops acrophobia and vertigo, San Francisco detective John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) is forced to retire from his career, but is asked by an old friend to follow his wife Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) under the belief she has been possessed by one of her late ancestors. The results of taking this job leads to Scotty becoming detached from reality chasing after a woman he falls in love with who might not be all she seems.

Vertigo was once a critically maligned film from Alfred Hitchcock only to grow into one of his most critically lauded, so much so it knocked off Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) off the top spot of the Sight & Sound magazine poll for greatest film ever made, not exactly an easy achievement to have completed when Citizen Kane was number one before it for five decades. The fact Vertigo has gained this stature is actually strange when viewing the film because it is such the opposite of the kind of films you'd imagine a stereotypical film critic, not necessarily a real one, would love, a ripe melodrama with vaguely Gothic tinges and where suspension of disbelief is very much required. You have to accept a lot of poetic licence. That Scotty's vertigo is a MacGuffin. That a major plot twist is shown earlier than it would in any other film, turning the rest of the movie into a type of psycho-dramatic character piece that roots itself into a direction detached from the rational. That it is a hammy film in tone but isn't undermined by this because if you "get" Vertigo's tone and appreciate its crafted elegance. Its place on that magazine poll would not help it as it would also lead people to seek it out, many of the films on the last poll in fact quite subversive but the potential mausoleum effect of the poll's nature in danger of undermining their power. Vertigo is at odds with the kind of film you'd picture on a great film poll, which are honestly for the most part very neutral and for the widest audiences for many such lists, because its full of troubling subtext easy to read into and has a very exaggerated tone that stands out.

Its elegance doesn't mean cover its intentional un-subtleness, close to being ridiculous. It dares to be a blatant supernatural film that does not follow rational conventions, and even when it becomes the Hichcockian tale of betrayal and deceit, this stays as the tone to the ending nonetheless. It's a slower paced film for Hitchcock, one where its plot cruxes are more to do with the emotions of two characters, Scottie and Madeleine, who become more emotionally disconnected from reality and pull the rest of the film with them into their heightened worlds. For the moments of lightness that take place, screwball comedy with Scottie's friend and ex-fiancée Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), who still loves him, most of the film is connected to Scottie almost entirely, onscreen for most of the film in the centre during his descent into dark obsession.  When the film shifts to its second half, the already mentioned plot twist which would usually happen at the end of another thriller is suddenly revealed halfway through with half the film left, leaving Vertigo in uncharted waters where one is disturbed by Scottie's increasingly erratic behaviour after he is briefly hospitalised but is still pulled into the break from reality that takes place too with him, where a character can enter a stranger's hotel room without warning and manage one hour later to go out with them for dinner as a sudden romantic couple, hidden emotions or not, pushing the movie into the illogical.

Vertigo hinges itself onto an area of disbelief that is drastically different from any other Hitchcock film I've seen except The Birds (1963). Even the dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) is safeguarded by the fact, despite being designed by Salvador Dali, that it's a dream whilst Vertigo, despite also having a dream sequence, is entirely in the vague and mysterious. In Vertigo the characters are drawn along narratively by emotions and unseen forces, not elaborate plots of other Hitchcock films, locations such as flower shops, woodlands and a mission called Mission San Juan Bautista, that plays a key narrative role, all becoming imbued with ghosts of many forms, literally in an image at the ending in the bell tower of the mission. The use of striking colour especially, usually in interiors, emphasises the ghostly air, from the red walls of a restaurant that is repeatedly entered by the characters and the reoccurrence of the colour green for a supernatural metaphor. The emotional centre of the film dictated by Stewart and Novak manages to keep the film's melodrama in the right groove, despite the apparently and significant age difference, Stewart able to switch himself from the stereotypically jovial and charming man he is seen as in cinema to someone almost shell shocked or a walking comatose, while Novak also has to juggle a complicated role when the film pans out in the end. One has to be patient with this film, jarring against one of the more quicker paced or elaborate Hitchcock films, and if it succeeds for the viewer the result sucks them into a peculiar headspace of deathly romance that's perverse.

From http://theredlist.com/media/database/settings/cinema/
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Technical Details:

Shot in lush Technicolor by director of photography Robert Burks, Vertigo is as much able to work because the aesthetic of classic Hollywood that the story is depicted through, the studio system style of Hollywood always evoking for me the sense of the elaborate and stylish, literally the "Dream Factory" creating dreamy films, even when shot on location, because the passing time distance from this era to today means a drastic change in look, aesthetic and mood. The rear-screen projection for actors driving cars to the colour palettes now become unintentional tools for creating heightened dreams. The San Francisco locations, especially the gorgeous panoramas of the sprawling metropolis, add a sense of scale, keeping a Gothic tone for the plot but setting it in a modernist urban environment thus proving it could still work in such an environment as it would an ancient castle.

The biggest contribution to the film is Bernard Hermann's orchestral score, the drama contained in it solidifying the characters' emotions and the lions share, not to dismiss the hard work of everyone else who made the film, to why it's able to actual work as a movie, a lush but far-from-generic score that adds further to the mysterious air surrounding all Scottie encounters and does. That it can switch from the legitimately romantic to the unsettling, and you can pick up the difference in the orchestral instruments and the notes they play, is evidence of its success as a score.

From https://www.dkit.ie/sites/default/files/styles/full_screen/
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Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist; Mind Bender; Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

The most openly unconventional aspects of Vertigo are specially created animated sequences. The first is the opening credits by Saul Bass, the title emerging from a woman's eye in extreme close-up, the very modern design of Bass' work for Hitchcock still to this day incredible for their craft but also unique compared to modern title designs still, the use of colour and shape almost avant-garde especially as the credits don't portray anything that takes place in the movie but sets up an unnerving mood it has. The other is the mid-film dream sequence designed by abstract artist John Ferren that takes the same route, flower petals spiralling outward and a figure falling into the void, one of the most iconic images of Hitchcock's career being James Steward's disembodied head staring straight at the viewer as he is sucked into a mental abyss of his own psyche that he is chained to for the rest of the narrative.

Baring this, Vertigo structurally is a very narrative driven melodrama. Barring its style, including the innovative depiction of Scottie's vertigo, a distortion of our perception as well as his as its always in first person, cinematic space growing in size without any seemingly actual movement, the rest of the film's unconventional tone is internal. Alfred Hitchcock was a Hollywood director who made commercial films but Vertigo does reach its tendrils into the expressionistic, with its languid pace, in that it's all induced and effected by its characters' minds not the other way around. When it gets to the second half as Scottie meets another woman similar to Madeleine, the ghosts of the first half change from historical ones to psychological baggage of sexual and gender issues. It would be crass and miss the point to say that it's a metaphor for cinema's dreams when it's about a man's memory and view of others becoming distorted and affected as he tries to control and groom this second woman to be Madeleine. Hitchcock was completely blunt about the sexual meaning of this in his interviews with Francois Truffaut but as well the notion of idealism and how it can become poisoned is noticeable.

From http://hitchcockzone.com/1000/Vertigo%20(1958)/0853.jpg

[Spoiler warning. Skip italicized text if you do not want the film to be spoilt for you]

Adding to this is knowing the woman Scottie is obsessed with is a mere image, a fake stand-in for his friend's real wife in a twist Italian giallo filmmakers would've ran with. The woman he loves manages to die twice in fact, his love only existing for the form of Madeleine, wearing a certain flower, a certain way to their blonde hair style tied up in the back, a certain grey suit dress designed for the film by Edith Head, and an image created based on the real wife, the individual Kim Novak's character actually is and Carlotta Valdes, the ancestor Madeleine is said to be possessed by, amalgamated together. The image of femininity he adored is a mere picture, while the stand-in who promises to love him is rejected for admitting how she is not the Madeleine he wanted and that she was used to trick him into a murder scheme. The "abstract" for this site, how I use the word, is as much about the questioning of subjective reality, and the theme of Vertigo of an idealised image, a beautiful woman, being both impossible to be reach and not even existing is a good example of this type of questioning, when the symbols of femininity for Scottie not the woman herself is what he desires. As an entertainment film, this makes the film a cautious tale of this obsession, and read further, this is a theme of mistaken perception that Hitchcock ran with continually and here concentrated on fully.

[Spoiler ends]

Whilst the film for me is not any more abstract than 'Low', The Birds more stranger and chilling in the baggage it evokes, Vertigo is haunting as an entertainment feature and art because its conceit is about the image one has overtaking reality as Scotty is chasing after a phantom in many a sense.

From https://eclecfreak.files.wordpress.com/
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Personal Opinion:

I am gradually warming to Vertigo. It does meander significantly halfway through, noticeably slower in pace to other Hitchcock films and once very sluggish and dreary for me. If one is not engaged with the film it's not going to work at all. I am not surprised Vertigo was originally a very unpopular film, as it isn't easy to digest needing time to soak in. Why it's become beloved by filmmakers like Brian De Palma, who openly took the plot but also riffed on the same theme of perception in Obsession (1976), the title spelling out the themes openly, and film critics is likely because one can dig deeply into its subtext but still have a very unconventional and rich melodrama, not just a study piece around it, to watch. The themes couldn't have been as enticing if you didn't have great central performances, the skill of Hitchcock and the technicians behind him, and the Hermann score, and it wouldn't have worked if the plot, hammy as it is at points, wasn't as enticing as it was. I still prefer other Hitchcock films but I wouldn't be surprised if I find more and more virtues as I think about Vertigo and revisit it. 

From http://theredlist.com/media/database/settings/cinema/
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