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Features | Saturday, 11 May 2013 Written by Jason Hendrick
Four Frames: No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has become one of the most iconic bad guys in cinema history. With his penchant for quiet weaponry and disquieting conversation, the character takes on a mythic quality that reads to both the audience and the inhabitants of the film as an unstoppable force of evil, an angel of death, or, perhaps, as Lleweleyn Moss (Josh Brolin) questions after having been wounded from battle with the fellow Vietnam vet: "the ultimate badass?"
Visually, we are introduced to both Chigurh and Moss through their violence. In the introductory sequence for Moss, we see him sniping antelope from a distance, tracking his prey, and ultimately coming across the "drug deal gone bad" that is the narrative catalyst for the film (like Llewelen's ultimate demise, a conflict of violence we are slyly denied). What the Coens show us about Moss in this sequence is almost entirely centered around his nature as a soldier.
The four frames I want to display here occur much later in the film, showing us Chigurh in a motel room, tending to the gunshot wound inflicted by Moss in their confrontation. This scene seems to me the "flipside" of Moss's opening sequence, but reveals something about Chigurh that is even more unsettling, heartbreaking even. Like the way in which Moss's opening sequence may be undervalued as simple "rising action," the sequence of Chigurh, alone, shedding his distinctive outfit (a wonderfully designed, slightly off attempt at "passing") and dressing his wounds may seem one of the most inconsequential sequences of the film; merely connective tissue designed to offset the climax to come.
Of course, the climactic confrontation never does come. Or, rather, it has already happened. And, as with the great risk of the final sequence in the film, where the Coens usurp all aspects of Story for Character, asking us to settle on the dream narrative of Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)--to care about this aging, essentially ineffective witness to the violence of Chigurh--it is in this motel room that we are asked most succinctly to consider and care for Chigurh.
Theses frames show us the trained gestures of Chigurh, and the way in which they play against his equally ingrained and subtle murderous gestures. Unlike Moss's earlier, messy attempts to clean his wounds at he and Carla Jean's trailer (or, John Rambo's macho suturing of his own wounds in First Blood), Chigurh's ability to tend to himself is not only more competent, but suggests the skill of a former medic. This reading begins with the previous scene of Chigurh's effortless looting of the "Mike Voss" Pharmacy, but becomes deeply revealing through the skill with which he creates an iodine wash bottle, and then sterilizes his tweezers to remove the buckshot from his leg.
Chigurh then dispenses the lids of the syringe and anesthetic with familiarity, ease, and urgency; the frame holding both this telling gesture and perhaps the most vital element of his discarded costume: his cowboy boots. Finally, as Chigurh flicks the syringe--again, a physical action that Bardem assures us is as second nature to him as the flick of a switch--a look comes across Chigurh's face that we have not seen before. What we see in this fleeting moment is the compassion of a healer, an idea that makes Chigurh even more terrifying in the final analysis.
Call it Noir, Western, or Dark Comedy; what gives No Country For Old Men an unprecedented weight in the Coen's filmography is the way in which it emerges, quietly, as a film about men who are the products of Vietnam.
Jason Hendrick
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Features | Friday, 10 May 2013 Written by Kieron Moore
On Location: In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)
“It's a fucking fairytale town, isn't it? How can a fairytale town not be somebody's fucking thing?” asks Ralph Fiennes’ cockney gangster Harry (Ralph Finnes) in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges.
A favourite childhood retreat of Harry’s, Bruges is the hideout to which he has sent hitmen Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) after Ray’s first hit goes terribly wrong. But things really spiral out of control when Ken realises why he’s really in Bruges: to kill Ray. The medieval Belgian town known as the “Venice of the north” soon becomes the setting for enough violence and bloodshed to keep even the most sadistic of cinemagoers satisfied.
Features | Friday, 10 May 2013 Written by Josh Slater-Williams
Lost Classics: The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)
1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh) is often treated as the poster boy for discussions of the boom in American independent cinema, a wave that emerged at the end of the eighties and flourished for much of the early to mid-nineties. Soderbergh would eventually work a balance between more mainstream Hollywood efforts and smaller features with greater artistic freedom afforded by monetary success. Richard Linklater and Gus Van Sant, other prominent names of the American indie wave, would also venture down similar paths in their careers. One filmmaker who would not do this was Hal Hartley, a director whose debut feature The Unbelievable Truth also premiered in 1989. Though never gaining the same mainstream attention the others did early on, Hartley still had fairly outspoken support for much of the subsequent decade, only for the followers to rapidly diminish since, his name and filmography fading into relative obscurity in comparison to his so-called peers.
Read more: Lost Classics: The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)
Features | Saturday, 04 May 2013 Written by Chris Rogers
Beyond the Frame: Architecture and Film #12 Development
Depiction of the architecture of the future is the ultimate expression of the relationship between cinema and the built environment. Credible realisation on film required budgetary and technical restrictions to be overcome, but also an awareness of actual architectural achievement and an understanding that the distance between the present and any projected future is rather greater than commonly imagined. As such, designers began by borrowing structures from the real world.
Read more: Beyond the Frame: Architecture and Film #12 Development
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