THE BLACK CAT

Hey--It's been a while, but I've been busy writing for my column over at PRESS PLAY.

Anyway, I always come back to needing to write about Ulmer's The Black Cat. Although The Bride of Frankenstein has the rep, Edgar Ulmer's 65 minutes are the true pinnacle of post war morbidity achieved in Universal's 1930s horror cycle. Its tech-deco-necro delirium is by turns hilarious, dated, classic, beautiful, stylistically 40 years ahead of its time, a storehouse of of cinema syntax drenched in true melancholy: this, not Detour, is the film that makes the case for Ulmer’s unjust exclusion from the upper leagues of the pantheon.

In a plot seething with multiple really Old Europe sexual pathologies, Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Vitus Werdegast a psychologist driven nearly mad by the torture he suffered at the hands of sadistic frenemy/architect/Satanist Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris, living dead Karloff) during World War I.

Lugosi and a magnificently naïve American couple (David Manners, Julie Bishop) couple arrive at Karloff's Bauhaus mansion--literally built atop a graveyard--and enact one of cinema's most brilliantly deranged dances to the death.

Dressed in shimmering Mandarin robes, his hair bleached the white of the old dead and cut in scary, unnatural geometries, Karloff creates one of the most glamorously seductive images of unfettered evil ever lensed, while Lugosi commits the performance of his career by actually underplaying his character's bloodlust.

Without showing an inch of flesh or a drop of blood, Ulmer creates a weirdly lyrical nightmare of necrophilia, mad science, implied flaying, classical music appreciation, and, hard to believe, more, as the true depths of the Poelzig’s dementia are revealed.

Without knowing there was an argument, Ulmer’s film shows that Hitchcock actually had style limitations, while actually predating the New Wave in a bravura sequence of elegant, aestheticized, sexual soul sickness that included intended jump-cuts, long single takes, and cross-fade glides from single to third person POV, all while Beethoven’s Seventh, Second Movement, mourns on the soundtrack and Karloff, camp stripped bear, channels the weariness of the first generation to endure the mechanize mass slaughter of modern warfare. “Did we not both die here in Marmorus 15 years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?

But horror is always just five inches from black comedy and Ulmer’s team doesn’t just cross the line, they dance on it. Perfect example and scene: poor lost Manners freaking out about being isolated in this Bauhaus house of death, and not being able to place a call. And Karloff, eyes glittering with something between Borscht Belt stand up and deep mittel European madness, "You see? Even the phone is dead."

On BLACK SWAN

Four films in and Darren Aronofsky’s short life in pictures turns out to have been a rehearsal for Black Swan, his masterpiece. The obsession with paranoiac spiritual mastery in Pi mirrored in the failed The Fountain, the bottomless empathy for two generations of tragic women in Requiem for a Dream, the use of the body as a thing beaten for redemption in The Wrestler—all these seemingly disparate themes fuse into this grisly fantasia of ultimately transcendent beauty. Watching Black Swan is like breathing in and being unable to breathe out until the final, perfect image.

Natalie Portman, in the performance of her life, plays Nina Sayers, a ballerina in a top company at New York’s Lincoln Center. Nina lives in a perpetual state of nearly losing her shit—not that she’d mind, as long as she attains an artistic perfection she can’t yet imagine.

She shares a cramped Manhattan apartment with her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), who was once a dancer herself. Does Erica treasure dedicating herself to her child’s success? Does she hate her for being born? Will there be scenes of horrifically eroticized Oedipal terror? Yes to all three, but these are Aronofsky women, so everything will be much more complicated.

The company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel, all bemused, cocky swagger), is reconceptualizing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as a sort of minimalist nightmare. He needs a dancer who can embody both the libretto’s innocent White Swan and evil Black Swan.

Nina, who, for all we can tell, has been so dedicated to dance she never got around to having sex, aces the White Swan. The Black Swan, not so much. And so she must learn about her dark side, which means sex, which inexorably leads to Lily (Mila Kunis), a spiritually lithe new dancer from San Francisco.

At first, just hanging around someone like Lily, whose life goes beyond ballet’s constricted black-and-white world of work and nothing else, gives Nina a liberating, sexualized buzz But even as Nina lands the Swan role her reality principle starts to fracture. Who is Lily, really? Is she out for a good time, to steal the Swan from Nina, or is Nina just going batty?

At the same time, the movie’s backstage melodrama kicks in with discomforting rawness as Nina deals with the legacy and fleshy reality of ex-Swan Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder, truly scary, seriously great). As if all this wasn’t enough, Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin’s script adds a layer of Cronenberg-esque body horror to the movie.

More important to Aronofsky is the idea of dancers pushing their bodies to grotesque extremes to create the illusion of effortless grace, and so he lavishes Nina’s zero-fat, injury-wracked body with lingering closeups. Nina/Portman’s use/abuse of her body verges on the contemptuous, an act of will over breaking bone, torn muscle, and ceaseless pain.

You already know from the ads that Nina and Lily have sex, but the movie’s actual turning point has to do with Nina and Beth and the single most horrific act of self-mutilation in cinema since Cries and Whispers. And from there, we’ll say no more.

Aronofsky’s usual team works with intuitive brilliance. Matthew Libatique’s Steadicam Technicolor work underscores the monotone, uncannily cocoon-like quality of backstage and the mad colorful delirium of night-clubbing. Between Clint Mansell’s score and Ken Ishii’s sound production/mixing, you’re awash in string music, Tchaikovsky sound quotes, and theater-rattling, bird-wing flutter musique concrete. It’s relentless. Like John Boorman and Nicholas Roeg before him, Aronofsky makes cinema as though it could be a hallucinatory drug.

Portman’s performance grounds it. She trained for a year to gain her ballerina bona fides. Her dancing isn’t prize-winning, but it’s wonderful, haunting, and strange.

Ultimately, her Nina will be remembered as one of cinema’s great ciphers. You see her as a trembling child-girl, a doe-eyed ingenue, an imperiously demanding taskmaster, but who is she?

One sense is someone of terrifying loneliness: Her entire life has been her mother’s apartment, training rooms, backstage, onstage. Lily is fascinated by the fact of her alien quality. Black Swan’s ending may anger or shock, but it felt emotionally sincere for someone like Nina—in a strange way, the only way for her. It’s a triumph in a truly great movie.

With Herzog on Kinski and Wagner

It's the year 2000, and I'm on a one year sabbath from New York (long story) and in a Baltimore hotel room with Werner Herzog, one of cinema's true living legends.

"It's a very interesting city," he says, looking out at the Inner Harbor, recalling earlier trips to the city. "It's not a coincidence that such a fine man as John Waters grew up and made his films here. A very strange, very dangerous place, full of conflict and real life."

Most of which the director won't have the opportunity to enjoy, as he's busy putting finishing touches on his staging of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser with the Baltimore Opera Co. while also doing press for My Best Fiend, his documentary about his famed collaborator, lunatic thespian Klaus Kinski.

Herzog has always approached his art with a fierce sense of independence and intuition. He financed and shot his first film at the age of 20, and has since completed more than 40 films in almost every conceivable form and genre. "I never went to film school," he says. "I've never been inside a film studio to this very day." Without any "academic bullshit" to bind his vision, Herzog's films have encompassed experimental works (1976's Heart of Glass, with its cast acting under hypnotic trance), ambitious art-house favorites (1975's The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser), and rule-breaking documentaries such as 1997's Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Still, he is probably best known for his five features starring the notoriously addled Kinski: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972); Nosferatu (1978); Woyzeck (1979); Fitzcarraldo (1982); and Cobra Verde (1988).

Kinski's personality was composed of equal parts megalomania, consumptive womanizing, insane insecurity, and bouts of general assholery. Before his death in 1991, he appeared in more than 200 films, usually playing cameo roles that required him to spend only one or two days on the set. If Kinski stayed longer than that, Herzog says, "He was intolerable -- with very few exceptions."

As My Best Fiend illustrates, an absurd level of patience was needed to deal with the actor's world-class tantrums. "It was as if a volcano had erupted," Herzog says, "as if a tornado had passed by! It was like this all the time!" All the director could do was "let the storm rage. It was a necessity that the storm had to exhaust itself first, until work was possible again."

However, even Herzog had his limits: Filming Aquirre in the Peruvian jungle, the two artists' "explosive, almost dangerous creative relationship" hit its demented peak when Herzog seriously contemplated whacking his nut-job star.

"We had a tacit understanding and agreement that what we were doing was beyond our private feelings," the director recalls. "This never must be violated. But when he was about to violate it [by storming off the set], of course I was determined not only to threaten him -- I would have shot him."

Today, Herzog views the near-homicidal situation as weirdly funny, although at the time he was "dead serious." "Thank God time has this mysterious quality to change our perspective," he says.

Herzog says he has no regrets about having worked with Kinski, naming the titles of their five collaborations as sufficient justification. "It was worthwhile for what you see on the screen. Who cares if every gray hair on my head I call 'Kinski'?"

Asked if any actors today are in Kinski's league in terms of sheer intensity -- Gary Oldman, perhaps? -- Herzog shakes his head. "[Oldman] is kindergarten in comparison to Kinski. I mean, he has a certain intensity, he's a good actor, but not the caliber of Kinski. There has never been a man in cinema who had such a presence, such a ferocious intensity on the screen. He's beyond comparison."

A director with a history of shepherding such operatic intensity onto the screen would seem a logical choice to direct an actual opera. Filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola and Atom Egoyan have actively sought out opera as an alternate means of expression, but Herzog, a serious opera buff, says he has "never volunteered to do operas. I was almost dragged into it."

Considering that the Baltimore production is his fifth version of Tannhäuser, and that he has previously staged a dozen other operas, one can only guess that Herzog likes being "dragged." At any rate, his excitement over this latest production is obvious: "Having the privilege to work with some of the greatest music ever composed, the finest musicians available -- that's a wonderful thing."

Michael Harrison, the Baltimore Opera's general director, recalls how the filmmaker got "dragged" into his Charm City gig: "I knew of Herzog's extraordinary [opera] productions, and I was discussing this with a colleague who is a head of the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville [Spain], and he said 'I'm doing Tannhäuser with Werner Herzog. Would you like to be a part of it?' "

It was an offer the big-time Herzog fan couldn't refuse. "We did [approach Herzog], approximately two years ago," Harrison says. "But it had to be done when he and his production team were available. I think he became so entranced with the music of Wagner that he began to see a corollary between his ideas of creativity and the emotion that permeates this music. He became very taken with this medium, while I was taken with his ideas, his vision."

Like many a classic Herzog film, Tannhäuser deals with a lone man fighting insurmountable odds to gain redemption. ("You should be cautious to touch that idea with a pair of pliers," he advises of this comparison, "because when you look at Tannhäuser, that's Wagner and not me!")

The opera is set in typically Wagnerian mythic, medieval Germany, jam-packed with angels, goddesses, and sexual implication galore. In the Baltimore Opera Co. production, Jon Fredric West and Louis Gentile co-sing the demanding title role; Petra Lang sings the part of Venus; and Eva Johansson plays Elisabeth, the object of Tannhäuser's salvation.

Although opera is free of the variables (such as bad weather) that plague the location shooting Herzog favors, he says that working on stage presents its own challenges. "It's music and light and wind, and very elaborate choreography," he says. "The technical translation is complicated."

In addition to the basic problem-solving (last-minute costume acquisitions, replacing a noisy wind machine) involved in mounting any opera, Herzog says he brings his own approach to the form. "I just listen to the music and transform these images onto the stage," he says. "I always say, 'Opera is achieved when the whole world is transformed into music.' And I think I've achieved it somehow."

And of his future opera plans? "At the moment, I say, 'No, I will not be dragged into it,'" he says, then laughs. "But I've said that a couple of times."