Film Atlas (Estonia): The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel

Country: Estonia

Title: The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel / ‘Hukkunud Alpinisti’ Hotell (1979)

An avalanche traps a police detective, an innkeeper, a physicist, a terrorist and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses in a remote alpine ski resort. The same night, a semi-delirious stranger shows up and a Scandanavian fop is found dead, his neck twisted by some impossibly powerful force. It’s up to the policeman, Inspector Glebsky, to solve the case. Although the setup is consciously designed like an Agatha Christie mystery, it was actually penned by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Russia’s most famous sci-fi writers, and they have something much weirder in mind. The innkeeper speculates about zombies. Glebsky suspects hypnosis. The physicist raves about aliens. This is a case that logic cannot solve.

Although the fashion on display is admittedly dated, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel was impressively ahead of its time in terms of style, structure and theme. The night-shrouded neo-noir cinematography and Sven Grunberg’s ominously dreamy synth score anticipate cinema’s dominate mood through the 1980s. The self-conscious deconstruction of mystery conventions (isolated locale, locked room murder, dogged cop, femme fatale, flowery narration) and the unlikely fusion of genres feels strikingly modern.

The initially sympathetic Glebsky ultimately winds up as an anti-hero who, blinded by an outmoded obedience to logic, duty, and authority, fails to adjust to a dramatically changing world. It’s a theme that registered as a powerful anti-Soviet sentiment during the Cold War (In a final monologue Glebsky justifies murder by saying, “Either they were human, and thus criminals who got what they deserved, or they were inhuman and thus can’t be murdered.”) and continued to be relevant now, when scientific progress has far outpaced the layperson’s ability to understand the reality we live in.

Some other random notes:

• The film was released in August 1979, within months of the vastly more famous Strugatsky adaptation Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
• At one point a character ponders, “Maybe I’m an android? How would I even know?” anticipating Android (1982) and Blade Runner (1982) to name a few.
• The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn novel was only recently translated into English (March 2015), but it has previously been adapted as a notoriously awful videogame. The player spends 5 hours doing chores in a hotel before having the entire plot narrated during the last 20 minutes, apparently due to funding being abruptly cut.
• Those of you who’ve read this blog since its giallo days know that I enjoy sourcing paintings that appear in the background of films. The large mural that the innkeeper claims is the dead mountaineer of the title, is actually Chuck Close’s mezzotint of artist Keith Hollington. A version hangs in my home city of St. Louis, but the one used here appears to match the version in the Pace Gallery of New York City.

Chuck Close's large-scale portrait "Keith."

My Favorites:

November
The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel

Spring / Kevade

Franky & Wendy

Film Atlas (Latvia): In the Shadow of Death

Country: Latvia

Title: In the Shadow of Death / Naves Ena (1971)

A group of Latvian fisherman are stranded at sea when the peninsula of ice they are on breaks free from the mainland. One man leaps into the water and attempts to swim back, but dies immediately in the churning cold. An old man says a brief funeral oration over him: “There was a man and then there was not.” This grim unadorned stoicism characterizes the film as the remainder are left to confront death, and each other, as their supply of fish dwindles and their iceberg shrinks.

Our viewpoint character is Birkenbaums, an affianced slightly angsty young man. Through flashbacks he reflects on his previously charmed existence, his faith that he would always remain unscathed by misfortune, and his lover back home, who once playfully wrestled with him while dressed as a grim reaper (ominously foreshadowing the real thing). He witnesses various reactions to their predicament in the men around him: a rich old patriarch hoards fish (one of the few explicit concessions to the Soviet propaganda agenda), another turns to prayer, a third succumbs to madness. 

Birkenbaums’s closest friend, a fair-haired teen, begins to fade first. When the others vote against killing their only horse to provide him nourishment, Birkenbaums feeds him with his own blood. As time and space melts away, a chance of rescue presents itself, but their hardest moment is yet to come, for there is not enough room to save them all.

Leveraging the best elements of two survival genres, mountaineering disaster films and lifeboat/shipwreck dramas, In the Shadow of Death is a cold, harsh thriller about impending death and its psychological effects, bringing out nobility and sacrifice here and selfishness and despair there. 

The film is short and rather terse. I expected the flashbacks to flesh out more of the characters, but the camera so rarely leaves their diminishing iceberg that its few brief leaps ashore have to be savored by the audience; a subtle decision by director Gunare Piesis. Although this is a film about facing hard truths and hard choices, it is also a film about hope and practical survival. You can see as much in words as in actions, like taking turns holding a makeshift flagpole because digging a hole to plant it in risks splitting their frozen island. It brings home the delicacy of civilization and of life.

Film Atlas (Kuwait): The Cruel Sea

Country: Kuwait

Title: The Cruel Sea / Bas ya Bahar (1972)

For the men and women who eke out a living on the coast of Kuwait, the sea is both friend and enemy, generous giver and ruthless taker, and at various times a meal ticket, a home and a grave. Moussaed, your typical handsome-but-poor young man is in love with Nora, your garden variety beautiful-rich-out-of-reach woman, who reciprocates his feeling despite her father’s objections. Moussaed is more successful at vetoing his dad, determining to make his fortunes as a pearl diver even though his father’s arm was paralyzed by a shark pursuing the same career. 

Once underway on a four month tour of duty, Moussaed partners with Badr, his only friend on the conspicuously solidarity-starved ship, and the two are reasonably successful at first. However, it soon becomes clear that they are playing a dangerous lottery rigged against them by both man and nature. The prolonged time spent submerged and the constant pressure changes saddle Moussaed with an excruciating earache while other illnesses plague the crew. Forced to push on anyway, his arm is caught in an underwater cleft and, after a terrifying struggle, he dies. 

Late that night Badr cuts open the clams from his ex-buddy’s basket and discovers several shimmering pearls. The ship returns from the season late. In the meantime Nora has been married against her will to a wealthy merchant. Badr gives the pearls to Moussaed’s parents, but, overcome by grief, his mother throws them back to the cruel sea.

The Cruel Sea was the first feature film from Kuwait and major landmark in Arabic cinema. The production is technically rather rough, marred by injudicious zoom shots and ambitious but frequently confusing editing and lighting that confuse several scenes, but the sweaty, sickly claustrophobia of the diving boat and the misleading serenity of the underwater photography elevate the film’s latter half. Similarly, the narrative begins rather conventionally with a pair of thwarted lovers who’ve got very little spark and at one point loses momentum during Nora’s extended wedding scene, but the story has a timeless wisdom and sadness, not to mention a great deal of thematic interest, that build towards the final acts.

Family, tradition, masculinity and life at sea, while shown as essential to community life and as cornerstones of their value system, are undermined by self-interest, parochialism and unjustifiable risk. Even dreams, the thing that movies are made of, are revealed as siren songs. In an extended flashback Moussaed’s father pursues a phantom pearl to his own disaster, and later fails to avert his son, who refuses to obey him, from an even worse fate. Conversely, Nora’s father should have been disobeyed, but can’t be, and result is also tragedy. This false choice, where respecting parental authority versus paving one’s own way both lead to misfortune, echoes the movie’s more explicit theme of an ocean on which lives both depend and end.

Film Atlas (Uzbekistan): Man Follows Birds

Country: Uzbekistan

Title: Man Follows Bird / Chelovek ukhodit za ptitsami (1975)

On a Central Asian mountain Farukh, a kind and sensitive boy, witnesses the blossoming of an almond tree and rushes home shouting with joy. The townspeople, less than enthused at being woken by news of this minor miracle, give Farukh a thrashing, but he’s rescued by a travelling beggar. 

Later that day we see that Farukh is the object of Amandyria’s love. Amandyria is a passionate and sensual girl who desperately wants Farukh to elope with her, but Farukh lacks the confidence to take the initiative and has his drunkard of a father to look after. Besides, he isn’t entirely sure he reciprocates her feelings. One night Farukh’s father passes away and during the funeral his creditors strip their home of valuables. Meanwhile, Amandyria is locked into an arranged marriage, and can offer the newly orphaned Farukh nothing but a little charity. He decides to hit the road with his best friend Khabib and the two hike across the countryside as travelling entertainers. Throughout their journey, roving bandits plague them. 

They finally stumble upon a paradisiacal mountain lake and settle in for the summer. After a flood upstream, they rescue a girl named Gulcha, a fellow orphan, and the three enjoy a few precious months of leisure and happiness. Both Farukh and Khabib develop feelings for Gulcha, until Farukh, sensing Khabib and Gulcha’s mutual attraction, bows out and continues his walkabout alone. Soon after departing he sees a dying peacock (their symbol of a happy life and a powerful premonition) and, too late, rushes back. Khabib is slain by a dishonorable bandit lord in an underwater duel and Gulcha, horrified, drowns herself. Grief-stricken once more, Farukh despairs of coexisting in a world where cruelty and callousness reign, until he again meets the beggar who rescued him from bullies a year earlier. The man turns out to be a great warrior and Farukh becomes his disciple, committing himself to a life dedicated to defending his country.

Ali Khamraev, a prolific Uzbek director best known for comedies, osterns (Soviet westerns shot in the Great Steppe) and documentaries, departed from his usual material to make this historically-set coming-of-age drama. Man Follows Birds begins as a neorealist slice of life, transitions into a fantasy tale, is shattered in the fashion of classical tragedy and finally ascends into the realm of national myth. Farukh’s journey can be seen as a metaphor for both the passage into adulthood and the rocky road of Uzbekistani history. Farukh is constrained by the demands of community, tradition and poverty. He breaks free by running away to live in harmony with nature and other like-minded children. Their inevitable fall from Eden is precipitated by internal tension, as their friendship grows into an untenable love triangle, and is ultimately destroyed by outside forces beyond their control. The final scenes, with their abrupt shift to militancy, imply a renewed sense of personal and national identity.

Khamraev was clearly influenced by Sergei Parajanov in his use of tableaux compositions, folkloric themes and surprising bursts of color (Khabib and Gulcha sleeping on a bed of yellow apples is one of many superb examples). He regularly shows us startling imagery from Farukh’s dreams, including an otherworldly motif of characters on black backgrounds lit by projections of flowers and ferns. The climactic underwater battle, devoid of dialog, is also quite wonderfully disorienting; a scene of beauty, confusion and tragedy all stirred together.  The film is thick with these visual flourishes, but Khamraev’s underlying compassion for the children and the genuine emotion in their performances, saves Man Follows Bird from feeling like a purely aesthetic exercise. 

Film Atlas (United Kingdom): Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Iconic bunny scenes in faux-Arthurian legend.

Country: United Kingdom

Film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

King Arthur and his loyal squire Patsy ride through Britain in search of worthy knights to join him at Camelot. The low-budget is immediately apparent from the lose interpretation of "ride;" Arthur mimes a steed while Patsy bangs coconuts together to produce the sound of clomping hooves. This fits in with Arthur's dubious authority, quickly undermined during his first encounter: a mud-wallowing peasant-dentist who demonstrates a dismaying degree of wit and contrariness in an impromptu political debate deconstructing the backwardness of monarchal rule by divine right. 

Embarrassed, if to proud to admit outright defeat, Arthur moves on to assemble key members of the Knights of the Round Table such as Sir Bedevere, Lancelot, Robin and Galahad before receiving a quest from God to seek the Holy Grail. They come across a castle where they are ruthlessly taunted by a Frenchman with a ridiculous accent who claims his master already has a "vice nice" grail and, after a failed siege involving a Trojan Rabbit, our knights split up to cover more ground. Their further adventures include the botched rescue of an effeminate prince-in-distress, bizarre shrubbery-loving druid knights averse to the word 'it', a castle full of virgins who lure in men using a grail-shaped beacon, an enchanter named... Tim, a shockingly vicious rabbit that can only be destroyed with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, a riddle-spinning bridge-keeper and, finally, one of the funniest anticlimaxes to ever grace the screen.

The Monty Python comedy troupe was hot off the success of their multi-season television show, as evidenced by their finely-honed comic tone and timing, but it wasn't a safe bet that their skit-based comedy routines would translate well into a feature-length narrative film, especially one satirizing such a long-shot topic as medieval British legends. But part of Monty Python's brilliance is their unexpected sources of humor and unpredictable absurdities that stick to an overarching theme without getting lost in the details (except for comedic effect). 

Such stern topics as witchcraft trials, duels to the death, the recovery of stolen relics, disposing plague-ravaged corpses and even the very sanctity of history itself (not to mention the BBC's coverage of it) are playfully mocked, deflated of pomp via slapstick, skewered with wordplay and broadly parodied through excessive violence and overturning clichés, earning some of the biggest laughs in cinema and permanently ensuring the reputation of British comedy. 

The script deserves a great deal of credit. It's among the most quotable works in the English language and gains points for style, variety and dexterity, but it's the pacing that keeps it together: as soon as it fires off a verbal volley or a silly sight-gag it's already nimbly charging into the next scene. It hardly matters if not every scene works for every viewer (the experimental animation sequences and an anachronistic police investigation are often cited as weak points), but with such abundance, breadth and depth of humor it remains a genuine pleasure even after many viewings.

Film Atlas (Turkey): The Herd

Country: Turkey

Title: The Herd / Suru (1978)

The Herd begins during a dispute between two rival shepherding clans, the Veysikans and the Halillans. The origins of the vendetta are murky, but it's clear that blood has spilled. In the recent past, Sivan, eldest son of the Veysikan patriarch Hamo, brokered a truce by marrying Berivan Halillan. However, Berivan is sick, has miscarried three times and since the last loss has become mute and despondent. The Halillans want to speak to her and offer aid, but the Berivans, especially Sivan’s embittered father, don’t trust them. Hamo considers Sivan’s wife to be at best bad luck and at worst a spy. For the humiliation of loyally defending this deadweight bride, Hamo would gladly disown his son if he didn’t need his help to save the clan from ruin. Their only chance for survival is to deliver 370 sheep to Ankara by train. Guarding the four boxcars are other members of the fading family, including a mentally-handicapped epileptic and Sivan’s naive younger brother Silo. 

Silo has a sideline selling ancient artifacts to an unscrupulous fence. They pay him a pittance, which he believes a fortune. The voyage is beset by bribes, corruption, theft, illness, death, bad blood and dirty dealing. The herd diminishes. Sivan and Hamo finally split. Berivan’s condition deteriorates. As failure closes in, Sivan, his clan and his whole way of life face the cold indifference of contemporary Turkey and the painful reality of their obsolescence.

Writer-director Yilmaz Guney spent a great deal of his career in jail for his Marxist sympathies (clearly on display in The Herd) and then later for murder, but that didn’t stop him from creating his most powerful masterpieces: The Way / Yol (which brought him international fame), Hope / Umut (a similar portrait of despair) and The Herd / Suru. He directed by proxy through collaborators Serif Goren and Zeki Okten. Like most of his films, The Herd is about an average worker desperately struggling against the shackles of poverty, ignorance and corruption.  

It is too simple to read The Herd as simply anti-capitalist or anti-modernization; Sivan is as frustrated by his own rural clan’s pride and superstition as he is by the city denizens’ greed and injustice. For his clan, and many others living in the undeveloped outskirts, there has simply been no preparation, no period of transition, before being forced to abandon their livelihood and their values or die. Though in reality Sivan never has a chance (and that’s part of the point), Guney’s realistic, sympathetic, even compassionate portrayal keeps us on the brink of hope. And their are touching moments, too. The way Sivan and Berivan stand by each other in mutual, though fragile and inarticulate, love, despite every internal and external obstacle, lends the film its sole glimmer of faith in humanity.

My Favorites:

The Way / Yol

Three Monkeys

The Herd / Suru

The Edge of Heaven
Winter Sleep

Head-On

Climates

The Hope / Umut

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Destiny (2005)

Dry Summer

Honey

My Only Sunshine

Major Directors:

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Zeki Demirkubuz, Reha Erdem, Yılmaz Güney, Yavuz Turgul

Film Atlas (Syria): The Dupes

Country: Syria

Title: The Dupes / Al-Makhdu’un (1973)

Three Palestinian men are compelled by circumstances to seek work abroad, attempting to illegally cross the sweltering desert border between Iraq and Kuwait without visas. 

Abou Keiss, displaced and dispossessed, is a middle-aged man with a wife and child. He dreams of his homeland, the orchard he owned there and his best friend, killed in the war. He does not want to leave, but he’s broke, living in half a shared room and knows his village has no future. 

Marouane is the second child of a large family. His older brother went to Kuwait to find work, but eventually stopped sending money home. Marouane’s father, tired and miserable, shirks financial responsibility too, divorcing his wife and moving in with a disreputable one-legged woman. 

Assad is in his twenties, a resistance fighter lying low until he can be smuggled across the border by a friend of his father’s. 

After all three men are tricked by malicious smugglers, they encounter Abou Kheizarane, a truck driver. He agrees to take them over the border, but they must promise to sit inside the truck’s iron water tank, an airless broiling casket, during the two dangerous checkpoints.

The Dupes is closely based on Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun, and it manages to capture the author’s shifting perspectives, stream-of-conscious flow and aggressively-nonlinear style. Egyptian director Tewfik Saleh’s untethered camerawork is so sinuous it can be disconcerting: it contemplates sunbeams lancing through an olive grove, follows only the feet of two men talking, picks out a face in a wall of cacti. 

Added to that, Saleh’s cerebral editing jumps us into flashbacks with little fanfare, triggered by images or words whose importance we may only learn later on. Theses flashbacks are key to understanding not just the psychology of the characters, but the myriad of personal and social problems faced by Palestinian refugees in general. Saleh’s three men are an interesting cross-section; completely different in personality, age and circumstances, but united by a shared goal. One of my favorite elements is that the driver, Abou Kheizarane, who we can’t help but mistrust from the first moment he’s introduced. He also gets a flashback. We find out that Kheizarane stepped on a landmine during the war and lost his manhood. Now he cares for little except money, but as he bonds with the exiles we come to understand that he, too, is one of the ‘dupes’ of the title. It is through his eyes that we experience the film’s feverishly tense climax as he tries to clear his transit paperwork before his passengers suffocate.

Kanafani was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad shortly before the movie was released and, ironically, shortly after it was released the Arab world banned it due to its criticism of government corruption and callousness (best exemplified during a montage rhythmically cut to an angry speech as a shill tries to convince Abou Keiss that he owes no loyalty to his leaders). So it should come as little surprise that few people have seen the film, yet it remains one of the most powerful and incisive works of Arab modernism.

Major Directors:

Omar Amiralay

Film Atlas (Suriname): One People

Country: Suriname

Title: One People / Wan Pipel (1976)

Afro-Creole medical student Roy is one year away from completing his studies in the Netherlands when he receives a telegram from his family requesting his presence at the deathbed of his mother. Lacking the funds for a plane ticket back home to Suriname, he visits a comfortably-established fellow expatriate who, much to Roy’s indignation, politely turns him away. He reluctantly accepts charity from his Dutch girlfriend Karina and arrives in time to hear his mother’s last words. We learn that Roy already has a long-time Creole girlfriend who expects to resume their relationship, but he instead falls in love with Rubia, a Hindustani nurse. They meets at a dance hosted by his free-wheeling childhood friend Norman. Roy’s father becomes upset over his son’s loafing as his visit drags on. When the stubbornly traditionalist patriarch discovers that his son's latest paramour isn't even black, he's absolutely livid. (Suriname’s two largest ethnic groups are Creoles of African descent and Hindustanis of Southeast Asian descent and their mutual animosity dates back to cultural and labor conflicts from the colonial era.) Eventually Karina arrives to fetch him back, but Roy has found a connection with his country and a new love that make his choice clear.

Roy and his three girlfriends.

Suriname’s only breakthrough film is impressively accomplished considering the country's absence of cinematic infrastructure and it struts forth with no shortage of pride and flare. Making ample use of indigenous locations and music, director Pim de la Parra draws us into Roy’s miracle-cured homesickness and late-blooming nationalism. But what makes the film more interesting than other back-to-your-roots parables and culture-bridging romances is Roy’s rather unsympathetic 'player' disposition. His blithe hopping between three women (the least loving of which is, interestingly, from his own community) would seem to undermine the firmness of his newfound commitment to Rubia and we can’t help wondering whether this has happened before. And despite several eloquent speeches about what’s wrong with Suriname/the Netherlands/insular communities/his father, Roy's love for his country doesn’t seem to go any further than enjoying its pretty girls, lively parties and natural splendors.  It certainly doesn’t involve finishing his medical degree and opening up a free clinic or any other form of work, activism or self-sacrifice. 

I’m left unsure whether de la Parra means us to see Roy as an amiable if still immature rebel whose passionate adoption of his lost heritage is suspiciously self-serving, or whether author and character are essentially interchangeable and their single-couple utopia is meant to be uncritically admired, but even if the latter were disappointingly true, there is still enough nuance in the clash of personalities, relationships and cultures to shed insight into the way third-world exiles reclaim their national, ethnic and personal identities.