Formal Film Study: Satires of the 60's

For my formal film study I chose three satires, Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend", Federico Fellini's "8 1/2", and Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb".

All three films were made in the 1960s and all three poke fun at something.

Historically, the 60s were a tumultuous time. The Cold War was a constant issue for the entire world, political parties were heating up, and overall there was change in the air. Studying three satirical films from this era was appealing to me because I expected that there would be a lot to good material to satirize.

For instance, Dr. Strangelove makes light of a very serious issue, namely nuclear warfare. There are instances of sheer hilarity throughout the entire movie, up until the iconic ending of a U.S. Air Force pilot, Major Kong, riding a nuclear warhead like a bucking bronco down into Russia. The constant recurring mantra "Peace is Our Profession" at a U.S. military base is the epitome of irony as bullets fly through the air, killing U.S. and Russian soldiers alike. The slogan is also hung in the office of General Jack Ripper (an ironic name if you remember the bloody serial killer Jack the Ripper), and it is ever present in the scene when he discusses matters of carrying out warfare. Perhaps one of the most absurd quotes in the film is a man crying "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" 

The film obviously has a problem with how the world treated Nuclear bombs because scene after scene showed carelessness and casualness over the subject of the bomb. One scene in particular (watch this--it is truly funny) pokes fun at the President of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union, "Dimitri". You are constantly shaking your head, hearing both men battle over who is "sorrier." The premise of the phone call was to warn Dimitri that his country was about to be blown off the face of the Earth, and he is worrying about why the President never calls to say "Hello".

Towards the end of the movie, we come into contact with Dr. Strangelove who is exceptionally creepy. The doctor, explaining a solution for the human race following the triggering of the Doomsday Machine, corrects himself more than once for addressing the president as Fuhrer, and he has to control his right arm from doing the Nazi salute. So, this film also has commentary on the Nazis and their role with the bomb. The doctor's solution (the human race would live underground for 100 years) only then becomes appealing to the room full of men when he states that in order for the human race to continue, there would be ten women for every one man. This is social commentary on gender discrimination, and when taking a step back and looking at the film as a whole, there is one woman in it, and she is in the movie for approximately 5 minutes, tops. 

Lastly, the movie ends with a sequence of detonations with a song playing in the background with lyrics, "We'll meet again". This is the last commentary of the film, showing that humans will always have violent, destructive tendencies, and will ultimately destroy themselves. 

This film shows humankind's obsession with money and material things. Although I was a mildly shocked multiple times and maybe even a bit freaked out at the end, I enjoyed the film. The film's plot is based around a couple traveling to the woman's parents' house and what they encounter on their journey. Both are plotting each other's murder because they have liaisons elsewhere. There are countless allusions to class parties, namely communism and fascism. The film won a Bambi award in 1969 for best international film. 

Also on their journey, car wreckage is a constant. There is continuous debris and fire with dead, bloody bodies scattered. In one scene, we hear a series of piercing screams, then a woman cries in French, "My Hermes purse!" She is not worried for herself, but rather her designer bag. This obsession with materialism is also evident in how the couple regards the dead strewn among the wreckage. Throughout the progression of the movie, we see the couple's clothes become adorned with more articles from the dead. The woman doesn't bat an eye at the bloody body as she rips the trousers off for herself. 

Stylistically, the scene composition stood out the most. There are long, drawn out takes, sometimes lasting 10 minutes. These were a bit hard to sit through, but it made the viewer drink in everything Godard set up. The absurdity of the film was best presented in the huge traffic jam scene (watch it if you dare), when the camera follows the couple as they pass car after car after truck after car, eventually coming upon a horrendous car accident. I connect this traffic jam scene to the opening scene in "8 1/2" with the sense of suffocation and absurdity, both providing a claustrophobic feeling. As they pass, we see caged animals, a random sailboat on a trailer, old people playing chess, a group of schoolchildren singing, all the while incessant honking is heard. This lends itself to the idea that there is order within disorder, and provides stark contrast between the honking and the grim accident. 

Another stylistic element that was especially noteworthy was the juxtaposition of random text in between scenes. One I remember was  "FAUX TOGRAPHE". "Faux" means "false" in French, and the French word for "photograph" is "photographe", so I interpreted this text as a false picture. This emphasizes one of the underlying themes of surrealism and the absurd; nothing is as it seems. The couple ends up taking a full week to make their journey to her parents' house encountering different people, a journey that should've taken an afternoon. The entire movie is very disorienting, from the very beginning of what seems like anarchic behavior to the lengthy description of a sexual scenario to poets prowling the forest, to fortune tellers commandeering a car at gunpoint, to the end when the couple is captured by cannibalistic hippies. 

There are continual references to political parties/classes in the movie. There is a man dressed as a French revolutionary, spouting ideas from the revolution. He describes the French Revolution's idea that freedom is bad; weekends are bad (one can note the Revolution's idea of a ten day work week), which is ironic because the movie is titled Weekend. There is also an instance when a character says "Aimez-là ou Quittez-là" (translation: Take it or Leave it), a slogan of a socialist party in France today. There is also a clear class struggle between the working class and the bourgeois. Our main couple is of the bourgeois class, and there seems it be negative commentary towards the bourgeois. 

This movie shares the same feelings of surrealism with Weekend. 8 1/2 is about a director, Guido, who is having trouble making another movie. 8 1/2 is reflective of Fellini's life as he is making his eighth-and-a-half movie, showing a theme of self reflection through out the movie.. Guido is also plagued by his love life, and there are countless flashbacks and moments when the imagined is mixed with the real. This movie won two Oscars for best foreign language film and best costume design. 

Every scene was beautifully crafted, showing elements of deep space composition akin to those of Citizen Kane. Roger Ebert discusses that "few directors make better use of space", and I concur. Every character is shot in way that makes them appear so graceful and polished, and every scene is stylistically interesting. This one scene in particular was especially captivating. There are funny elements coupled with tense moments paired with nostalgic flashbacks filled with emotion. This one was one of my favorite scenes (please watch it all!!).

A cool thing I picked up on in 8 1/2 was a dance scene that was very much like the dance competition scene in Pulp Fiction. "Maya", the woman in 8 1/2, had short black hair and performed the same dance moves as "Mia" in Pulp Fiction. I am not surprised by this because Tarantino loves making homages to other films in his own.

The one element that stood out in all three movies was the music. In Dr. Strangelove, a classic American war song accompanied every scene of the airplanes carrying the nuclear bombs. This reiterated the inevitability of doomsday because of the constant nature of the music; the planes' journey toward their targets was also lingering in the back of our minds as we watched the film.

In Weekend, the music was almost a nuisance. Either the I was cringing at how loud it was, drowning out some dialogue, or I was noticing the absence of it among the scenes like the traffic jam when the only sound was incessant honking. In the scenes when music was present it would begin to boil, becoming louder and louder until it was so dramatic and disorienting I couldn't understand what was being said. Then, it would calm itself, only starting the cycle over. 

In 8 1/2, the music was spectacular. The scene I linked above gives you a taste of how the music was used to create feeling, as the music in the other films did. The music changes from bold orchestral movements to simple, stunningly beautiful notes during the flashback of the bathing/sleeping scene when Guido was a child. 

All three of these movies left me feeling a tad bewildered and thinking, "what just happened?" but in my experience of watching movies, the ones that leave you feeling this way are the ones you can watch again and again and find something remarkable each time.