These notes on Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair, were written by John Bennett, a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison, the Cinematheque's Project Assistant, and a Programmer for the Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival. A 35mm print of A Foreign Affair will screen in the Cinematheque's regular space, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue, on Saturday, April 22 at 7 p.m. Admission is Free!

By John Bennett

By 1945, Billy Wilder had three very different successes to his credit as a writer/director. He débuted with The Major and the Minor (1942), a mistaken identity farce, which he followed up with Five Graves to Cairo (1943), a cloak-and-dagger war film set in the Sahara. In 1944, he scored his biggest success yet with Double Indemnity, a steamy cause célèbre of passion and murder. The following year, barely before the VE Day confetti could be swept from the streets of jubilant cities, Wilder found himself in Europe at the behest of Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information. Wilder was tasked with helping to oversee the denazification of the German film industry in Berlin—a city to which he was no stranger. He had arrived in the glittering Weimar-era metropolis from Vienna as a young journalist in 1926, found his first work as a writer in the German film industry in 1929, and had fled for Paris by 1933 not long after Hitler came to power. Returning to Berlin, Wilder found a surreal atmosphere. Decimated buildings provided scant shelter for a war-harrowed population, and seedy black markets thrived in the shadows of singed architectural landmarks—and yet parties whose debauchery matched that of the bustling Berlin of the Weimar era raged on under the occupation of the armies of the Allies. This is the singular atmosphere that pervades 1948’s A Foreign Affair, one of the legendary writer/director’s most exquisite comedies.

After returning from Germany, Wilder notched yet another success. His drama on alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, swept the ’46 Academy Awards—Wilder took home Oscars for screenplay and direction, and the film won Best Picture. Riding this career high, Wilder (along with Charles Brackett, his screenwriting partner at Paramount) dove into A Foreign Affair. The film (like The Major and the Minor before it and Kiss Me, Stupid after it) bears all the trademarks of a tightly constructed romantic farce. Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (representing Iowa’s fictional ninth congressional district) arrives in Berlin as part of a congressional delegation tasked with investigating the morality of the military stationed in the city. Hardly after the plane lands, she delivers a chocolate cake to Captain Pringle, a war hero who is one of Congresswoman Frost’s Iowan constituents—as well as one of the occupying army’s most decorated degenerates. When not feigning regimental propriety, Captain Pringle spends his time cavorting with Erika von Schleutow in her half-destroyed apartment. Erika enjoys a reputation in Berlin as a popular and alluring cabaret singer. Her reputation in the eyes of the U.S. authorities in Berlin is less glowing: she is suspected of having been the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi official who may still be alive and in hiding in the defeated city. In her quest to purge the army of immorality, Congresswoman Frost makes it her personal mission to track down the military figure suspected of supporting Erika and protecting her from military scrutiny. But this quest is complicated when Phoebe finds herself falling for Captain Pringle, who begins to romance the congresswoman to throw her off the scent of his postwar tryst.

These three character archetypes (the prig, the rake, the harlot) make for a classic sex farce. But Wilder and Brackett nuance these broad types by giving each the breathing room to plead the case for his or her behavior. If Congresswoman Frost is a prude, it’s because duty and professionalism keep profound loneliness at bay. If Captain Pringle is a cad, it’s because years of warfare have shown him a manic excitement that sudden peacetime cannot wholly replicate. If Erika is promiscuous, it’s because survival in a maddened world has necessitated it. The three lead actors give performances that help enrich the farcical archetypes. Jean Arthur, in her penultimate film role, lends the Congresswoman a rectitude that slips to reveal a heartbreaking tenderness. John Lund impresses both the smarm and charm of Captain Pringle (and his frequent slips of the tongue when lying to the Congresswoman are executed with great comedic subtlety). Marlene Dietrich delivers the quintessence of her trademark Teutonic sultriness; yet the smoky elegance of her superb cabaret numbers (written by Friedrich Hollander) belies a hardened sense of tragedy vis-à-vis her hollowed-out city. Within the framework of farce, each actor finds ways to convey the grimly serious, be it personal or political.

Indeed, A Foreign Affair’s brilliance lies in its careful balancing act of tones. The film is certainly a bona fide farce. But, like other American films made in the immediate postwar period (notably William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives), it conveys the lingering trepidations of a world catching its breath, of a world still not completely unmenaced by Nazism and political instability. The film revels in bawdy comedy, such as when two GIs mistake Phoebe for a Tirolese Fräulein and whisk her away to a sordid nightclub. Yet there are other sequences, such as Col. Plummer’s congressional tour of bombed-out Berlin, that are handled with striking sobriety. Later in the film, Phoebe’s heartbreak is depicted with aching compassion. At other times, the serious and the comedic converge in surprising ways. In one scene—as funny as it is unsettling—a young boy, still under the sway of Hitlerjugen propaganda, idly draws swastikas on any surface he can in Captain Pringle’s office as Pringle recommends denazification recreation clubs to the boy’s nervous father. Such jokes may seem like blasé treatments of horrible situations, but Wilder was in a unique position to make them. The rise of Nazism impacted him profoundly. As a Jewish journalist and writer, Wilder was forced to live the arduous existence of a refugee after 1933 in Paris and, briefly, Mexico before he was granted entry to the United States. More tragically, Wilder learned after the war that his mother, grandmother, and stepfather were all victims of the Holocaust. Yet despite this profound personal upheaval and loss, Wilder never abandoned his unwavering wit.

A Foreign Affair’s quality was widely recognized by the film community. Bosley Crowther, the influential New York Times film critic, lauded the film’s sophistication, and the Academy granted Wilder and Brackett a nomination for Best Screenplay (Charles Lang was also nominated for the film’s cinematography). A Foreign Affair was not met with uniformly glowing reviews in the wider world, however. According to Ed Sikov’s biography of the director, the Production Code office fretted over the film’s brazen lewdness. The Defense Department felt obliged to state that moral turpitude did not afflict the armed forces as much as the film would have audiences believe. The film was banned outright in Germany. Nevertheless, A Foreign Affair remains one of the best distillations of Billy Wilder’s sensibility: it meets the harshness of the world with a wry smile, a broken heart, and a dirty joke.

These notes on Luis Buñuel's Él were written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison and project assistant for the UW Cinematheque. A new restoration of Él from the Cineteca di Bologna will screen as part of our current series highlighting the best of last summer's Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, on Saturday, March 18, at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By John Bennett

With the opening images of Él, famed surrealist auteur Luis Buñuel immediately draws us into his unique brand of irreverence and perversity. A priest leads a religious ritual in which parishioners’ feet are washed. As the camera tracks into a close-up, we see the priest gingerly kiss a foot he has just finished washing (an image that echoes actress Lya Lys kissing a statue’s toe in L’Age d’or, Buñuel’s first surreal bacchanalian feature). One parishioner’s roving eye wanders to a pew filled with women. As he appraises their high-heeled shoes, Buñuel subtly profanes imagery that had glowed with religious sanctity just moments before. The leering churchgoer is Francisco Galván de Montemayor (Arturo de Córdova), a suave, patrician man who becomes enamored with a woman named Gloria (Delia Garcés). Gloria, in turn, quickly comes to find Francisco’s suave confidence—as well as his prominent social position—alluring. The two hastily wed soon after their first meeting. On the very first night of their marriage, however, Francisco reveals his horrible flaw: he is possessed by a jealousy so monstrous that it makes Othello seem saintly by comparison. Gloria soon realizes that this outsized jealousy manifests itself in increasingly ludicrous ways. A stranger laughing with a waiter at a hotel restaurant is enough of a stimulus to throw Francisco into a petulant rage. As Él plays out, Gloria desperately tries to find ways to escape her husband’s chronic paranoia.

Buñuel is best remembered as one of world cinema’s most playful and puckish surrealists. In his early period, his filmic surrealism sprung from the world of visual art. His first scandalous short, Un chien andalou (1929), was co-written by Salvador Dalí, and L’Age d’or (1930) elaborated the short’s disorienting techniques and shocking imagery into a feature length work. His late period, best represented by dramas like Belle de Jour (1966) or comedies like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), deployed a dreaminess that followed in the wake of the oneiric arthouse classics by filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman. Él, however, falls squarely in the director’s middle period, during which he made films for the Mexican film industry after fleeing his native Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Here, Buñuel remained ever the surrealist, but industry demands forced his flights of fancy to be more clearly integrated into his films’ narratives. Such is the case with Él, whose strange set pieces are intelligibly embedded within the film’s story world. In one particularly wacky sequence, a frenzied Francisco wanders into a church; here, shots depicting churchgoers sitting piously in their pews are intercut with sudden shots of those same parishioners laughing wildly at Francisco as an echoing cacophony of laughter rings out on the soundtrack. Here, unlike Buñuel’s first and final films, the surrealism is motivated by the narrative: we take these strange jump cuts as expressions of Francisco’s all-consuming paranoia and deteriorating mental state.

Also of a piece with Buñuel’s larger filmography is the obsessiveness of Él’s protagonist. Across the many phases of his career, Buñuel seemed to revel in the foolishness of male characters driven to passionate extremes by desire or hate. Francisco, in all his manic jealousy, bears a strong resemblance to the frantic characters played by Fernando Rey in notable Buñuel titles such as 1961’s Viridiana (in which a man becomes infatuated with his niece—who happens to be a nun), 1970’s Tristana (in which a Spanish nobleman becomes enamored with a young orphaned woman in his charge), or 1977’s That Obscure Object of Desire (wherein a man obsesses over a young woman surreally portrayed by two different actresses). With this character type, Buñuel manages to create men who are both repulsive and, in their own buffoonish way, humorous. The reprehensible Francisco frequently behaves with brutish roughness toward his wife, and, in one harrowing sequence, worse violence is hinted to be taking place off screen. This moral turpitude takes on a grimly humorous hue when, by the film’s ironic coda, we realize how stubbornly, idiotically inflexible Francisco’s paranoid convictions are. Like so many men in Buñuel’s subsequent films, Francisco is a villain to be scorned as much as he is a clown to be derided.

Given Buñuel’s status as a globetrotting, visionary filmmaker (he worked in France, Mexico and Spain, and he even lived for a period in the United States), one may be tempted to see Él as an anomalous entry in Mexican cinema. But the film, with its emotional extremes and its imperiled heroine, can be considered of a piece with the melodramas that the Mexican film industry produced regularly at the height of its economic power in the 1950s. Él is barely more extreme than, say, Alberto Gout’s wildly over-the-top The Adventuress (1950). Yet even if it was in keeping with certain Mexican filmmaking traditions, the film flopped at home and abroad. In My Last Sigh, his autobiography, Buñuel notes that Él played theatrically for less than a month in Mexico. On the festival circuit, the film received a chilly reception at Cannes. In a moment of absurdism worthy of a Buñuel film, Él was met with an unappreciative audience at a special screening for French veterans of foreign wars, and Jean Cocteau—Buñuel’s surrealist-in-arms—was vocally hostile toward the film. Nevertheless, its reputation has enjoyed a rehabilitation over the decades, with the film now considered to be—alongside The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) and The Exterminating Angel (1962)—one of the best films of Buñuel’s Mexican period.

These notes on filmmaker Larry Gottheim and his films were written by Zachary Zahos, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Larry Gottheim will appear in person at the Friday, February 24 screening of two of his most recent works, Entanglement and Chants and Dances for Hand . The program will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By Zachary Zahos

Less than one week after screening a selection of Paolo Gioli short films, the UW Cinematheque provides another opportunity to experience the work of a singular, arguably underrated avant-garde master. Furthermore, we are fortunate that the artist in question, Larry Gottheim, will be present in 4070 Vilas Hall, to introduce and answer questions about two recent (or at least recently completed) films, Chants and Dances for Hand (1991-2017) and Entanglement (2022). Some in attendance may even be able to resume conversations that began in September 2019, when Gottheim last visited campus for a similarly themed Cinematheque retrospective. But Gottheim returns to Madison not just to soak in its film culture and weather; rather, he is also here to update his film and manuscript collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. This process began during his last visit, and since then, piles of material have been donated, processed, and made available to researchers looking to learn more about this essential figure in American experimental cinema.

Analyzing the films of Larry Gottheim is, to be honest, a bit intimidating, given that Gottheim himself is such an eloquent and insightful critic of his own work. After all, he did earn a PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale. You can find his writings at the nicely kept website, LarryGottheimFilms.com, as well as in a forthcoming memoir, The Red Thread, a draft of which Gottheim was kind enough to send me after our acquaintance in 2019. In that book’s distilled, imagistic prose, Gottheim weaves together reflections on his personal history, aesthetics, technology, physics, philosophy, James Joyce, the list goes on. The one, bright constant threaded through the text are his films, whose motivations and resonances Gottheim deconstructs with great care and humility. Reading Gottheim on Gottheim, one detects a life lived not in cinema, but through it; the relatively slim number of references to other films and filmmakers stands in stark contrast to the network of connections Gottheim draws between each of his own works. These intra-filmography connections are less about the particulars of film form, and much more about the accrued knowledge and life experience that led him to make a film like Blues (one long, silent, meditative take) in 1969, versus the radically different Knot/Not (a barrage of superimposed, cacophonous images and sounds) fifty years later.

One implication of this analysis so far is that it is difficult to neatly package the work of Larry Gottheim. His early films, at least, are often mentioned in the same breath as other “structural films” of the 1960s and 1970s, works, like Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), designed around a formal, legible structure of change. In fact, as chair of what would become Binghamton University’s Cinema Department, Gottheim hired Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, and other like-minded filmmakers who would use their academic perch to experiment with the fundamentals of cinematic perception. Made during those heady Binghamton years, Gottheim’s Fog Line (1970) is a textbook example of structural film’s “gradual change” tendency. Over the course of one 400-foot, 11-minute roll of 16mm film, fog slowly lifts from a verdant clearing in upstate New York, revealing massive trees, power lines, and ghostly horses. Yet, as with any work of art that beckons repeat viewings, Fog Line does not simply employ a pre-fitted arc, from zero to full visibility. Near the end, the fog appears to encroach back into the clearing, or at least cease its withdrawal. Are we seeing a natural phenomenon, or is the film emulsion itself playing tricks with our eyes? Gottheim has referred to Fog Line as having “a capacity of not being exhaustible” — the ultimate state to which all of his films aspire.

On first blush, the two, newer films screening this week bear little in common with an early work like Fog Line. Entanglement and Chants and Dances for Hand both consist of rapidly cut, dense, impressionistic montages, replete with philosophical asides, musical interludes, and ethnographic observation. Though distinct in subject matter, these two films share with all of Gottheim’s work a transparent structural integrity, built on repetition and recursion. Entanglement pushes this to a notable extreme. This digital work cycles through an assemblage of pixelated film clips; instructional web videos; still photographs; CCTV footage from the 2022 massacre in Bucha, Ukraine; and original material by (and starring) Gottheim himself. Gottheim guides us through this thicket using act breaks, graphic match cuts, overlapping dialogue, and superimposition. Soon enough, we glean a set of ideas primarily concerning quantum mechanics (black holes, string theory, elementary particles, and “superposition” are all invoked). It is overwhelming to behold, which is perhaps why, at the halfway mark, the film restarts; that is to say, the first twelve minutes play again, with essentially no changes. This repeated structure allots one the time to unpack the film’s cerebral density. Fragmented musical cues, of French pianist Alfred Cortot and Wagner’s Götterdämmerung opera, also offer immediate pleasures.

The mid-length Chants and Dances for Hand is the one I expect to ponder the longest, in part because of its slippery symmetrical structure, but most of all due to its personal nature. Filmed in Haiti over the course of several years, the film bears superficial similarity to Maya Deren’s ethnographic documentary Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1954), as both feature Haitian vodou rituals at their center. Indeed, Chants demonstrates the trust Gottheim earned from this community; he is seen participating in religious customs, and his camera betrays close access to these rituals — fair warning that a goat, named Kabrit, is sacrificed on-screen. On this same note, Gottheim documents a tumultuous political uprising in Port-au-Prince, culminating in disturbing footage of a charred corpse and a dead boy. The actuality of death pervading this film is not simply the product of sensationalized gawking, but of familial concern. The “Hand” in the film’s title refers to Gottheim’s son, Hand, whose mother, Mitsou, is the Haitian woman seen playing the violin at the film’s beginning and end. Gottheim intersperses extremely candid, playful footage of Hand throughout this work. It is furthermore notable that the sound drops out completely, for about two minutes, as we see women and men, some as young as Hand, stand before these public corpses in fragile awe.

This review of Alice Diop's Saint Omer was written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. Saint Omer will screen on Thursday, February 16, at 7 p.m., in our regular Cinematheque venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

Alice Diop came to prominence as a filmmaker award-winning crafting documentaries like Nous and La Mort de Danton in which African identity and the African diaspora were central themes. That approach certainly hasn’t changed for her new feature Saint Omer but this is the first time Diop is working with a more structured narrative that undergirds her thematic ponderings. The resulting film won a slew of awards, among them the prize for Best Screenplay at the Chicago International Film Festival and the award for Best Film at the Ghent Film Festival last October.

As if to illustrate that there is not a clear line that divides documentary work and fiction, Saint Omer opens, after a short ten second prologue, with a university lecture about the way in which art sublimates reality, a scene that uses Hiroshima, Mon Amour to make its point. The story Diop subsequently uses to sublimate reality is a fascinating tale that mirrors two African-European women: on one side is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a writer working on a new version of Euripides’ Medea. Seeking inspiration, the project leads her to attend a trial in the town of Saint Omer. On trial is the second female protagonist of this drama: Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) who is being charged with the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, a case that has obvious parallels with Rama’s Greek tragedy of choice.

It takes a while before the movie reveals its full storyline to the viewer and even when it has done so, Diop opts for a pace that allows us to slowly take in all the complex elements of the unfolding trial. Using predominantly long takes, the camera explores the emotions on the characters’ faces but also lets the judicial details slowly unfurl themselves through testimonies. Out of these lengthy observations – a scarcely moving camera often keeps the image locked on a single face while we hear other voices contributing from offscreen – a richly textured account of complex and often perplexing events slowly develops. Diop opts for letting testimonies and interrogations play out mostly in real time, which means that the viewer is asked to adjust judgements and views along with the crowd in the courtroom.

Most striking as this trial unfolds is the way in which the directorial choices open up a second layer of meaning that finds its way to the surface through the reflective and contemplative style. Underneath what seems to be a simple formalist exercise in a time-tested format lies a much more poignant reflection on the warping of African traditions. In his book Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft, Professor Koen Stroeken addresses the way in which traditional African witchcraft has morphed into a violent hybrid with westernized conceptions of guilt and punishment. Without ever explicitly talking about Stroeken’s subject, Saint Omer still manages to make these changing traditions palpable to the viewer by subtly suggesting the shadow they cast over the trial proceedings.

The fact that the film succeeds in weaving these layers into the narrative is in no small way indebted to the superbly crafted screenplay that often smuggles small subtleties and telling details into lines of dialogue or seemingly redundant situations. In that way, scenes such as the one in which Laurence’s mother lectures Rama on what to eat and not to eat at lunch become much more important than they might initially seem and neatly tie into the undergirding themes.

The quality of the writing should not blind us though, to the splendidness equally displayed in the visual style of Saint Omer. Although never really vying for the viewer’s attention, the images shot by Diop and director of cinematography Claire Mathon are quietly powerful and overwhelming. Mathon has worked on films as different as Stranger by the Lake, Spencer, and two acclaimed collaborations with director Céline Sciamma: Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman. Once again, the cinematographer finds the perfect pictorial style – albeit a very different one than in previous work – to best suit the narrative needs of the film. Alice Diop, for her part, has already revealed herself as a remarkably mature filmmaker, even at the relatively young age of 43. This first foray into fictional work – although her films have always eluded such easy categorizations – certainly bodes well for future endeavors.