Happy 50th, Chicago Film Festival!

I've known since I moved here that I shared a spiritual link with the Chicago International Film Festival, and this year the case only gets stronger. On October 9, the festival will turn 50 on the same day I turn 37, and as happens every year, the programmers will whup even my relatives and loved ones in the competition for Best Gift.  Tickets go on sale to the public today, though one of the perks of joining Cinema/Chicago and supporting the organization is getting a two-day head start on those purchases.  I suspect I won't be the only patron who feels I am being showered with presents.

For their golden anniversary, the leadership has curated a selection that, according to Programming Director Mimi Plauché,"ties back to the history of the festival and also looks forward in so many ways." That commitment to its own heritage begins with the Opening Night selection of Liv Ullmann's Miss Julie, extending CIFF's streak of programming all of Ullmann's directorial efforts since her first in 1992 (including a new personal favorite of mine, Private Confessions, which won Pernilla August a richly deserved Best Actress award here in 1996).  Ullmann will be back to introduce the film and take questions, as will Hollywood directors and CIFF loyalists Oliver Stone and Taylor Hackford, who will screen some favorites among their own work: Natural Born Killers and the extended cut of Alexander in Stone's case, The Idolmaker and White Nights in Hackford's.  CIFF will also host the North American premiere of the newly restored Why Be Good?, released simultaneously as a silent and a talkie in 1929 and previously thought lost.  The star, Colleen Moore, plays a character named "Pert," which is all I need to know. She will be familiar to CIFF audiences as the inspiration for the Franju-esque graphic that CIFF has used as its logo since its inception, since she helped to found the whole institution.  Archival pleasures extend as well to a four-film cycle of Isabelle Huppert's greatest post-2000 hits, selected by the actress herself and screening all in 35mm at the Music Box: The Piano Teacher (blistering), Comedy of Power (diabolical), Copacabana (atypically comic), and White Material (unmissable).  Whether Huppert herself will alight for the occasion was not clear, but a girl can dream.

Miss Julie, despite being an Irish-set and substantially Irish-funded production, also commences in its way CIFF 2014's spotlight on Scandinavian cinema, which encompasses among many other films Ruben Östlund's festival smash Force Majeure, which I couldn't get into in Toronto; Norway's 1001 Grams, already submitted for Oscar consideration; Sweden's The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which at least gave Roy Andersson some competition in the race for memorable film titling; encore screenings of Breaking the Waves and Fanny and Alexander; a portmanteau of recent Nordic short films; and Iceland's Of Horses and Men, already a cult favorite, with an indelible poster and this IMDb logline: A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with immense consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception. You can bet I'm skipping the one-night-only screening of Birdman to be there.

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Actress Files: Liv Ullmann

Liv Ullmann, The Emigrants
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1972 Best Actress Oscar to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret)

Why I Waited: The Criterion Collection deserves a newly inaugurated Nobel Prize for Cinema in my book, but I'm sure I'm not the only devotée who harbors dream-visions of expanding their catalog. Jan Troell's The Emigrants and its sequel The New Land, revered on their release but extremely difficult to track down these days, strike me as an ideal box-set for some well-resourced DVD imprint, especially now that Criterion is gracing Troell's more recent arthouse hit Everlasting Moments with a typically lustrous packaging. I'd hoped by the time I got around to The Emigrants that a revival-house screening or an official DVD pressing somewhere would show the film to superior advantage. As it is, I'm enormously grateful, and for the umpteenth time, to my friend Mike, who provided me with a copy of this film way back when we were first getting to know each other. We swap stuff like this the way addicts trade needles, but mercifully, the only health risks are mental. And even when I want a hit so bad I can taste it, I can resist the urge for years when I suspect it will be worth the wait.

The Performance: Ironically, the two performances for which Liv Ullmann secured her two Oscar nominations are, today, two of her most impossible films to see—despite the usual axiom that the point of the Academy Awards is to ensure visibility for films that need it. Neither of them has ever appeared on DVD, unless you count the hacked-up and English-dubbed limited release of The Emigrants that Warner barely put out in 2007, minus 40 minutes of original footage. Even VHS copies are very hard to come by, and most of those are severely truncated, too. Someone will eventually explain to me the reasons for such rude treatment. Besides these headaches of ready availability, however, neither the two films nor Ullmann's performances in them have much in common. I ought to return one day to 1976's Face to Face, since I do love Bergman and I cherish any top-grade actress rendering an all-stops-out mental crackup on screen. Some people cite Ullmann's explosive charting of the mental deterioration of a Swedish psychoanalyst to be one of the greatest performances ever lensed, but the film's muddy symbolisms, the repetitions in the screenplay and the acting, and the almost lewd overvaluation of howling despair put me off a little. By contrast, Jan Troell's The Emigrants—also a nominee for Best Picture, Best Director, and, in the previous year, Best Foreign Language Film—is a much more stately, superficially conventional chronicle of a nonetheless harrowing experience, as a party of 14 loosely related men, women, and children from the rustic Småland province of Sweden decide to take their chances in the reputed promised land of North America. Together, they have had their fill of tyrannical employers, religious persecution, thwarted opportunities for learning, and alternately drowned and sun-blasted crops.

In deference to my promised focus on Ullmann's performance, I'll say quickly that The Emigrants is an absolute stunner of naturalistic historical recreation and intimate human portraiture. Balancing the majestic visual scale, the low visual contrasts, and the sedate color palettes of rural 19th-century paintings with the nervy camera movements and unsettling sound design of up-to-the-minute cinematic technique, The Emigrants is all the more impressive for the fact that Troell worked as director, cinematographer, editor, and co-adapter of Vilhelm Moberg's novels. Certainly since the Best Picture slate was shrunk down to five nominees in 1944, and perhaps not even beforehand, I don't think that category has ever again in a single year boasted four such superior movies as Cabaret, The Emigrants, The Godfather, and Sounder, which of course only makes it more frustrating that Troell's achievement cannot be more readily savored by a wider audience.

But we were speaking of Ullmann, whom we first meet as a blonde-plaited girl perched lazily on a swing, itself suspended from a huge tree branch. With the light behind her and a consequent golden nimbus of backlighting tickling away at her features, Ullmann is a radiant image of youth. For a story that will lean so heavily on everyone's massive utopian investments in the myth of America, there is some irony to the fact that no one in the film ever looks as sublimely inspiring or as contentedly situated in time and place—not even once they've reached their mythopoetic destination—as Ullmann's Kristina does in these introductory shots. Kristina soon marries the young, local farmer Karl-Oskar Nilsson (Max von Sydow, or were you expecting someone else?). As she moves in with Karl-Oskar's crippled father and silent, vaguely censorious mother, Ullmann maintains a ruddy, only half-concealed vitality: seeing to her chores of milking cows and preparing food and gathering straw, but occasionally espied having a respite on yet another swing, when she probably ought to be toiling. The presence in the household of Karl-Oskar's younger, more handsome brother Robert (Eddie Axberg), a precocious reader, a riverside dawdler, equally stirred by philosophy, natural science, and faraway locales, suggests an inevitable romantic tangle. In fact, though, he and Kristina never come anywhere close. Ullmann makes subtle but quick work of suggesting the swift erosion of Kristina's restless girlishness, and her stalwart disinclination toward sin. She can still be sweet-talked into a nocturnal roll on the straw pallet she shares with Karl-Oskar, but not without suggesting that a fourth pregnancy in four years might be something to avoid, given their intractable debts and their stingy fields. Kristina is by far the most fertile thing on Karl-Oskar's farm, but she is no earth mother. Despite the initial impression Ullmann made of gorgeous, arousable mischief—made more tranquil as the years pass, but still vaguely palpable as she, and she alone, listens with thoughtful fascination to what Robert reads aloud—she has to give Karl-Oskar the same warning that Alma gave Ennis in Brokeback Mountain against conceiving more children he has no way of feeding. She's still a smitten wife, but life has begun to sober her up. Worry has begun to nibble at her, like bedbugs that won't go away.

Nonetheless, in offscreen moments, Kristina keeps relenting to Karl-Oskar's advances, and they keep adding to their brood. She is a much more pious believer than her husband, and Ullmann imparts a sense that Kristina's practical reservations about bearing a larger family are suffused with a theological fear that she is tempting God's patience by living and loving beyond her means—that she is professing a mindfulness of resources that she is not fulfilling, or that Karl-Oskar keeps upsetting on both their behalves. She is understandably piqued, then, when Karl-Oskar reacts with glumness to her announcement of another pregnancy. Still, her heated reaction—especially in proportion to his swift self-recovery and his earnest vows of continued adoration—imply that she has silently been fretting, even berating herself, well before disclosing the news to her nonplussed husband. She is rankled and scared enough by his casual blasphemies in the fields, blaming God for his own pathetic harvests, that it's a bit less surprising, though only a bit, when she holds him so severely to task after lightning strikes their only barn and burns it fully away. Ullmann holds up her hands in an etherized pose of praying after this happens, gazing stonily into the camera and toward Karl-Oskar as they jointly approach. She looks sphinxlike and serenly taunting, like one of those women who wordlessly beckon from uncanny landscapes in Tarkovsky's films. But the bizarre edge of thrill and relief that Ullmann sneaks into Kristina's fearful recriminations suggests that she'd rather pay an inevitable bill to their angered God by sacrificing a farm than by losing a child. Before long, Kristina and Karl-Oskar do lose a child through a dismal accident, and only then does she accede to everyone else's avid longings for the New World. However, she's pregnant once again by the time they leave on their grueling voyage, and it's clear that she expects still more trials from the Holy Ghost.

From time to time she says as much, but it's really by watching Ullmann's uneasy pensiveness in the backs of several shots that we best track what she's feeling. Hunkered into the wagon that hauls them from their family plot to the chaotic seaport, barracked into the massive ship that is their tightly-packed home and their fetid prison for a ten-week voyage, not quite becalmed even after the ship arrives in New York City (minus several of its original passengers), Kristina typically subsists as a quietly but nervously reactive presence. Many of her close-ups are brief, wordless inserts, in which Ullmann capitalizes on her amazing knack for profound but unshowy distillation of emotion, a capacity for total expressive lucidity that has recently become the provenance of Juliette Binoche. To be sure, she gets some more volatile moments, too. She weeps in weary self-disgust when she discovers her clothes crawling with lice. She raves in desperation, looking to find a daughter who has somehow wandered off while a second passenger-boat temporarily docks. She is incensed to be traveling in the company of a prostitute named Ulrika (Nonica Zetterlund), whom her uncle, a zealous and scarily arrogant minister, praises as God's favorite child in the entire community. Why else, he asks, does Ulrika go unbitten and undiseased, even as seasickness, scurvy, and vermin infestations ripple through the rest of the ship's hold? Kristina has no answer except a fuming, almost cellular rejection of this logic, though whether she's angry with Uncle Danjel or Ulrika or herself, maybe even at God, is something for the viewer to think about throughout the tantrum and through lots of subsequent inserts of Ullmann, weary behind the eyes and obviously troubled at heart.

The scenes of strenuous emoting were not my favorites in Ullmann's performance, partly because they risk being predictable reactions to generic goads (humiliation, parental fright, moral disgust), and partly because these facets of Kristina sometimes arise too quickly or too floridly. The most substantial reason, though, is that the wealth of information Ullmann conjures about Kristina even when she's doing and saying much less constitutes such an extraordinary display of unegotistical artistry that one almost hates to see Kristina pipe up. All she needs is one incongruously fretful expression while a hundred other characters are rejoicing in the finally-attained dockside of New York for us to see that Kristina is contemplating this whole journey in a different, more inward, more inviolably skeptical plane than anyone else among her company, even her husband. She's the God-fearing pilgrim among all the secular travelers, who dream of Minnesota topsoil and assimilated American consonants and California gold.

Refreshingly, though, Ullmann and Troell refrain from making Kristina a hysteric or a nag, and they wouldn't dream of using her to pathologize older ways of feeling. Ullmann's concessions to period are to play Kristina as someone who expects discomfort and hard work and to retain a bone-deep consciousness of divine observation, responding to calamities or provocations not as things to be angry about but as moments to be humble—although here again, Ullmann captures Kristina's piety while forbearing from making her meek or passive or impenetrably internalized. So many actors play period by giving their characters ornate or estranged exteriors out of step with contemporary idioms but emphasize that their hearts and minds are as modern as could be. Ullmann, though, has neatly reversed that equation. Aside from the strongly marked regional accent in her voice, she speaks, moves, and breathes with an unself-conscious immediacy unusual for performances in tales of the 1840s, and yet it's tangible at every moment that Kristina's soul measures itself by different values. Her joys and worries and expectations are those of a very different era. If she's a bit tacit, it's not because she's under her husband's thumb or in some other way "unliberated" but because she is so deeply habituated to the ways in which even the mainstays of her life—the ground, the water, the air, her Lord, her womb, her food, her questions, her work, her dislikes, her hunches about the future—regularly resist even the hardiest work ethic, the most Christian modesty, the best attempts to manage her family or to earn God's clemency.

This is why, even as I am tempted to say that Cicely Tyson's Rebecca in Sounder and Ullmann's Kristina in The Emigrants might come closer to a mutual understanding than you'd expect from any two characters in the same Oscar race, I cannot imagine Kristina being capable of that heart-stopping, plaintive, desperate, and loving sprint that Rebecca climactically takes toward her husband. Ullmann keeps Kristina vital, open, accessible, and matrimonially devoted without suggesting that she could love a husband as voluminously as Rebecca loves hers, without committing a sin of pride. In fact, when Kristina lies bloody and depleted, in the advanced stages of shipboard illness, what she offers as a dying confession to Karl-Oskar is a barely audible "I care for you very much, and always did. We're such good friends." Ullmann, who has mapped ecstatic, ambivalent, and openly hostile marriages during her storied career, is in full command of the actorly dexterity required to express such a modest, fragile emotion in a way that suits the character and the period without disappointing a modern audience's desire for emotional identification and release. She has need to wail and weep elsewhere in The Emigrants, but mostly she's defined by a placid but uncomplacent watchfulness, keeping one eye on her children and one on the uncertain future, near or far.

It's hard to imagine serving The Emigrants much better than this, and if the performance feels just marginally shy of the highest heights, that speaks less to any deficiency than to Ullmann's mature contentment to fit within Troell's grand, deliberate, but nonetheless astonishing schema. (It may also have to do with the superhumanly high bar that this actress sets for herself in other work.) So little is Ullmann interested in knocking our socks off or bending her scenes to privilege Kristina that when The Emigrants ends, you may have trouble, or at least I did, remembering exactly how the character looked or where she was for her final shot. One of the other co-leads is gloriously settling, and one is ardently commencing yet another voyage. Both impressions are indelible. Whether Kristina, though, has a sense of having arrived or of only now embarking on a new voyage is much less certain, and as we've learned from Ullmann's performance, it probably has less to do with physical locations than with spiritual soundings. Gazing at Ullmann at any given time, you learn plenty about the character, and you desire to find out more. While taking in the full scope of The Emigrants, though, you occasionally lose track of her completely, or you realize you haven't seen her lately and start scouring the corners and the backgrounds of the group shots. Given the way the actor and filmmaker have collaborated to conceive Kristina and to integrate her within the novelistic riches of The Emigrants, all of these responses—fixated, distracted, and curious—are equally suggestive of how fully Ullmann warrants our praise.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 3 to Go

BONUS: Notoriously, Ullmann lost her shot at a third nomination when an arcane AMPAS rule prohibited the Oscar eligibility of Scenes from a Marriage in 1974. It isn't simply that Scenes debuted on Swedish TV, albeit in a much longer form, but that this broadcast and the U.S. theatrical release failed to coincide in the same calendar year. I read in Inside Oscar about the ad taken out in the Los Angeles Times by a group of actresses who wanted Ullmann to be considered, and while preparing this post, I decided I had to see it for myself. So here you go, a top-drawer artifact of actressexuality, straight from page F12 of the Times on January 17, 1975. Now that's what I call the approval of your peers. Sometimes it's just an honor not to be nominated!

Picked Flick #44: Shame

Across all of the arts, I think that the most urgent and sophisticated depiction of war is the one Bertolt Brecht constructs in his play Mother Courage and Her Children, in which the rumbling of military convoys and the cracks of artillery are mostly offstage echoes. The focalizing character is Anna Fierling, dubbed "Mother Courage" for both laudatory and facetious reasons, who strains to make a living for herself and her three bastard children while trudging through the muddy, scabbed grounds of the battlefields and surrounding towns, selling her second-hand wares to whomever, on whatever side, of whatever nationality or political persuasion, is willing to part with a buck, or a mark, or a krona, or a pair of boots, or whatever. Brecht helps us to understand war as a series of dark negotiations with one's own ethics, with one's own being, and with the competing ways of construing oneself as a communal figure: as a partner, a parent, a patriot, a pragmatist, a profiteer, a bystander, an objector. No one now living—at least no one paying any attention—can doubt the continuing relevance of this viewpoint, and the need for its proclamation: war, when it is happening, and it is almost always happening, is never "over there," it is always here, in its reverberations, its roots, its dollars and cents, even in the most isolationist refusals of war's reality.

Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film Shame presents itself in as un-Brechtian a style as it possibly could, but the intelligence and the inclusiveness with which it examines war as a social and human condition are very nearly on a par with Brecht's. In Bergman's Persona, made two years previously, Liv Ullmann reacts with mute shock and terror to televised images of martial atrocities in Southeast Asia, and to the horrifying conviction of a Buddhist monk setting fire to himself in protest of man's inhumanity. War provides a crucial context for the vicious psychological retrenchment that Persona subsequently explores, particularly via the Ullmann character, but Shame confronts the issue in a much more direct and thorough-going way. Eva and Jan Rosenberg (Ullmann and Max von Sydow) are married concert musicians who live out a rustic existence on a Scandinavian island—farming and raising chickens, struggling to get the radio and the truck engine to work, ferrying to the mainland for necessities and the occasional luxury indulgence. In Shame's first scene, Ullmann and von Sydow wake in their beds (not, crucially, the same bed), and as she rather brusquely dresses and washes her face, he forlornly recounts a dream of the previous evening. An undeniable chill, if not quite a hostility, exists between these people, though its relative severity will rise and fall through the first half of the film, sometimes warming to an optimistic intimacy, sometimes tumbling into a scary antagonism. Meanwhile, we learn quickly that whatever unnamed country of which the Rosenbergs are citizens, albeit quite secluded ones, has been rent for several years by civil war, whose armies might invade their own environs at any moment. In many films, even ones by Bergman, these dual narratives would serve as metaphors or reflections of each other: the on-and-off combat within the Rosenbergs' marriage and the literal war that, for now, is only visible in the processions of military trucks and the low-flying jets that occasionally pass overhead. The genius of Shame, though, rendered with stomach-turning immediacy and realism, is that we experience all of this as one narrative. The gnawing discontent between Eva and Jan is directly conditioned by the war; it is one of the thousands of tongues through which the war speaks. She expresses contempt for his tearful, paralyzed anxieties; he doesn't understand how she can listen to so much more of the radio coverage than he and yet reflect so much less sensitivity and fear in response; she wishes he would fix the fucking truck, partially so they will have a means of escape if marauding armies do appear, and partially because he's such a goddamned procrastinator in general. About a half-hour into Shame, with a speed, a potency, and a plausibility that are equally hard to bear, the martial conflict explodes at the Rosenbergs' very own door, frightening them to their cores, annihilating their privacy, and serving to draw them back together but also to make them scowl even more deeply at each others' shortcomings. Again, these personal clashes are not sidebars or collateral effects of the war: they are part of what war is. As circumstances deteriorate even further in Shame, so too do the relations between the Rosenbergs.

Along with how it pervades our personalities, slips under our very skins, the other vile and best-kept secret of war is its shapeshifting ability. Like a flammable liquid, it pours itself into any space or vessel, and is prone to ignite anywhere. The second half of Shame, now that the Rosenbergs realize how immersed they are in the crisis, shows how arbitrarily they are pawned between the opposing factions, how their friendships and their enmities become hopelessly confused, how in a very Brechtian fashion—if not, again, in a Brechtian idiom—war becomes a marketplace for terrible barters, including sexual ones, which give onto their own cycles of self-defeating revenge. If I'm making Shame sound like harrowing viewing, then I'm doing it justice; few films are so excoriating in their images or their trajectories. But there is nothing abstruse or reductive or inaccessible about it: it doesn't need manichean figures of good and evil like Platoon, or peekaboo movements in and out of the maelstrom like Saving Private Ryan, or even the ornate and remote meditative koans of The Thin Red Line. Ambitious and indispensable as Malick's movie is, its motivating quarry is the philosophical knot of war, whereas Shame draws the rutted map of war's psychology, in bold and grievous strokes recognizable to any audience, and liable to frighten and humble them all. Ullmann, exquisitely forceful and believable in her role, has exactly one Bergmanesque soliloquy about the states and layers of being and suffering, but even this builds to a ringing, legible, and haunting conclusion. Imagining the war-torn world as the collective nightmare of humanity, of a global conscience in a restive, inattentive sleep, she asks herself, "What happens when the person dreaming all of this and all of us awakes, and is ashamed?" (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1968 Svensk Filmindustri/Janus Films.