10 films with films – Weekend – Kommersant
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Cinema is, by definition, a fake: similar to ours, but a different world. But cinema is by definition a reality, because it is impossible (if we are not talking about animation) to make a film without people and objects in front of which the camera is placed. How, then, to call cinema within cinema? Many directors hid other films inside their stories, either as an insert plot, details of a fictional narrative, or a commentary on it. Fake inside fake? Reality within reality? Or proof that one cannot be distinguished from the other? Ten examples from the history of world cinema give very different answers.
“Inglourious Basterds”
Quentin Tarantino, 2009
film within a film: “Pride of the Nation”
Quentin Tarantino’s first foray into the murky waters of alternate history hardly needs much introduction. According to the plot, a combat detachment of American Jews, supported by the French Resistance (also from ethnic minorities) and a German spy, completely changes the course of World War II. Is it possible to turn large-scale historical events through the efforts of a few people? Tarantino’s question sounds more relevant than ever, but for a postmodern film director, it’s a fantasy about another world where something went differently, and not a reflection in the spirit of Tolstoy about the role of the individual in history. So the climax of Inglourious Basterds takes place in a theater screening of Tarantino’s fictitious Nazi movie propaganda Pride of the Nation. The film itself in the film mixes reality with fiction: “Pride of the Nation” is dedicated to a sniper-order-bearer who, at the personal request of Goebbels, plays himself – thereby provoking an equally acute question about the manipulation of facts in propaganda.
“The Last Movie Hero”
John McTiernan, 1993
film within a film: Jack Slater 4
Director John McTiernan first made an important contribution to the canon of action movies (he put “Die Hard” and the first “Predator”), and then he himself subjected him to ridicule – however, completely harmless. Once in the world of his favorite action franchise “Jack Slater”, the teenage protagonist finds himself in an improved version of reality, where the weather is always good, all the women are dazzlingly beautiful, and the machinations of the villains are easy to guess, because they act in accordance with dramatic clichés. On the contrary, the film character Slater is lost in the real, not on-screen Los Angeles: a native and resident of the fantasy world, he is not ready for the fact that in reality you cannot break glass with your hand and not cut yourself. The concept of the film is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s earlier Purple Rose of Cairo, where a Depression-era romantic young lady falls in love with a melodrama hero who magically descends to her from the screen. But in McTiernan’s picture there is little sentimentality, but a lot of the spirit of the times: in that era, the idea that all life consists of signs (that is, it does not fundamentally differ from a movie or TV series) sounded everywhere – in newspapers and on TV, in the speeches of politicians and in the books of fashionable philosophers. And it is no coincidence that in The Last Movie Hero these ideas are embodied by the actor-symbol of the nineties – Arnold Schwarzenegger, who simultaneously plays himself and a parody of his masculine image.
“Start”
Gleb Panfilov, 1970
film within film: “The Life of Joan of Arc”
After the brilliant debut of No Way Through the Fire, Gleb Panfilov conceived a film about Joan of Arc – an ambitious idea for any director in any historical situation, but especially in the late Soviet Union: Jeanne was not only a symbol of resistance to the invaders, but also a fanatic who experienced religious visions. The script was not given a go, and Panfilov answered “The Beginning”, where the heroine was not the medieval heroine herself, but a young weaver who plays in a drama circle and suddenly receives an offer for the main role in a film about Jeanne. With this move, Panfilov not only circumvented censorship, but also complicated the structure of the film, turning it into a story about three lives of one woman – a modest provincial woman, an aspiring movie star, and the legendary warrior she plays. The heroine of Inna Churikova is trying to find herself, maneuvering between how others see her and what is expected of her; this is one of the key female images in the history of Soviet cinema.
“Cleo 5 to 7”
Agnes Varda, 1962
film within a film: “The Newlyweds of McDonald’s Bridge”
Until the 1960s, cinema was rarely interested in itself. Although Hollywood has already made films about the glitz and poverty of show business (two versions of A Star Is Born, Singing in the Rain), the discovery of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Agnès Varda, who directed Cleo from 5 to 7, was that the cinema has become a natural part of the life of an urban person from an entertainment or an art form. The hero of Godard’s “Breathless” sought to imitate the heroes of Humphrey Bogart (this did not lead to anything good). Cleo from the film Varda herself acts in films – she is a singer and actress, split between her body and the screen image. Whilst away the time before a fateful visit to the doctor, Cleo moves around Paris, endlessly reflected in mirrors and shop windows, as if refracted into many versions of herself. At some point, the dramatic intonation turns into burlesque: Cleo and her friend go to the cinema and watch a silent short film in the genre of screwball comedy. Her character, played by Godard, sees the world in black because he wears dark glasses. As soon as he throws them into the Seine, life immediately gets better – an ironic commentary on how cinema teaches optimism and how it deceives us.
“Irma Vep”
Olivier Assayas, 1996 (film), 2022 (TV series)
film within the film: “Irma Vep”
French directors can’t see beyond their noses! Why do we need a new wave when there is John Woo! Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung (she performs in Irma Vep under her own name) is surprised to hear such scandalous judgments from journalists and colleagues. The director of the film in the film (played by Jean-Pierre Leo, the actor-talisman of the new wave) was once on a par with the greats, but fell into a permanent crisis and for some reason is filming a frame-by-frame remake of the silent masterpiece “Vampires” – an undertaking that cannot make sense explain even himself. Maggie will remain a stranger in an unfamiliar city, director Rene will never find herself in a changed world, their film will not work out: a rough cut is a chaotic series of defective shots with close-ups of the actress. The theme of the inexorable change of eras, time that cannot be stopped with the help of cinema, will become even brighter in the auto-remake of Irma Vep. Assayas filmed a serial version of his own story 25 years later, when he himself had already become an elderly director: masked heroes were back in fashion, and John Woo was forgotten, but communication between people is still fundamentally impossible.
“Forbidden Room” + “Sessions”
Guy Maddin, 2015/2016
film within a film: a series of lost films
The Canadian avant-garde artist Guy Maddin also peers into the era of silent cinema. His alchemical films, starting from his first works, are inventive pastiches from the themes and techniques of early cinema, mixed with irony and a surreal worldview. Maddin’s research led him to an ambitious plan to recreate real-life but lost films. Much of the legacy of the silent era has not survived to this day, including the work of classics like Hitchcock and Murnau (both included in the project), and Maddin is undertaking to fix it. But, of course, not seriously: his “remakes” are bizarre fantasies on the theme, each of them lasts only a few minutes. The fake films are included in the full-length “Forbidden Room” and are also available as an experimental video “Sessions” on a special site that automatically cuts fragments in random order for each viewer. Whereas in Maddin’s earlier works history, reality, and fiction were relative concepts, here the history of cinema itself is relative and accidental.
“The Other Side of the Wind”
Orson Welles, 2018
film within a film: “The Other Side of the Wind”
Orson Welles’ last film was shot in fits and starts and was left unfinished during the director’s lifetime due to legal disputes that dragged on for decades. This is Citizen Kane’s farewell work about an aging filmmaker Jake as he struggles and fails to finish his new film and seeks help and friendship from the younger generation of filmmakers who have come to replace him. Jake shows his opus called The Other Side of the Wind at his ranch to a select audience. Wells, who hated the thoughtful European cinema of Godard and Antonioni, conceived the film within a film as a parody of the intellectual hits of the seventies. But in the long time The Other Side has sat unfinished on the shelf, its satirical aspect has faded a little. Now, almost 40 years after Wells’ death, his latest film looks like an encyclopedia of styles, ideas and heroes of his time: the outgoing generation in the person of Jake with his Hemingway image (John Huston played the role), young impudent “new Hollywood” (Wells’ protégé Peter Bogdanovich – he finished editing The Other Side of the Wind years later) and the pop psychedelic of the fictional film – as an attempt to capture a new time that eludes Jake and Wells himself.
“Sound recording studio “Berberyan””
Peter Strickland, 2012
film within a film: Riders Pool
In the 1970s, a British sound engineer travels to Italy to work on a film about horses, only to find out upon arrival that the project is actually a bloody mystical horror in the giallo subgenre that was popular in that era. A heavy atmosphere reigns in the studio, strange events take place, and the Englishman seems to be dragged into an unhealthy B-horror plot. screams of actresses, disgusting chomping sounds that are created in the studio by masters with the help of fruits and knives. Everyone can interpret these sounds and imagine the plot of The Horsemen’s Pool to the extent of their depravity: Strickland’s painting is not about what we see, but about what we fantasize about. This brings it in line with other great films about sound – “The Conversation” by F.F. Coppola and “Puncture” by Brian De Palma, whose hero also works in the production of cheap horror.
“Bad upbringing”
Pedro Almodovar, 2004
film within a film: “Visit”
The twisted plot of The Bad Education is full of unexpected revelations and changes direction several times, like in film noir or classic Hollywood melodramas. This is a film about childhood trauma – a dark backstory of the plot is associated with sexual abuse in a Catholic boarding school. A film called The Visit, invented by one of the main characters based on his own biography, is a kind of therapy, an attempt to rewind time and reinvent himself. But, like any memoir, the film in the film is full of omissions and distortions, and the author of The Visit turns out to be not who he claims to be. In the tragic world of Pedro Almodovar, the past never lets go, and an attempt to return to it can only lead to a new tragedy.
Trofim
Alexey Balabanov, 1995
film within the film: “Arrival of the train at Tsarskoye Selo Station”
Alexey Balabanov’s early short film can be called a variation of the literary canon about the little man. The central character himself, a peasant performed by Sergei Makovetsky, reminds rather not of Pushkin, but of Dostoevsky (and yes, of Balabanov’s later paintings): the plot begins with Trofim killing his own brother with an ax out of jealousy and fleeing punishment to St. Petersburg. The viewer still sympathizes with the murderer, who wanders senselessly through a strange, hostile city, as Danila Bagrov will do a century later: the action of Trofim takes place at the end of the 19th century, shortly after the invention of the Lumiere film camera. It is with the history of cinema that the ending of the film, shot for the almanac “Arrival of the Train” on the centenary of the first screening, is connected. At the station, Trofim accidentally gets into the lens of a movie camera; the action is transferred to the nineties, two directors (Balabanov himself and Alexei German) are sitting over archival films. The frame with a bearded man staring at the camera seems superfluous to them – it prevents them from seeing the train, and without thinking twice, they cut Trofim out of their project. So a tragic, inappropriate life turns out to be a defective frame for a big story.
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