Technicolor Memories: Le Samourai (1967)

Title Shot (60's Typography FTW)

Le Samourai (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) is, if nothing else, exquisite meditation.

Since time immemorial, a valve of my heart has been exclusively reserved to pump at full capacity only while watching film noir, a fact first acknowledged when my high school film studies professor thrust Double Indemnity deep into my eye sockets, followed by The Big Sleep, The Killers, and Orson Welles' mischievously manipulated Touch of Evil (the 1975 cut). (He was a good guy, that professor, rode a mean hog, wore leather jackets, jeans, and aviators—when he wanted you to watch something, you fuckin' watched it.) The genre cut into my flesh like it was a knife, cutting until I bled, and when I bled, that blood was cold ("Jill, this blood, this looks like cold blood...").

So what I'm saying is: I'm a reptile, the responsibility for which falls squarely at the feet of [Dr. Octagon] (or Capcom?); and that I enjoy noir is no surprise—it's embedded in my cold, cold blood.

The first time I watched Le Samourai, I was in complete disbelief. Where had this film been all my life? It had taken me 6 years since Double Indemnity to watch this? How could that be? Well, I suppose it's availability may have been marginal up until its resurrection as a member of the Criterion family, but the point is, including that as an excuse, it was still inexcusable that I had never even heard of it. Why hadn't this been thrust into my eye sockets? (Or the more apropos location of my belly?)

Not that I have a VHS Deck in my abdomen; I envision a dubious transaction on the streets of Chinatown where the local bootlegger hands it off to me in a forceful fashion as I walk past, dropping my cash at his feet.

Because my life is noir as fuck.

Noir as fuck

Le Samourai is transcendent, style sublimating into substance; the sharp existentialism of assassin du jour, Jef (played to perfection by Alain Delon), puts all other cinematic killers to shame. Outdoor shots are thick with rainy-Sunday atmospherics accompanied by a melancholic electric-organ theme that hypnotizes; interiors often labyrinthine (note the first scene inside the Police Department), confusing the senses with unexpected doorways, extras as subterfuge, and post-bop jazz. Actual acts of violence are few and far between; the story is about accepting the consequences for those actions that you willfully performed, few as they may be. And as you sit, entranced by the 24fps sequence of events that unfolds, you will come to understand as Jef understands: life is not something to be taken lightly, but it can be taken quickly.

Rain, Rain, Go Away...

The collaboration between Melville and Delon produced two of the greatest crime-dramas in history (Le Cercle Rouge being the other. They also worked together on Un Flic, but I've yet to see it. So maybe they went 3/3. I'd believe it.). Melville's direction is refined, so enthusiastically intellectual, philosophical even, that it seems at odds with a genre that some might instinctively consider hyper-masculine (see: Heat). But that's just some gender-bias bullshit. Of course it took a careful, nuanced director with vision to craft a film like this and not have it devolve into some shitty tale of revenge (which in some respects it may resemble). When Jef is betrayed by the woman he's betrayed his woman with, he knows what he has to do. But do we?

The Beautiful Caty Rosier

Melville uses his actors to meditate on what may or may not be an actual quote from Bushido code, but whether the quote is real or imagined is irrelevant—Le Samourai makes it real through a process of semiotic transmutation. And we, the viewer, meditate on whether or not we need to watch this damn movie again.

I vote yes.

Takin' down the set

Soliloquy I / Science Leaves My Self-Importance in Ruins

Rapidly divergent thoughts converge always at a point of least expectance; and in that way, when you’re not expecting to think at all, you might dredge up an axiom: that your thoughts are of the same stream, a single river, come from some cloud-hidden valley in that unknown cardinal direction which points to the heavens. Therein resides a lake whose pure water is analogous to the gods, by its depth you might measure their ambition. On its surface forms a fine mist and from that mist the fontanus, simulacra of divinity made to stimulate the Earth by rain of dithyrambs, paeans, and odes. Diluted by descent from so high, these sacrosanct globules of thought travel through the infinite tributaries of man, his capillary labyrinths of consciousness; and then, when discarded as silt, whether that of the theologian or philologist, they’ll share the same soggy delta—before being poured into the maw of that eternal glutton, the Thought-Æther Ocean, its true source.

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It's been a few days since I started this blog and after making two extremely dissimilar posts to begin things, I began to feel guilty that I should have opened with some greeting and/or statement of intent. But now it's too late for that, so I hope any potential readers are capable of accepting that the content of this blog will be as it will be. You wouldn't challenge the Ocean to a duel would you? Muhfuckahs get drowned-dead.

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Thinking about thought (as I'm prone to do when doing little else), I was reminded of a video my friend Wythe linked to over at the Culture Project. In it, Professor Dan Dennett does his damnedest to remind us that, much like ants, there's a whole fuckton of human beings out there, and as a consequence of that fact we can't all be special, especially not in the way our minds work. The video is perhaps too brief to wholeheartedly dig into that vulgar proposition, but the good Doktor is an engaging and amiable fellow (lowering our guard with his jolly beard and bald pate) who, through the use of optical illusions, proves that since we all get fooled we are all not special.

His thèse dramatique is not something that humanity can easily be convinced of, as Doc Dennett observes through many dinner conversations, but even if you find yourself scoffing at the information presented I recommend watching it through to the end just so that you can test yourself at the "What's Wrong with the Picture?" Game. The website that hosts this video also has some other talks of his, including one on the dangers of memes, and a bevy of other excellent scientific resources. Always good for a wandering through the mist.

The discussed speech can be found here: "Can we know our own minds?"

I also like this one: "Apes that write, start fires, and play Pac-Man"

I'd befriend a bonobo.