Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE filled me with joy. It’s an affirmation of life and a reminder that film is still an artform. When so many films today seem to be done by people who do not even understand the basics of the filmic language, here is a film that reminds us how elegant and transformative it can be when spoken so fluently. Malick communicates so much in a single image where some films would only dare to convey something so deep in their entirety. Malick isn’t shy to take on the big issues and here he takes on the biggest issue of all – life. And I’m talking about life on a cosmic level.

Malick begins his film about life with the revelation of a death. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt, 12 MONKEYS) and Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain, THE DEBT) receive word that their son has died. They struggle with the news and go through the stages of grief as everyone does. Malick intercuts this with how the death has affected their oldest son Jack (Sean Penn, DEAD MAN WALKING), who is now a successful businessman, but is lost in his life.

In this opening meditation on grief, Malick keeps the audience questioning the who, what, where and when of events. It’s an unsettling feeling that he creates. The characters are all contemplating the meaning of their lives. Jack is featured in a metaphorical dreamscape wondering through the desert searching for purpose. Malick is laying the groundwork on how the death makes his characters feel. In context with what comes next, he is giving the context for life. Life is valuable because it ends and we never know when that will happen.

Then Malick takes the viewer back to the beginning of life on Earth. In an extended sequence of gorgeous visual effects, he starts with the Big Bang, travels from single cell organisms to the dawn of dinosaurs. It’s like watching a prehistoric version of the experimental documentary KOYAANISQATSI. Life and death touch this sequence hand in hand. It’s a profound statement on how one human death in the grander scheme of the universe is a rather mundane event. How many lives human or otherwise have lived and died in the history of the universe to be forgotten by time? Immortality in the physical plane certainly does not exist.

Next Malick brings us back to the O’Briens. It’s now the 1950s. Jack, played by Hunter McCracken, is born. As an infant he takes in the world around him, trying to make sense of it. Later comes brother R.L. (Laramie Eppler). He shows conflicted emotions to this little person taking away the attention of his parents. But as they grow, they become the best of friends along with their younger brother Steve (Tye Sheridan). Malick spends a great deal of time watching them at play, experiencing the simple joy of life.

But as Jack gets older, he is pushed and pulled between the opposite natures of his father and mother. His father is of nature, a man of the world who tells his sons that they can’t be too good or they will never get ahead in life. He is not a completely uncaring father, but he is a taskmaster who takes his own resentments toward being an unimportant man out on his family. He is never content. Jack’s mother is led by grace. She rises above Earthy desires and focuses on the happiness of her family and the things she does have. As Jack reaches puberty, the more he becomes like his father as he lashes out at a world he finds unfair. He watches in wonderment and a bit of jealousy as R.L. develops more like his kind mother.

Malick casts unknowns as the children in order to capture the true innocence of youth. The three O’Brien brothers feel like real brothers because Malick allows them to act like kids and just happens to be filming it. They aren’t burdened by dialogue, which is sparse throughout. For his trained actors, he received equally natural performances. Pitt brings the correct complexity to Mr. O’Brien. He is an imposing figure in his children’s lives, but we know he loves them. This duality makes his harsh behavior all the more off putting and real. Chastain has few lines, but embodies grace. She speaks volumes with her eyes and body. Watch how her character uses profound nonverbal communication with her children. A simple touch of the hand says she loves them, wants to console them and sometimes most importantly understands them. Penn’s appearance is more like a cameo, but his natural screen presence adds the right weight to the elder Jack’s search for meaning.

There is a spiritual element that runs under the film. The name of God is invoked, but this isn’t some specific religious statement. I can’t say it better than Roger Ebert when he wrote that it is a prayer. If there is a higher power out there, Malick is lifting this film out there as a thank you for life. In bringing attention to the insignificance of one life on the grandest of scale, Malick only highlights the importance of the simple daily joys of life. Loving is the only thing worth striving for.

Malick brings forth his ideas both grand and small through a collision of gorgeously composed images. If you’ve ever seen a Malick film before, you know what I mean. Working again with his NEW WORLD cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, they create photography that could be slipped into any art photography book. As I said earlier, the images convey an incredible amount of information.

One that particularly struck me was one when Jack is a small boy. His concerned father scoops him up and hands him off to his mother who shields him from something obscured in the background. Is a man having a seizure on the ground? It’s never explained. How many memories do we have from childhood that stick with us that we never know the context of what really happened because we couldn’t fully understand them at the time? Malick conveys this complex truth in a single shot. It works only because of its composition, timing, and direction synching together perfectly. This is film at its basic brilliance. Images conveying a story and larger meaning in context with the entire progression of imagery. So many films today only have images of people telling us the story and meaning. If it weren’t for watching the pretty people or pointless action, they could work as radio dramas.

This film is not conventional. The first half is experimental in the way it bucks conventional storytelling structure and conventions. It will confound many. Its recent Palme d’Or win at Cannes surprised many, because it left viewers scratching their heads. But what I think the Cannes’ jury saw was what I say – a work of art meant to be viewed many, many times to truly grasp everything it has to say. The only mainstream film to compare it to in scale, artistry and ambition would be 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. No other major studio (not even their art house brand) will release a more artistic film this year. It’s very conceivable they won’t release a better one either.

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Sensual is not a word often thought of when one thinks of a Disney animated film. But this Disney short flows with it. But this isn’t just any Disney short, it originated as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. A seemingly unlikely pair of artists to work together. Disney wanted to experiment with the animation form and Dali saw animation as a perfect way to explore surrealism on film. The project started in the 1940s with Dali drawing dozens of images, but the film never came to be. Following the production of FANTASIA/2000, Roy E. Disney championed its completion using original storyboards and journals.

Like a Dali painting, the film is a dance through an absurd dreamscape. The film begins with a beautiful naked woman walking across the desert. Naked woman in a Disney film?! Gasp! Trust me, the real naughty bits are unseen. The images are driven by an original 1940s recording from Mexican composer Armando Dominguez and singer Dora Luz, which gives the blend of 2D and CG animation another level of surrealism. The animation style does so as well. The strobe-like movement of the woman is like watching flashes from a dream.

While there is a loose story of Chronos’ doomed love affair with a mortal woman, the film is best described in its visuals. Classic Dali imagery abounds where shapes and figures make up larger pictures. A dancer’s body makes up the face of a bearded statue and then the mouth and space between stretched faces. That dancer’s head turns into a dried dandelion. Homage to UN CHIEN ANDALOU is paid with ants crawling from a hole in a hand. Those ants turn into men on bicycles with bread on their heads.

This experimental film will bring different meaning to each viewer like interpreting a dream or a painting. As it was referred to in FANTASIA/2000 as a FANTASIA sequel idea that never came to be, the film has “baseball as a metaphor for life” in there too.

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If you’ve ever seen a Guy Maddin film than you remember his style. If you don’t remember his style than you’re lying and have never seen a Guy Maddin film. For those who haven’t seen his work he creates modern silent films with all their excesses and devices. More so than THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (a very funny film) and DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN’S DIARY (a blood-sucking ballet), this film delves deep inside the filmmaker’s own Id.

The main character is named Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs). At the start of the film, he heads back to his family orphanage inside a lighthouse to give it two fresh coats of paint. He wants to make it nice for his mother (Gretchen Krich, HENRY FOOL) who has had a pull over him ever since he was a boy (Sullivan Brown). As a youngster, he and his older sister (Maya Lawson) lived among the orphans, notably Savage Tom (Andrew Loviska), who gives all the younger kids lessens in primal urges. Guy and Sis’ mother kept tabs on them with a strange telescope device that could find anyone you loved no matter where they were. This allows her to keep tabs on her blossoming daughter. Guy was a captive witness to the sexual hysteria his mother wields toward his teenage sister.

Mystery and romance bloom when the teen detectives the Lightbulb Kids show up to investigate the strange holes in the back of the necks of orphans. The Lightbulb Kids are a brother and sister team and Wendy (Katherine E. Scharhon) is the first to arrive on the island. Guy quickly develops a crush on the junior sleuth. She however has eyes for Sis and in an effort to woe the sexually curious girl she disguises herself as her brother Chance by tucking her hair under a hat.

In the spirit of grand guignol, the film has a dark shadowy feel throughout. Savage Tom seems like a boy brought in from THE LORD OF THE FLIES. The kids’ father (Todd Moore) is a mysterious scientist whose face is never seen. At times, their mother makes Mommy Dearest look like June Cleaver.

Within this stew of German expressionism and classic melodrama, Maddin the filmmaker is always true to real emotions. He conjures up the strange compulsion and repulsion children feel for the parents. Their mother feeds on them, which creates all their emotional scars. But she is still their mother; the only one they will ever have. In her own twisted way, she does love them.

With no dialogue, the story is told via title cards and voice-over from Isabella Rossellini, the perfect choice for this kind of oft kilter sexuality tale. Think BLUE VELVET crossed with GREEN PORNO, which placed actors in bug suits to dramatize the mating habits of garden creatures. In the hands of a less skilled filmmaker, this approach would be distancing. But Maddin doesn’t use these devices to tell the audience the story, only build onto it. The titles and voice over are filled with wit and humor.

As I’ve said in reviews of other complex cinema, this is 400-level material. The more one understands the era in cinema Maddin is taking inspiration from the more they will appreciate what he is doing. His use of silent film conventions is less satirical than some of his other films, but more poetic. The style allows him to use bold and grand metaphor without making the film seem ridiculous. He is a master of the absurd. And yet every detail seems cultivated from the real life experiences. The exaggeration in style and drama focuses the audience on his message and gets to the heart of the character’s ordeals. He tells his story through a language that true film fans speak. Knowing the code makes for a fuller experience because one knows the detail he is attempting.

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Like Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, Dalton Trumbo’s JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN shares a place in cinema history as the only film directed by an artist known for other endeavors. Trumbo received two Oscars for screenwriting for THE BRAVE ONE and ROMAN HOLIDAY while he was blacklisted. His exile from the credits of cinema ended when producer and star Kirk Douglas gave him a credit on SPARTACUS. Eleven years after that he adapted his own novel with uncredited help from Luis Buñuel into this cult classic. Many will only know the film from its inclusion in Metallica’s first video ONE. For years, it was unavailable outside of the festival and revival house circuit. It is a chilling antiwar film that is disturbing like a great horror film. The powerful imagery will not leave your mind soon after.

Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW) is a young man shipped off to World War I. During a pointless mission, his body is ripped apart by a bomb. He looses all four limbs, his eyes, nose and ears. The only sense that remains is touch. He’s locked in a living nightmare where he is uncertain of day and night and time. He talks with Jesus (Donald Sutherland, SLEUTH), who can’t give him comfort for his condition. Trapped in between dream and reality, he has memories… or are they hallucinations… of his father (Jason Robards, MAGNOLIA), who values his special fishing rod over anything else in the world, because it’s the only thing that makes him special. A nurse (Diane Varsi, PEYTON PLACE) takes pity on him, giving him crucial links to reality.

Trumbo uses black & white film to represent the real world, while Joe’s dreams take place in color. We never see Joe’s injuries. He is always covered in sheets and a mask. We hear Joe’s thoughts in voiceover and his slow discovery and understanding of the extent of his injuries is more frightening than if we saw them firsthand. The surreal quality of Joe’s dreams isn’t overplayed. The strange is played as normal and the normal is presented slightly askew. This makes Joe’s claustrophobic and hopeless reality seem all the more unnerving.

In the film, Trumbo uses Joe’s condition to critique war and existence. How do you know you are awake if you don’t have eyes to open or a mouth to scream or ears to hear others with? If you can’t participate in the world, is life worth living? Trumbo touches on great ironies as well. Generals send young men out to kill and be killed, but when they are injured they try every measure to keep them alive. In his new freakish condition, Joe is kept in a utility closet with closed shutters, because the military wants to keep him breathing, but don’t want anyone to see the product of their profession. He’d really be bad for recruiting.

Trumbo claimed that the film wasn’t antiwar, but simply an examination of Joe’s life after his injuries. But it would be foolish not deny the message of that story. The injured are often the forgotten of wars. Governments often take the lives of young men, who are still alive, but don’t give back in equal return. If you think this is a thing of the past, just ask a soldier from Walter Reed or one suffering from life altering injuries if they’ve received more than what they gave. Is life worth living if you’re 20 and can’t ever earn a living? That lies at the core of the film’s theme. Trumbo hauntingly brings this through. SOS will never be the same. Like the universal sign of distress, this film is also a call for help.

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This short is featured on the Animation Show Vol. 3 DVD.

Guilherme Marcondes’ experimental electronica-infused animated short mixes 2D computer animation with bunraku-style puppetry. From an amusement park on the edge of Sao Paulo, Brazil, a giant tiger emerges, controlled clearly by three shadowed puppeteers. As the striped beast stomps through the streets he creates a magical kind of chaos, transforming the humans into animals and spreading electrified vines and flowers across the modern landscape.

This ode to returning to nature has some fun with the transformations of its mindless humans. An office worker snaps into a slug. A family horking down dinner morphs into monkeys. A group of clubbers sprout feathers, becoming squawking toucans. Other inhabitants of the city are transformed as well. Cars snarled in traffic turn to slugs and a swipe with its paw at a helicopter bursts forth a flurry of birds. Marcondes mixes styles well, utilizing the tiger puppet — an older storytelling tool — as the transforming impetus in the modern world, which is animated through more high-tech means. Inspired by a poem from William Blake, the power of the beast is carried over into the short. While Blake wonders what kind of God would create the fearsome tiger, Marcondes’ film wonders what force would allow the creation of urban sprawl.

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Tony Comley’s ABIGAIL won a special distinction award at the Annecy Animation Festival, a pretty nice feat for a student film. It begins with an airplane falling from the sky with its engines on fire. The passengers in coach sing cheerily “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” as they plummet to their deaths. A man longing for a woman in a photograph leaves the chaos in coach for the more refined first class, where things really get weird.

The nightmarish tale mixes tones in an off-putting way. Haunting moments are followed by jokes. Clues to the meaning are casually littered about, but as the film progresses they seem more and more random. Comley gives us little to decipher his code, leaving us to fill in the blanks for ourselves. This isn’t intrinsically bad, but without hints the viewer gets to the point where they get lost as the story twists and turns. As for the animation, the rotoscope-style, similar to WAKING LIFE and A SCANNER DARKLY, is a bit stilted.

With a lot of experimental animation, one takes what they bring in. The more obscure the references, especially when no overall theme is clear, the smaller the audience becomes. Comley says the film is about how we deal with the things we cannot control. Using that idea, which isn’t clear in the film, gives the film a discernable through line, but even that theme breaks down in cynical personal quirks.

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The easiest way to anger the non-adventurous movie watcher is not to show them something shocking, but to show them experimental animation. They become belligerent with what seems to be nonsense and you can watch as the anger consumes them when someone tries to explain the meaning. This could be for many reasons, which I will get to later.

So why do I bring this universal statement up in the discussion of Max Hattler’s experimental short COLLISION? Because the film is a great example of the barrier between those who like experimental film and those who hate it. Hattler’s explosion of bright colors and shapes is timed to a firework-like soundtrack. His use of color and symbols make it fairly easy to read his meaning. They represent the various flags of the world as they mix and meld and explode into a celebration of multiculturalism. The message comes off fairly obvious… at least for me. Someone else might just see a kaleidoscope of pointlessness.

So it seems intimidation is the barrier that experimental film presents. Do you get it or do you not? Some viewers will find meaning in everything and others will not. Some viewers will hold their own personal profound meaning up as a pretentious badge of honor. Some will reject all notions of meaning as a stand against the artsy and the fartsy. Others will invent meaning just so they don’t look like they didn’t get it. Who wants to watch a film that makes them feel stupid? This is why critiquing experimental film is so difficult. One person’s scribble is another person’s Jackson Pollock. So taste plays a huge part in experiencing experimental works. So I take two approaches to judging experimental films — what did I take from it, and what did the filmmaker intend and did they convey that meaning on screen. The latter is not always available, so you must trust your own judgment.

For Hattler’s COLLISION my personal take and his intention (which I discovered in an interview with him) were one in the same. In the realm of experimental animation, his piece is fairly easy to decipher, because if you recognize his use of common symbols in both his visuals and music you are easily lead to his point. Did it blow me away? No. It presented its idea in a skillful and engaging way, but didn’t make me think of the subject in a new light. So I liked it, but didn’t love it. Like all film, some experimental films are more difficult than others. Some have no grand meaning, because they’re more like dance than theater. A study in movement. Some have no meaning because the filmmaker has made them so obscure that no one can decipher the code. Some have no meaning, because they have no meaning. So in the end, COLLISION is no different than a feature film like BABEL, only speaks a different filmic language in expressing the same ideas.

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Bob Dylan is an enigma, and that is exactly what one could call Todd Haynes’ film that contemplates the seemingly contradictory sides of the famed singer’s personality. Haynes has always been a filmmaker who takes risks from his unsettling SAFE to his pseudo-Bowie biopic VELVET GOLDMINE to his Douglas Sirk, 1950s melodrama-like FAR FROM HEAVEN. Now he contemplates the many aspects of Dylan, leaving the audience thinking (maybe even confused).

Six difference actors play six different Dylan-like characters. The various stories are woven together and a few even intersect. We begin with an 11-year-old African-American boy hitching a ride on a train calling himself Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin, TV’s LACKAWANNA BLUES). He’s traveling the country playing ’40s blues and acting like it isn’t 1959, avoiding the social turmoil of the times. Next we meet 19-year-old poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw, PERFUME) cagily avoiding definition during an interview. In a documentary-like segment, we learn about the career of influential folk singer Jack Rollins (Christian Bale, BATMAN BEGINS), who hasn’t done an interview in years since be converted to Christianity. Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) is a womanizing actor who became famous playing Jack Rollins. We see him during two periods in his life — meeting abstract artist Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP) and then watching as their marriage falls apart as Vietnam ends. Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett, ELIZABETH) is an arrogant star that has turned his back on folk music and plugged in. During a tour in London with The Beatles, he challenges reporter Keenan Jones (Bruce Greenwood, CAPOTE) on his lack of caring about “finger-pointing” songs. Finally, in an almost dreamlike sequence, Billy the Kid (Richard Gere, CHICAGO) wonders the countryside trying to find freedom.

I’M NOT THERE is a challenging film. One’s knowledge of Dylan going in will certainly increase one’s understanding and enjoyment. If you’re not a Dylan fan, prerequisites should be the documentaries DON’T LOOK BACK and NO DIRECTION HOME. As a Dylan fan, I found myself enthralled with the nuance and collection of moments from the singer’s legacy. Haynes skillfully weaves in real Dylan songs and versions done by the actors to highlight key moments in Dylan’s musical and personal life. A highlight for me was Richie Havens’ rendition of “Tombstone Blues.”

The Heath Ledger/Charlotte Gainsbourg segments are the film’s heart, peeking into the real emotional life of an often emotionally guarded man. Woody/Dylan and early moments with Rollins/Dylan look into the social awakening of the artist, while the Billy the Kid/Dylan and born-again Rollins/Dylan show us an artist running from his fame, wanting to be freed from the burden and find redemption for his past sins. Aged folk singer Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore, FAR FROM HEAVEN) talks about how Rollins/Dylan let down the movement, which is reminiscent of Joan Baez.

Deserving her Oscar nomination, Blanchett captures the pretentiousness and arrogance of the Dylan we know from DON’T LOOK BACK. Blanchett’s character has come to believe the label of genius, but coolly rejects it when asked. The presence of famed wrestler Gorgeous George in the film makes one think that this Quinn/Dylan likes to play the villain. However, even Quinn/Dylan’s shield of indifference falls when he meets poet Allen Ginsberg (David Cross, GHOST WORLD). Quinn/Dylan is drunk on his own fame, intrigued by the Edie Sedgwick-like model Coco Rivington (Michelle Williams, THE STATION AGENT) and dipping into drugs when the busy schedule gets too much. Blanchett’s rendition of “The Ballad of Thin Man” is not great musically, but illustrates the multi-layered meaning of the song when it comes to the privileged elite and how the tune was an inspiration to the Black Panthers.

The more I think about this film; the more I want to watch it again to uncover and decipher its many mysteries. This is the kind of heady film that gets labeled “a film major’s film,” leaving the average filmgoer scratching their heads. Those looking for easy or mindless entertainment should not sign up — this is a 300-level class in film and/or Dylan appreciation. I say this not to sound like Quinn/Dylan, but only to prepare the less daring film viewer that they shouldn’t expect convention here. But was Bob Dylan ever conventional? For someone who watches a great deal of films and looks for something different, this film delivers a passionate performance and excites with invention. It’s a fascinating portrait of a man who could be a completely different person on any given day and does justice to that complexity.

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Life and art intersect and blend and overlap and intrude in on each other in Ingmar Bergman’s challenging masterpiece, PERSONA. This is film as art. Like all artforms, there are pieces that are more accessible than others. It takes a fuller grasp of the artform and sometimes the artist to understand the complete scope of their work. A novice, or even causal, reader doesn’t start with Proust, they will start with easier classics from the likes of Twain. The same can be said about film. CITIZEN KANE’s accepted place as “the best movie ever made” has as much to do with its accessibility as it does its innovation and quality. From its experimental opening to its elusive ending, this film is what it is on the surface and it’s much more at the same time.

Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann, SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE) is a famed stage actor, who has stopped speaking. She has been profoundly struck by the fact that her entire life from her profession to her personal life is based on artifice. So in an effort to find some truth, she stops all verbal communication. A young nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson, THE SEVENTH SEAL) is assigned to care for the actress. At first she wonders if she is too young to handle such a strong willed woman, but once the two women travel to a seaside vacation home together, they begin to draw closer. Elisabet continues to not speak, only listening to the increasingly frank confessions of Alma, who tells the older woman of a brief sexual encounter that was exhilarating, but resulted in a great deal of regret. Soon the silence becomes too much for Alma, who cannot handle the quiet judgment of Elisabet. The battle of wills will break down and blur their identities and cross the line between reality and fantasy.

A key to understanding what it all means is the opening montage of images from film and religion. Bergman is giving the audience a key for themes he has tackled his whole career, which include the silence of God, life and death and the psychoanalytical breakdown of the personality. In a very Brechtian fashion, Bergman reminds us that we are watching a film. The action of the plot works on several levels with each level dealing with a different theme. German playwright Bertolt Brecht felt theater should be less about trying to recreate life, and more of a comment and debate on life. Bergman does the same in PERSONA, reminding us that this is a film — at one point letting the film break and melt away.

However, this does not mean the film is void of an emotional element. In a very human and engaging way, Bergman questions the cruelty of a silent God. How can He sit back and judge us without giving us clear guidance? Why does He not speak in the wake of epic tragedies? Alma dreams and imagines Elisabet advising her and comforting her, but is it real or the fantasy of someone who wants to believe? Alma’s growing frustration with the grinning silent Elisabet is tangible, breathing vitality into the grander theme.

As for the psychoanalytical view of the film, Bergman looks at how all humans put on masks and play roles depending on where they are and whom they are with. Alma plays the role of the good nurse, following in her mother’s footsteps. She’s going to play the good role of a dedicated wife even though her only passionate interchange with her fiancée was right after her outdoor orgy. When Alma tells Elisabet about the sexual encounter, it’s like a patient confessing to their psychiatrist or a practitioner confessing to a priest. In an ironic twist, the patient Elisabet becomes the analyst and the nurse becomes the patient, transferring her feelings of guilt and rage onto the silent observer.

As Alma tries to break the willful Elisabet, the actress is trying to break down the nurse. Elisabet wants to forcefully remove the masks that Alma wears whether the younger woman wants them removed or not. In another touch reminding us that this is a piece of art, Elisabet the actress like a vampire feeds off the life and personality of others. Artists steal aspects from others lives and expose them to the world. If Bergman’s portrayal of God seems harsh, his view of the artistic process isn’t watered down either. However, a truly bold artist exposes the ugliness of their own life and Bergman does so here. The opening montage again refers to his past work, so he’s telling the audience that this is him — his confessional, his thoughts, his beliefs. In the signature shot of the film, half of Ullmann’s face is blended seamlessly with Andersson’s face. They appear as one woman. There are many readings of the shot. The simplest is that the characters personalities have completely meshed and that they are now the same, a blending of the people they were when they first met. But it can also stand for the blurring of the line between art and life. We are sometimes actors in the real world and sometimes real life can be captured in art.

All of what I have said has been gleaned from carefully thinking about the film and reading others thoughts. I’m sure more will be revealed upon further viewings. I don’t say this to prove my “oh, so impressive” film knowledge — I say this because if you go into this film you must be prepared to be challenged. It is a complex film with layers of subtext. But it also can be viewed as a simple story about two women playing mental games against each other to see you screams first. With its haunting music and black & white cinematography, PERSONA captivates the viewer with a gripping uneasiness. In some ways, the film is a psychological horror film.

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The star rating system really fails when it comes to reviewing a film like this one. A person’s own personal beliefs on the subject of drugs come into play when watching and appreciating (or not appreciating which ever the case may be) what the film is trying to do. I guess the best place to start is to present what apparently the filmmakers were setting out to do. They wanted to make an objective look at one man’s trip on LSD.

Directed by Roger Corman (THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH) and written by Jack Nicholson, the film stars Peter Fonda (EASY RIDER) as Paul Groves, a commercial director who is getting a divorce from his wife Sally (Susan Strasberg, PICNIC). Paul wants to experience an enlightening trip on LSD, so he enlists his friend John (Bruce Dern, DIGGSTOWN) to watch over him while he’s tripping. They go to a lavish hippie hangout in the Hollywood Hills where they get the LSD from Max (Dennis Hopper, RIVER’S EDGE).

So you may be thinking that the film is just pro-drug hippie propaganda, which is not entirely true. Paul’s trip isn’t completely positive and the film does present some of the negative results of LSD, if only briefly. Could this film encourage someone to take drugs? Yes. Just like a violent film can influence a violent person to copy that film’s violence. Films don’t make people do anything; they can only inspire the already curious or the naïve to take an action they most likely would have done eventually. But that’s why you don’t let your 15-year-old watch this film.

I make this point because for some people anything that could possibly influence someone to do something one deems as wrong is a negative thing to have in the world. I disagree with this argument, but that’s a debate for a different time and place. The only reason I mention it is to illustrate how one’s own personal feelings will play a big part in how they view this film. Someone who already believes that drugs can take a person to a heighten state of consciousness will obviously view this film in a more positive light than a member of MADD would.

So again how does one critique such a film? I say you critique the effectiveness of what was intended. Yet, you can’t rid you own beliefs from judging the material. Additionally, the film’s objectivity also influences our feelings as well. If the film were clearly on one side or the other than it would be much easier to judge, using facts and our beliefs as our guide. So this is all a lead up to stating how I went into looking at the film.

Making a film that tries to capture the experience of taking LSD is not inherently wrong to me. We watch films about things we find wrong all the time. How many murders have we witnesses in a darkened theater? So as long as the film appears to be honest from our point of view than it works. I believe that the hallucinations of an acid trip mean nothing. The drug makes you see and hear things that already lie within yourself. The only meaning that the funky colors one sees possess is the meaning the beholder puts upon them. It’s no different than believing that God is speaking to you by making the image of the Virgin Mary appear on your toasted cheese sandwich.

Therefore, the film works when it presents kaleidoscope like colors and random images. Inherently these sequences hold no meaning outside of the meaning the viewer wants to put on them. This to me is what a trip is really like therefore as a filmic representation it works.

However, watching meaningless images for an hour and a half is, well, meaningless. So is it really worth one’s time? Maybe it would work as a short subject, but not as a feature. Other interesting parts include a laundromat scene where Paul sees images in the falling clothes of the dryer. It’s funny to watch the woman who’s washing her clothes observe the crazy behavior of Paul. It also does a nice job of showing how reality and hallucinations mix during a drug trip. So THE TRIP gets an average score for the parts that work.

However, what really brings down the film is the heavy-handed metaphoric images in the early part. This is the area where the film loses its objectivity by bringing clear meaning to Paul’s hallucinations. Images and memories of his wife would make sense, but the laughably clichéd visions of Paul running on the beach and black clad grim reapers chasing him on black horses are a joke. There is one part that accumulates every on-the-nose image representing death the filmmakers could dig up. When Death from THE SEVENTH SEAL showed up, I couldn’t help but laugh.

So the film just didn’t work for me. It’s not as objective as it sets out to be and when it is objective the inherent meaninglessness of its subject matter makes for a thoroughly pointless experience. It’s not necessarily a bad trip, but it’s certainly not a good one either.

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