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nded gods the free for all around the sacred chalice is like a burlesque while all the evidence suggests that spielberg wants it to be not only dramatic but symbolic and edifying as well whoever wants to act like an angel acts like a beast one wonders what compels spielberg to want to act like an angel when nothing is forcing him it is not only that he believes in the permanence and therefore the bankability of the archetypes he is manipulating but also that he is trying in good faith to go beyond pure entertainment by rooting his popular art in a noble prestigious tradition this is the ambition which made him construct an homage to serials a humble and popular genre if ever there was one around a biblical artifact charged with mystic mythical connotations the ark of the covenant and then pushed him a few years later to enrich it in indiana jones and the last crusade with the quest for the grail the archetypal model for every quest produced by the western imagination let us add that when he is not acting the angel he tends to be the beast in another way the bestial compulsion is given free reign in indiana jones and the temple of doom deprived of any religiosity and dominated by a perverse delight for refined tortures and other sadistic cruelties in the staging is the angelicness a safeguard against the excesses of spielberg s id some were surprised by the revelation of a hidden side to a filmmaker they had believed to be disneyian but a film like poltergeist from two years before written produced and more or less directed by spielberg through a middle man tobe hooper should have alerted them poltergeist is the negative and the negation of e t its dark evil satanic version the point of departure is exactly the same an average suburban american family the only difference the father is present the mother nevertheless is the solid strong element she saves her daughter presented humorously finds itself confronted with foreign forces but this time the extraterrestrials are entirely evil they belong to a beyond that is no longer spatial the distant galaxies of the visitors in close encounters of the third kind and e t but psychic and particularly suspect because it escapes all the physical laws of our world the bastion of this universe of vengeful spirits its trojan horse is in the heart of the victims living room it is the television set through which they intrude on the family s everyday life disrupt it and kidnap one of them the most familiar object in the modern living room this electronic marvel that inexhaustibly dispenses distractions and information therefore becomes the vehicle of the forces of evil and a nightmarish experience likewise the childhood terrors that fill the film which spielberg admits are personal memories are rooted in the most banal reality but transfigured by his imagination the child s bedroom becomes a laboratory for monsters like young steven making electric ghosts to hide in his closet and scare his sisters however the filmmaker concretizes these imaginary fears the tree whose silhouette is threatening in the night and whose branches look like arms ready come through the window to grab the child a memory of the trees in the forest in snow white a film that terrified young steven ends up being revealed as a supernatural and evil force brought to life by a destructive physical power every familiar element of everyday life is likewise exploited and transformed into a potential or very real threat what we call reality or normality is an illusory construction built on the shifting sands of irrationality the way the freeleng s house is built on an ancient cemetery haunted by the lost souls buried in it the first two thirds of poltergeist constitute one of the peaks of spielberg s work culminating in the superb invention of a rope thrown into the fourth dimension an umbilical cord that helps the mother bring back to the world her daughter who has been kidnapped by the spirits the placenta covering the child reinforcing the re birth imagery after this false return to normality the film sinks into a series of horror and grand guignolesque scenes that only seem spielbergian for their incoherence and gratuity although it would be naive and not very logical to attribute responsibility for them only to tobe hooper who is only following an undoubtedly very detailed storyboard provided by the producer screenwriter it is hard to doubt that spielberg wanted this horrifying bric a brac partially for its commercial potential but also because it corresponds to a very clear taste in his work for unpleasant and indeed repulsive images this perverse infantile taste already present in jaws the contents of the shark s stomach that cause richard dreyfuss to faint is also found in indiana jones the snakes in raiders used again in lost crusade the rat infested tunnel in crusade the chirping of insects in temple of doom and in the same film the monstrous menu in the extraordinary meal scene live serpents coming out of an enormous gutted snake stuffed beetles a soup filled with real eyes brain served in the scooped out skulls of monkeys the excess and gratuitousness of this kind of scene is surprising and shocking but they are only the manifestation of one of the less appetizing aspects of the childhood spirit spielberg is addressing a pre adolescent clientele that delights in this kind of joke spielberg is not a man to be content with a popular and commercial triumph even one without precedents looking to modify his trademark image and prove he could do more than super serials and juvenile epics with special effects he announced plans to direct a serious adult film these are his own terms or in any case those attributed to him a film with real characters where he would tell a story through the performances but just as soon as it was chased away spielberg s true self came galloping back the result the color purple is a monument of redundant vulgarity two years later came empire of the sun far superior sometimes even admirable but manifesting the same incomprehension or is it simply a refusal of the demands of its subject in both films spielberg takes on an intensely dramatic theme a story with occasionally unbearable aspects and treats them like a musical comedy a music video or an ad for a luxury product as the horror of the situations increases his cinematic treatment puts them at a distance by making them beautiful celie s tribulations in the color purple accumulate and surpass those of all the heroines in ponson du terrail style melodramas and almost make those of justine de sade s heroines look like mere trifles their very excess and the flamboyant style in which they are staged however quickly drain them of any authenticity jim graham the young hero in empire of the sun who by the end of the film reaches approximately celie s age 14 years old at the beginning of purple spends four years in a japanese concentration camp with other british and american soldiers but in spite of the terrible living conditions in the camps he seems to get through the test as in a dream in a state of permanent exaltation lumping him together with the protagonist in john boorman s hope and glory transformed by a childish or pre adolescent way of seeing the horrors of war become a marvelous experience but this approach totally convincing in boorman s film becomes hard to accept in the context of empire where the prisoners are literally dying of hunger are savagely beaten and where every day is a constant struggle for survival robert benayoung the only unconditional admirer unrestrained in his own words of spielberg among serious critics in france considers both films masters theses on life lessons rivaling mark donskoy and king vidor positif no 343 if he means professional mastery we can only approve the description spielberg s virtuosity and his technical control are impressive the weaknesses for which he is criticized are not clumsiness everything is intentional as for the lessons we are more skeptical celie and jim s adventures are such extreme cases and spielberg s approach disdains believability to such an extent his vision of reality which is in fact a kind of phantasmagorical hyper reality consists of simultaneously stylizing and magnifying its characteristics that the force of his characters personalities and their ability to survive lose any exemplary power it s a bit as if comic strip super heroes entered a naturalistic drama celie s transformation of albert s kitchen for example is so much like a before after sequence in a commercial that it provokes laughter it is almost a gag intended for a cartoon more than admiration in empire the entire economy of the camp and a good part of its life seem to be organized around the bartering activities of a twelve year old boy for us to believe this spielberg would need to demonstrate how it functions but such attention to practical details and the reality of things would contradict his heroic and mythologizing vein the more the film progresses the clearer it becomes that the kid s astounding socio economic success is a gift we must accept without discussion the old popular expression it s just a movie seems to have been made for spielberg especially these two films that aspire to humanism we never for a second forget that we are in the cinema this artificiality is actually part of their charm which is real especially for empire rendering a reality historical ethnic social about which he has no direct knowledge the exoticism of alice walker and j g ballard s novels is what must have attracted him spielberg imposes his cinephile filter pauline kael describes purple as a remake of song of the south by visconti according to her spielberg sees 1909 georgia the way a european filmmaker would we might add that such jubilatory sequences are less evocative of donskoy or vidor than the sam wood of the end of a day at the races empire of the sun is spielberg s most ambitious film and undoubtedly his most successful with close encounters he once again confirms his talent and his limits the latter so directly linked to the former that it would feel in vain to reprimand him we remain stunned by the size of the production the brilliance of the direction and the way in which the one sings the others praises other films have probably used an equally large number of extras but very few have so productively showcased them some crowd shots filmed with a crane there are countless crane shots in this film and the camera is rarely static make the famous shot of the atlanta train station in gone with the wind look petty and insubstantial this reference is not accidental the selznick quality we noted at the beginning of this text manifests itself again in the mix of vastness unrealism and a flamboyance sometimes at the limits of good taste that characterize empire spielberg even puts a giant poster for gone with the wind in a street scene at the beginning of the film the first part the sequences in shanghai busy very active constantly visually inventive creates a euphoria comparable to certain moments in close encounters for about the first hour the film is so impressive that we wonder how spielberg will maintain his distance the film is 145 minutes long and in fact empire begins to lose steam and disintegrate in the second half each sequence is enormously finessed but remains isolated as if it was conceived for itself alone with no relationship to the general structure the overall rhythm as in indiana jones the film becomes a series of spectacular set pieces that hide or extremely schematize what is exciting about the subject the realities of camp life the relationships of the prisoners among themselves and with the japanese the problems of survival the sequences follow each other without revealing any connection between them therefore we notice the symbolism of jim s passages back and forth between the british section and the american section of the camp but we have trouble understanding what motivates them this incoherence is all the more regrettable since the organization of the script hints at a real concern for the construction and the composition in the musical sense of the word certain visual themes like the juxtaposition of toy planes and real planes are repeated and modulated over the course of the film this concern can also be found in the music itself the welsh song jim sings in church at the beginning of the film is superimposed over a japanese military song at the end aside from a few ideas like these john williams music remains abominable redundant emphatic and underlining in broad strokes every emotion in the worst hollywood tradition spielberg explains with candid frankness his predilection for williams i know how to bring a tear to the viewer s eye but he knows how to make them flow interview in rolling stone no 459 two years before empire in empire it often feels like the purpose of the music is less to bring tears to our eyes there is hardly a moment to be truly moved in such an overly grandiose film than to inject a vaguely mystic solemnity to images in which spielberg seems to lack confidence religiosity is more present than ever in a context where it would not seem to have much place an atheist he defines himself this way preoccupied with god early in the film jim dreams of him as a tennis player and imagines him at the end in an apocalyptic photo whose flash is the explosion in hiroshima there s an impression that spielberg is looking to make his film deeper more significant while he already had a story with exceptional gravity and amplitude at his disposal which could have done without such supplements if it had only been treated more directly religiosity is only one of the familiar spielberg characteristics we find in empire it is striking that a film that wants to be so different from the earlier ones resembles them so deeply its spielberg s natural way the sign that he is an auteur one example among hundreds when the prisoners evacuated from the camp arrive in an immense stadium where the luxury furniture of their previous homes is stored their limos pianos harps everything perfectly conserved after four years in the open air we can recognize his taste for bric a brac for the surreal juxtaposition at the end of raiders which is citing the ending of citizen kane or the scenes in close encounters where airplanes from thirty years before are found in the desert or in the special edition a cruise ship buried in the sand this scene makes no sense plays no role in relation to the rest of the action serves no purpose other than to allow the director to please himself like so many other scenes in his films that are equally gratuitous and playful like the boat found in the sand or the thousands of hands raised in unison in response to françois truffaut s question in the same film such moments often please us and we would grudgingly stay away from our pleasure but spielberg seems not to want...