The shoo-in for Oscar's BFLF? László Nemes' Hungarian Holocaust rhapsody, SON OF SAUL

The sure-fire equation for the Best Foreign Language Film award: Quality + Holocaust = BFLF. Add some originality and you've got an even more likely bet. László Nemes' new film, SON OF SAUL, certainly touches all three of those bases. As much as I expected to find the film wanting in major regards, I, like so many of our critics (audiences, too, I suspect), found myself quickly under its spell. It was only last year that another of these Holocaust honeys -- Ida -- walked away with the award, and now, here's another that everyone seems to be counting on to win.

Why is Son of Saul so special? Because of the perspective -- quite literally, the visual point-of-view -- taken by the filmmaker (Mr. Nemes is shown at left). From the beginning and for almost all of this 107-minute movie, the camera stays close to the face and figure of its protagonist, Saul -- a member of the Sonderkommando at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, that group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in their machinery of large-scale extermination during World War II.  What makes this perspective so strange yet pointed is that for maybe the first time on film, we see a concentration camp and its workings only marginally, off to the side and not, as it were, the main attraction. Of course, it is, and this is what gives Nemes' film such a strong combination of gravity, irony, and originality.

We see what's going on, all right, and we know exactly what it all means, and it is as horrible as ever, yet perhaps somewhat easier to view when taken, as does our "hero," Saul (an indelible performance from almost-newcomer Géza Röhrig, shown above and below), along with all of us who are watching, as something foregone and impossible to change. We don't focus on the atrocities, but we know very well that they are a constant life-ending, death-embracing presence.

Saul simply does his job without comment or feeling. Until one day everything changes. What happens and why is part of the plot and best left to your own discovery. At the same time that Saul is suddenly busy with his new "project" -- which, by the way, can be taken realistically or symbolically: It works well on both levels -- the Sonderkommando members are plotting something of their own. They know that their lives, though marginally better than the other Jews in the camp, will soon end in death, after which they will be replaced by more of the same.

These two plot strands weave in an out of each other as the movie reaches its climax, which, as does much of the rest of the film, works both realistically and symbolically, offering in its strange way, hope from despair. Or not. It is also possible to dismiss all this, as a few critics have done, as sentimental and utterly unearned.  I disagree:  The hope here is always in sync with the reality of the situation, making for a kind of balance that remains fraught and fierce, in which the best that can be hoped for is terrible indeed.

Caveats? Maybe. The unusual perspective provided by the filmmaker works in a kind of "smartly confusing" manner. Because we're privy to so little and only know parts of the two puzzles at hand, we can't really know specifically how all this might or could work out. This means that we have to accept what we know and go with the flow. We do, yet a few too many coincidences begin to rankle. Certain things seem too easily accomplished and not so believable. Yet because of our limited perspective, we can't be sure, and so we accept it. This is, in its highly circumscribed way, very smart, corner-cutting movie-making.

For all its barely-glimpsed horror and the despicable history we now know all too well, Son of Saul left this viewer in a quiet, thoughtful state: won-dering at and appreciating -- against insurmountable odds -- life and hope. In the end, the movie is about something bigger than our own tiny lives.

From Sony Pictures Classics, Son of Saul opens here in South Florida this Friday, January 29, at the Tower Theater, Miami; Cinema Paradiso, Ft. Lauderdale; Living Room Theaters, and Regal Shadowood 16, Boca Raton; Carmike Muvico Parisian, West Palm Beach; Movies of Delray and Movies of Lake Worth. You can click here to see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters, nationwide.

BRUCE CONNOR: THE ART OF MONTAGE opens two-week run at NYC's Film Forum

Just what is montage? Since even yours truly has been known to use the term incorrectly (at least according to the defini-tions he can now find), let's begin with the explanation found on Wikipedia:  a technique in film editing in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information. It is usually used to suggest the passage of time, rather than to create symbolic meaning as it does in Soviet montage theory. OK: good enough. Applying that definition, I'd say most montage used in mainstream film does indeed suggest time passing
/events happening rather than the creation of symbolic connection.

For mainstream symbolism montage, look to something like the "candidate recruiting" section of Alan Pakula's The Parallax View and especially to art/experimental film practitioners such as Jay Rosenblatt, Gustav Deutsch and Bruce Conner (shown at right), the artist who died in 2008 and whose filmed montages/collages are being given a two-week/two-program retrospective at New York City's Film Forum, starting tomorrow through November 23. The work of men like these three are said to have inspired the quick-cut, fast-paced music videos that pack as many rapid-editing "ideas" as possible into their short time frame. And so they do, but so -- one might ask -- what? Enough of these quick-connection movies, shown one after another, can leave a viewer feeling that he's stumbled into an attention-deficit-disorder film festival.

Watching the two series of Conner's work under the titile of BRUCE CONNER: THE ART OF MONTAGE has something of this effect, due to the filmmaker's love of repetition. There's a lot of it here. The artist's place in the annals of those who told us, early on, about our increasingly crazy consumer culture, is secure, I think -- even if watching the actual work can try one's patience. The still above is from Conner's Report, in which he purposely takes the hugely overused President Kennedy assassination footage and plays with it -- to sometimes interesting effect -- removing sound, using repetition, and then slicing in photos such as the above.

If I had to choose, due to time and/or money constraints, between the two programs, I'd opt for Program A (click and scroll down to see the complete programs for A and B), which contains probably Conner's most famous work (also his first), A Movie, in which the filmmaker strings together newsreels and old-movie clips with other found footage, attaching wildly appropriate music (or maybe it's appropriately inappropriate) to come up with something that veers between an idiot's delight and the shockingly thought-provoking. Among its images is the world's most popular "death" symbol, the mushroom cloud, which the artist would use again (and again) in his later Crossroads (below), which offers A-bomb detonations around the Bikini atoll in such luscious slo-mo, black-and-white photography that I suspect would give even Lucy Walker pleasurable goosebumps.  And yet 36 minutes of these explosions is simply way too many.

If you like naked ladies, you'll find plenty to ogle here -- artistically, of course!  Program A offers something I'd never seen in Marilyn Time Five: Miss Monroe, in her pre-plantinum days, clad in nothing but panties and  lolling around in very suggestive moving images -- all to the sound of her own quite lovely voice singing the Livington/Malneck/Kahn song I'm Through With Love. We literally get Marilyn doing this five times from different angles and in differing repetitions. Via this 13-1/2-minute film, you can see -- in a way that none of her Hollywood studio movies managed to capture quite as well -- why Monroe was the heterosexual male's delight. With her ample body (those breasts -- and way before augmentation came into vogue!), her softness (in appearance she seems to have almost no muscle) and her seemingly infinite pliability, she's a dream come true. In Program A, we also get 60s icon Toni Basil in Breakaway (below), a new kind of "liberated" woman, who, like Marilyn, sings her own song, but with very different results.

In The White Rose (7 minutes, from Program A), actually tells a kind of story: an artist who had been working on one enormous painting for something like 13 years and must finally have it removed from her apartment.  We watch it happen until, finally, the artist sits out on her fire escape surveying the moving company men as they cart her art away.

Most of Conner's work is in black-and-white but as he moved along, he also experimented with color and sepia. Around 50 minutes into Program A, just following the headache-inducing Mea Culpa (above), we see some of this. Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (below) is a welcome, quiet respite from all the freneticism, followed by the Valse Triste, also in sepia with a score by Sibelius, which tracks a lot of comings and goings. Conner's last film Easter Morning (in full color) offers images of leaves, flowers, color and light -- all stop-motion, fast editing, and (for me) not much meaning.

Program B begins with two short films set to modern music: Mongoloid (to DEVO's song) and America Is Waiting, to the song by Eno and Byrne.  Both are only 3-1/2 minutes long, and the latter, for me, offers some of the most interesting and thoughtful image juxtapositions of any of Conner's work (one of its images is shown below). The final fifteen-minute film in this program, Looking for Mushrooms, looks as if the filmmaker has found -- and then ingested -- some. Filled with jerky hand-held camera movements, the film follows the indigenous people of.... Mexico? For awhile, at least, and then we're clearly back in America -- with boobs, naked ladies, Tiffany lamps, light shows, dissolves, overlapping photos and some nearly subliminal images.

This is an odd ending to a mixed bag of movies. I'm glad I saw them, some of which I'll certainly remember and perhaps watch another time. Again, Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage will run through Tuesday, November 23 and perhaps eventually appear on DVD, where aficionados can play and replay until meaning becomes clear(er) and/or the repetition induces a pleasant, hypnotic and not unwelcome sleep.