Abel, the harried protagonist of J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year (2014) is impeccable in all ways. As played by Oscar Isaac, Abel (the name is pronounced with a strong accent on the last syllable) is simply too handsome to be believed. Isaac has dark good looks that are so spectacular as to threaten the film's otherwise realistic texture: this guy looks too good to be true. And, in fact, Abel is a sort of fairy-tale hero -- he is unfailingly polite and humble, always thanking people for agreeing to see him; he has a beautiful wife whose cleavage he is not averse to treating as a business asset. His children are cute and clever and he's bold and virtuous -- in the film's last scene, he tells a soon-to-be-corrupt city official that he has always chosen "the most right" path to achieving his objectives. There may be a little quibble as to whether his objectives are worthy -- he's trying to acquire a river terminal and storage tanks for his growing fuel gas empire (his fleets of trucks deliver fuel on Manhattan and throughout all of the boroughs and northern New Jersey). For Abel, everything is transactional and he displays the most punctilious honor in repaying debts and protecting his workers. His problem, however, is that his ambition has landed him in trouble: he is expanding his base of operations into territory long held by competitors and they are responding by hijacking his trucks, stealing his fuel oil, and beating up his employees. Abel's response to this harassment is to make complaints to the District Attorney, apparently in Newark. This strategy is ineffective -- the DA's office is investigating Abel's operation, probably at the behest of one or more of his competitors and a 14 count indictment against him is under preparation. Against this sea of troubles, Abel stubbornly refuses to use certain tools that are available to him. His wife is the daughter of a Brooklyn gangster and, of course, she offers her father's assistance, something that Abel rejects with horror. The Teamsters representative suggests that Abel arm his drivers. This he also rejects on the basis that the truckers don't have valid conceal and carry licenses. When a shoot-out occurs on a bridge leading into Manhattan (one of Abel's drivers has taken matters into his own hands and armed himself), the Abel's bank withdraws financing. This creates a dilemma for Abel who has staked his entire fortune on acquiring the river terminal from a group of Hasidic Jews. The film's narrative consists of Abel's efforts to find out who is harassing his business while simultaneously working feverishly to put funding in place for the terminal deal after his bank withdraws support.
Chandor is a scrupulously realistic director best-known for the Robert Redford vehicle, All is Lost as well as Margin Call. These films rely upon precise exposition of a milieu that may be unfamiliar to most viewers. Abel is from some Spanish-speaking place, possibly Puerto Rico, but his English is precise and impeccable (like everything about him) and he makes even his Latino workers speak English when they are on the job. Abel represents an immigrant outsider who has played by the rules, amassed a considerable fortune through his law-abiding efforts, and, then, finds himself confronting the lawlessness of mobbed-up American business. Chandor shows that there is little distinction between gangsters and businessmen, a perennial and unfair trope in films of this sort. The menacing figure that Abel confronts at his barber shop is not a mobster but the owner of a competitor fuel gas company. When Abel enters an Italian restaurant to find a group of men gathered around a table in the back of the deserted joint, we learn that these men are not the Mafia but, instead, the owners of competing fuel gas companies meeting to "carve-up" and manage the market. Although we see shady characters from time-to-time, the chances are that they are simply other players in the fuel gas business.
This is the kind of film in which the script is probably better than the way the movie plays. It's a neo-noir, filmed in color, but a picture that would be perfectly comfortable in grim-looking black-and-white. The acting is uniformly splendid and the best thing about the picture is its characters -- just about everyone is believable, with an interesting, even gripping, back-story. Character is developed through action and there is very little explanatory discourse -- this makes the picture interesting: we are always speculating about motives. Jessica Chastain dares to make herself look more than a little hard-bitten as Abel's wife -- she's a tough cookie, more than willing to protect herself with her little pearl-handled gun and by other extra-legal means as well. (Abel snarls at her that the gun -- he abhors all firearms -- is the sort of weapon that a "whore would carry.") Albert Brooks playing Abel's weary and mildly corrupt consiglieri excels in that part. The various thugs and goons are all colorfully portrayed and there's a discordant, if powerful, subplot about a young man, also an immigrant, who hopelessly aspires to the wealth and influence of his boss, Abel. Every shot has a purpose -- scenes of Abel working-out by running at high-speed along the docks are not only picturesque but establish the middle-aged hero's ability to engage in long-distance footraces with the goons harassing him. (But the showy scene involving the foot-race through decaying warehouses, onto a subway, ending in a big beat-down on a subway platform is completely superfluous -- why not the just stage the beat-down at the place where the highjackers have wrecked Abel's fuel truck? From a strictly narrative point of view, all of the running is unnecessary and looks absurd anyway; Abel's camel hair coat, which is a like a character in the movie, doesn't get besmirched in the grimy chase and Abel himself seems scarecely out of breath.) Similarly, at one point, Abel's wife questions an additional $11,000 payment on the fuel terminal transaction. Abel tells her that one of the tanks still has fuel oil in it and that he is paying a commercially reasonable price for the oil. The oil is necessary for a later sequence in which someone commits suicide and, inadvertently, shoots a hole in the tank. The tank begins to leak and Abel plugs the leak with his handkerchief. This is an example of the film's script seeking to embody it's meanings in an emblematic image: Abel is always "plugging leaks" but it seems to me that the pressure of impounded oil in a 50,000 gallon tank could not be stanched in the event of leak by merely putting the tip of a handkerchief in the bullet-hole -- of course, this raises speculation as to the volume of oil in the tank, that is, how high is the level of the oil. (My point is that be creating these visually effective metaphors, Chandor gets himself into narrative trouble that he, then, has to correct in other parts of his hyper-ingenious script; this can be a wee bit distracting.) There are three-fourths of a good movie here, but, in the end, I'm not exactly convinced. If Abel is such a straight-arrow, how come he is transacting business with a group of Hasidic Jews in brief cases full of raw money -- I assume that taxes are being avoided here. But isn't this illegal? In one scene, a search warrant is executed on Abel's home. While his wife uses her wiles to delay the cops, Abel takes boxes of accounting records out of the back of house and puts them under a cantilevered balcony. Are the cops really so inept that they are not going to look under the balcony behind the house? The last part of the film involving Abel's scramble to raise more money seems contrived to me. Why doesn't he mortgage his home? It's a mansion that seems worth about a million dollars. Can't he float a loan with the fuel oil providers or distributors? Would the bank really pull the plug on finance to his business because of some bad publicity? Banks are some of the most criminal enterprises in the country and it would seem that the mildly illegality in which Abel is involved wouldn't deter most banks from doing business with him. Ultimately, I suppose, the film can be seen as neo-realist -- a high-finance version of Bicycle Thieves with the funding for the river terminal standing in for the bike. The problem for the movie is that if you posit realism as the measure of your film, it had better be realistic on all levels and in all details -- and here I think the film comes up a little short. Chandor's theme, I suppose, is that even the most virtuous are corrupted by American business practices. Abel's wife says that her accounting is "consistent with the standards of the business" -- whatever this means. And, in fact, corruption inside his own organization, very close to home, ultimately saves the day for Abel. This is the meaning of Abel's assertion that he has always chosen "the most right" way -- not the right way, but the "most right".
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Saturday, December 29, 2018
They Will Not Grow Old
The title to Peter Jackson's impressionistic World War One documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), seems to me to have a double meaning. First, of course, the film's name is elegiac - there is a whiff of A.E. Housman in the title: the young men that we see in their robust multitudes in this film will die pointlessly in the mud of the Western Front. Second, however, the title refers to Jackson's herculean effort to retrieve, restore, and, even, resurrect in color and three dimensions the fading photographic records of the Great War. Under this interpretation, "they" refers to the images transcribing evidence of World War One, herky-jerk and decomposing nitrate film showing soldiers marching toward the trenches, then, crouched in collapsing and swampy mud-holes on the battlefield or staggering back from the front lines with bloody heads rudely wrapped in gauze, limping along betweem the shoulders of the shell-shocked buddies -- in these fading black and white newreels, we can dimly see smashed caissons and the puffs of earth and black smoke where the shells gouge the horizon and, sometimes, blurry piles of corpses and dead horses. Jackson's title is a sort of vow: "these images" shall not grow old -- and, so, with the aid of the most advanced and sophisticated computer equipment, his teams have digitally erased scars and scratches on the film, adjusted movement to the modern standard of 24 frames per second, and, then, colorized the black-and-white pictures so we see the restored footage acted out under blue skies by young men whose wounds bleed red gore. Apparently, Jackson restored over 100 hours of fading, mutilated footage, imagery in the possession of London's Imperial War Museum -- recreating the pictures on film by adjusting their contrast, eliminating the over-exposed flares created by nitrate decay, and, then, injecting color into them. Not content with these innovations, Jackson hired teams of stereographers to put the film into a three-dimensional format, brought lip-readers into the studio to speak the words that we see these long-dead mouths forming on screen, and, finally, added a full Foley soundtrack of whizzing bullets, exploding shells, and men's feet enmired in the mud making sucking noises as they trudge forward toward barren horizons. The result is mesmerizing, although, I have certain reservations about Jackson's project transforming these hundred-year old newsreels into vivid, life-like friezes of ruin and destruction.
The film's form, governed by its soundtrack, is decisive. Jackson had recourse to thousands of hours of interviews recorded with old soldiers during the sixties and seventies -- apparently, an oral history project involving collaboration between the Imperial War Museum and the BBC. Jackson cuts these voices into a rough narrative, an account purportedly capturing the essential experiences of a British soldier on the Western Front. This narrative begins with the declaration of war, leads through enlistment and basic training and, then, in a coup de cinema shows us the long lines of troops marching through ruined villages toward the gunfire in full color. (The first 15 minutes of the film is black-and-white, indeed commencing with shots that only occupy a little murky window in the middle of the huge 70 mm screen; as the film progresses, the aperture imperceptibly grows larger until the black and white images occupy the whole screen -- then, when the troops reach Belgium and begin marching toward the front, the movie signifies that "we're not in Kansas any longer" (to quote a similar effect in the 1939 Wizard of Oz, presenting the giant images in full color. The effect is startling -- the audience gasps in awe, although, as I will argue, below the gimmick palls a little as the film progresses. The movie, then, continues the narration by showing us the terrible squalor of the trenches, the horror of shelling, and, then, presents a representative battle, a full, frontal attack on a German position. The film depicts the gruesome horror of field hospitals, and, concludes with the armistice and the soldiers, indelibly affected by combat, returning to England. In the film's final five minutes, the images revert to black-and-white and the pictures shrink again to only a small aperture in the huge black screen. (There is a half-hour coda: an account by Jackson of how the film was manipulated to discover the colors that he believes were always implicit in the images -- his theory is that the world is in color and that WWI cameramen would have used color if it had been technologically available and so the footage is, in effect, already in color: the colors are simply hidden, waiting to be resurrected by his teams of technicians. This is a questionable proposition as I argue below.)
I have elsewhere decried the use of archival materials in Ken Burns' films -- that is, Burns' tendency to rip an image out of its historical context and, then, use it as a kind of wallpaper for his carefully scripted narration. In my view, this technique does a disservice to the actual historical event that the image shows -- the picture represents real people in a certain real situation. Burns doesn't care who the people are, nor is he interested in the context of the image -- that is, who took the picture or why; he is satisfied with only the roughest correlation between image and narrative. Peter Jackson carries this approach to its logical conclusion. First, his magisterial narrative is a collage cut together from hundreds and hundreds of different voices -- although the sound-track carries the plot, its stitched together from hundreds of witnesses who were, of course, describing their experiences rooted in specific places and times. Jackson's soundtrack extracts the specificity of experience from the accounts and blurs all of the soldiers into a single generic "soldier of the great war" -- in this case, not an air man or submariner but an infantryman stationed on the Western Front. Jackson's insanely synoptic narrative acknowledges it's technique and, so, is a bit more honest than the way Burns' makes his films, but it is, nonetheless, problematic -- these men didn't experience a generic war; their experiences were personal to them. As I have noted before, the magisterial soundtrack, a major achievement in the art of mosaic, controls the imagery -- the resurrected images of trench warfare are never identified as to location or provenance. (The technical coda to the film makes it clear that Jackson and his team know exactly what the specifics are: they can identify the troops by uniform and, sometimes, by the faces of the men; they know the day the pictures were made, or, at least, the month, and the location, including in some cases, the precise camera angle from which movies were made -- it's a little maddening to be denied any access to this information, although, of course, to have this data exposed would clog the film to the point of rendering it inaccessible.) As in the case with Ken Burns in his Civil War film, Jackson encounters a crucial lacuna -- there is no compelling footage of the entire raison d'etre of the enterprise, that is, actual combat. WWI combat was so brutal and deadly that cameramen never got close enough to any actual battles to show much of anything. There is some ghostly footage of a patrol -- shadowy figures picking their way across a field lethal with barbed wire and flooded shell-holes -- and a few minutes of an attack, filmed by someone lying on his belly, images that show soldiers in long muddy coats walking forward with eerie and grave determination. These pictures don't gain anything by being colorized and projected in three dimensions -- they are monochrome in any event and, as one might expect, the assault doesn't seem to be really going anywhere: it's like a procession in a dream. Jackson covers for this deficit by pan-and-scanning groups of soldiers gathered together before the assault and, then, cutting from close-ups of their faces to show battered, dissolving corpses lying in shallow pits. This technique is effective but repetitious and creates a certain grim suspense -- sometimes, the close-up shot of the smiling soldier isn't followed by a mutilated corpse but, instead, engravings from a weekly publication issued during the war, black and white pictures filmed at such close range as to spread the image across the screen in a pattern of printer's dots (an effect that bears much resemblance to certain Pop Art paintings) . The engravings are ludicrously violent and jingoistic -- brave, kilted Scotsmen mowing down ranks of Germans -- but they are full frenzied action and so, partially, convey the chaos and savagery of battle. It's too much, ultimately, about too little and, I think, Jackson would have been wiser to just acknowledge that actual combat footage from World War One (as from any war) is mostly missing in action. The lurid cross-cutting is effective but goes on for too long.
Several sequences are shocking in their immediacy. A scene in which an artillery shell explodes almost on top of a horse-drawn caisson is particularly horrific. We see the shell burst -- there's no fire in the image just a nasty blast of smoke mingled with flying mud -- and, then, see the caisson overturned and the a mangled horse struggling to get to its feet. The soldiers ahead in the procession dismount and one of them runs toward the horse. The narrative describes how the men grew to love their horses and suffered immensely when they were killed. (The scene reminds me of an episode in All Quiet on the Western Front, in which the novelist Erich Maria Remarque describes a Pomeranian or Silesian soldier, a farm-boy driven insane by the sufferings of the horses.) Several of the shots of shelling are frightening and there are memorable images of the aftermath of battles, including one shot of a man with a very discernible and uncontrollable tremor in his hands -- a victim of shell-shock. Images of the horrific earth-volcanoes made when mines were exploded are dauntingly impressive and work very well in three-dimensions. Curiously, the pictures showing soldiers impassively smoking or fixing their bayonets while waiting to be called up "over the top" are not very dramatic -- the human face is generally not that expressive, particularly in dire circumstances, and most of the men seem to show little overt emotion despite the fact that they are only minutes away from being killed or horribly injured. (One shot of soldiers in a sunken road waiting for the cue to attack is effective because it shows greenery, some grass and trees in contrast to the generally blurred monochrome of mud and upturned earth. In his coda commentary, Jackson tells us that almost all the men in the picture were killed a few minutes after the image was recorded -- but, if you weren't told this, nothing really on the faces of the men reveals what is about to happen. The commentary tells us that the men display panic in their faces -- I saw nothing of the kind. Generally, they are inexpressive and if a narrator told us that ten minutes later, these men were rewarded for their valor with Christmas pudding, brandy, and a visit to a holiday pantomime, we would be similarly credulous, I think: of course, we can read that in their faces, we believe, but we're wrong.) The 3D effects don't add anything to the film (except for a close-up of a tank rolling over our faces and the scenes of the subterranean mines exploding). In fact, the 3D is mostly a distraction -- we see the array of troops generally organized in tiers, as if the troops are standing on risers at fixed distances from one another. This is not the way the eye perceives depth and, in my view, the 3D is a bad idea. Some of the colorization seems wrong. The textures of grass and field aren't exact and Jackson spills movie gore all over his corpses. But, of course, blood generally displays itself as black when bursting from the body and, then, very quickly dries to a murky rust-colored brown. The gore on the corpses, which should be brown, is generally shown in a brilliant scarlet -- it's an impressive impressionistic effect but it's more surrealist than realist. Finally, Jackson's treatment of the hundred-year-old footage combines a curiously naïve and reverential stance toward "reality" with disrespect for human memory. No one sees anything naively -- rather, reality is represented to us by being mediated through thought, memory, and our own vantage or interest: reality isn't just out there -- rather it's created by our perspectives. Jackson boldly maintains that a newsreel photographer in 1916, given the choice, would have elected to show the War in color -- a photographer friend of mine is skeptical about that assertion. Black and white is Platonic -- it seems to preserve what is essential in an image while disregarding "accidents" (in this case color). Our memory of the Great War is black-and-white. I don't know that it's universally true to say that our memories of past experiences are in color -- in what color do we recall our first car crash or sexual encounter? I'm not entirely sure that even applying notions of color to memory are accurate or helpful. Thus, I don't know that injecting color into a black and white picture proves much of anything -- ultimately, it's more a gimmick than any sort of key to a new, or enhanced reality.
That said, the "gimmick" (or "miracle") involving in the resurrection of these old images is fascinating. They Will Not Grow Old has been available on only a few screens. Clearly, the producers of the film didn't appreciate the public interest in this project. Almost all of the showings of Jackson's film have been sold-out -- and, in fact, Variety notes that the movie has earned more money than many other Christmas releases. People want to see this picture. So Jackson's tremendous effort has paid off in one respect -- he's brought more people into a darkened room to peer into the abyss that is the First World War than any other film maker during my life-time.
The film's form, governed by its soundtrack, is decisive. Jackson had recourse to thousands of hours of interviews recorded with old soldiers during the sixties and seventies -- apparently, an oral history project involving collaboration between the Imperial War Museum and the BBC. Jackson cuts these voices into a rough narrative, an account purportedly capturing the essential experiences of a British soldier on the Western Front. This narrative begins with the declaration of war, leads through enlistment and basic training and, then, in a coup de cinema shows us the long lines of troops marching through ruined villages toward the gunfire in full color. (The first 15 minutes of the film is black-and-white, indeed commencing with shots that only occupy a little murky window in the middle of the huge 70 mm screen; as the film progresses, the aperture imperceptibly grows larger until the black and white images occupy the whole screen -- then, when the troops reach Belgium and begin marching toward the front, the movie signifies that "we're not in Kansas any longer" (to quote a similar effect in the 1939 Wizard of Oz, presenting the giant images in full color. The effect is startling -- the audience gasps in awe, although, as I will argue, below the gimmick palls a little as the film progresses. The movie, then, continues the narration by showing us the terrible squalor of the trenches, the horror of shelling, and, then, presents a representative battle, a full, frontal attack on a German position. The film depicts the gruesome horror of field hospitals, and, concludes with the armistice and the soldiers, indelibly affected by combat, returning to England. In the film's final five minutes, the images revert to black-and-white and the pictures shrink again to only a small aperture in the huge black screen. (There is a half-hour coda: an account by Jackson of how the film was manipulated to discover the colors that he believes were always implicit in the images -- his theory is that the world is in color and that WWI cameramen would have used color if it had been technologically available and so the footage is, in effect, already in color: the colors are simply hidden, waiting to be resurrected by his teams of technicians. This is a questionable proposition as I argue below.)
I have elsewhere decried the use of archival materials in Ken Burns' films -- that is, Burns' tendency to rip an image out of its historical context and, then, use it as a kind of wallpaper for his carefully scripted narration. In my view, this technique does a disservice to the actual historical event that the image shows -- the picture represents real people in a certain real situation. Burns doesn't care who the people are, nor is he interested in the context of the image -- that is, who took the picture or why; he is satisfied with only the roughest correlation between image and narrative. Peter Jackson carries this approach to its logical conclusion. First, his magisterial narrative is a collage cut together from hundreds and hundreds of different voices -- although the sound-track carries the plot, its stitched together from hundreds of witnesses who were, of course, describing their experiences rooted in specific places and times. Jackson's soundtrack extracts the specificity of experience from the accounts and blurs all of the soldiers into a single generic "soldier of the great war" -- in this case, not an air man or submariner but an infantryman stationed on the Western Front. Jackson's insanely synoptic narrative acknowledges it's technique and, so, is a bit more honest than the way Burns' makes his films, but it is, nonetheless, problematic -- these men didn't experience a generic war; their experiences were personal to them. As I have noted before, the magisterial soundtrack, a major achievement in the art of mosaic, controls the imagery -- the resurrected images of trench warfare are never identified as to location or provenance. (The technical coda to the film makes it clear that Jackson and his team know exactly what the specifics are: they can identify the troops by uniform and, sometimes, by the faces of the men; they know the day the pictures were made, or, at least, the month, and the location, including in some cases, the precise camera angle from which movies were made -- it's a little maddening to be denied any access to this information, although, of course, to have this data exposed would clog the film to the point of rendering it inaccessible.) As in the case with Ken Burns in his Civil War film, Jackson encounters a crucial lacuna -- there is no compelling footage of the entire raison d'etre of the enterprise, that is, actual combat. WWI combat was so brutal and deadly that cameramen never got close enough to any actual battles to show much of anything. There is some ghostly footage of a patrol -- shadowy figures picking their way across a field lethal with barbed wire and flooded shell-holes -- and a few minutes of an attack, filmed by someone lying on his belly, images that show soldiers in long muddy coats walking forward with eerie and grave determination. These pictures don't gain anything by being colorized and projected in three dimensions -- they are monochrome in any event and, as one might expect, the assault doesn't seem to be really going anywhere: it's like a procession in a dream. Jackson covers for this deficit by pan-and-scanning groups of soldiers gathered together before the assault and, then, cutting from close-ups of their faces to show battered, dissolving corpses lying in shallow pits. This technique is effective but repetitious and creates a certain grim suspense -- sometimes, the close-up shot of the smiling soldier isn't followed by a mutilated corpse but, instead, engravings from a weekly publication issued during the war, black and white pictures filmed at such close range as to spread the image across the screen in a pattern of printer's dots (an effect that bears much resemblance to certain Pop Art paintings) . The engravings are ludicrously violent and jingoistic -- brave, kilted Scotsmen mowing down ranks of Germans -- but they are full frenzied action and so, partially, convey the chaos and savagery of battle. It's too much, ultimately, about too little and, I think, Jackson would have been wiser to just acknowledge that actual combat footage from World War One (as from any war) is mostly missing in action. The lurid cross-cutting is effective but goes on for too long.
Several sequences are shocking in their immediacy. A scene in which an artillery shell explodes almost on top of a horse-drawn caisson is particularly horrific. We see the shell burst -- there's no fire in the image just a nasty blast of smoke mingled with flying mud -- and, then, see the caisson overturned and the a mangled horse struggling to get to its feet. The soldiers ahead in the procession dismount and one of them runs toward the horse. The narrative describes how the men grew to love their horses and suffered immensely when they were killed. (The scene reminds me of an episode in All Quiet on the Western Front, in which the novelist Erich Maria Remarque describes a Pomeranian or Silesian soldier, a farm-boy driven insane by the sufferings of the horses.) Several of the shots of shelling are frightening and there are memorable images of the aftermath of battles, including one shot of a man with a very discernible and uncontrollable tremor in his hands -- a victim of shell-shock. Images of the horrific earth-volcanoes made when mines were exploded are dauntingly impressive and work very well in three-dimensions. Curiously, the pictures showing soldiers impassively smoking or fixing their bayonets while waiting to be called up "over the top" are not very dramatic -- the human face is generally not that expressive, particularly in dire circumstances, and most of the men seem to show little overt emotion despite the fact that they are only minutes away from being killed or horribly injured. (One shot of soldiers in a sunken road waiting for the cue to attack is effective because it shows greenery, some grass and trees in contrast to the generally blurred monochrome of mud and upturned earth. In his coda commentary, Jackson tells us that almost all the men in the picture were killed a few minutes after the image was recorded -- but, if you weren't told this, nothing really on the faces of the men reveals what is about to happen. The commentary tells us that the men display panic in their faces -- I saw nothing of the kind. Generally, they are inexpressive and if a narrator told us that ten minutes later, these men were rewarded for their valor with Christmas pudding, brandy, and a visit to a holiday pantomime, we would be similarly credulous, I think: of course, we can read that in their faces, we believe, but we're wrong.) The 3D effects don't add anything to the film (except for a close-up of a tank rolling over our faces and the scenes of the subterranean mines exploding). In fact, the 3D is mostly a distraction -- we see the array of troops generally organized in tiers, as if the troops are standing on risers at fixed distances from one another. This is not the way the eye perceives depth and, in my view, the 3D is a bad idea. Some of the colorization seems wrong. The textures of grass and field aren't exact and Jackson spills movie gore all over his corpses. But, of course, blood generally displays itself as black when bursting from the body and, then, very quickly dries to a murky rust-colored brown. The gore on the corpses, which should be brown, is generally shown in a brilliant scarlet -- it's an impressive impressionistic effect but it's more surrealist than realist. Finally, Jackson's treatment of the hundred-year-old footage combines a curiously naïve and reverential stance toward "reality" with disrespect for human memory. No one sees anything naively -- rather, reality is represented to us by being mediated through thought, memory, and our own vantage or interest: reality isn't just out there -- rather it's created by our perspectives. Jackson boldly maintains that a newsreel photographer in 1916, given the choice, would have elected to show the War in color -- a photographer friend of mine is skeptical about that assertion. Black and white is Platonic -- it seems to preserve what is essential in an image while disregarding "accidents" (in this case color). Our memory of the Great War is black-and-white. I don't know that it's universally true to say that our memories of past experiences are in color -- in what color do we recall our first car crash or sexual encounter? I'm not entirely sure that even applying notions of color to memory are accurate or helpful. Thus, I don't know that injecting color into a black and white picture proves much of anything -- ultimately, it's more a gimmick than any sort of key to a new, or enhanced reality.
That said, the "gimmick" (or "miracle") involving in the resurrection of these old images is fascinating. They Will Not Grow Old has been available on only a few screens. Clearly, the producers of the film didn't appreciate the public interest in this project. Almost all of the showings of Jackson's film have been sold-out -- and, in fact, Variety notes that the movie has earned more money than many other Christmas releases. People want to see this picture. So Jackson's tremendous effort has paid off in one respect -- he's brought more people into a darkened room to peer into the abyss that is the First World War than any other film maker during my life-time.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
My Dinner with Andre
My Dinner with Andre is a touchstone for me. When I first saw Louis Malle's picture in 1981, I took pride in sitting through the whole thing. I wasn't impressed at that time, but parts of the movie stayed with me -- certain speeches and images came to mind as quotations that I could use in various applications. I wondered why this was so, but ascribed these memories to the film's hyper-literate script. I saw the movie a couple of times over the next thirty years. Now a life-time later, the film feels like something central to my way of seeing the world. The movie has grown. It doesn't feel too long to me now and watching the whole thing in one setting is no longer an achievement. If anything, the movie could be longer, could continue interminably-- Andre and Wally are distinct characters, some of the most remarkable created in the history of film and it's a pleasure to be in their company. Furthermore, the film is now more meaningful in light of the other works made by these two men, either individually or apart. I've seen Wally Shawn's The Designated Mourner with Mike Nichols on CD and that play, a work that I've also read several times, seems to be foreshadowed in the mixture of whimsy and bleak horror that appears from time to time in Malle's film. Of course, Vanya on 42nd Street is a masterpiece and, although I'm more ambivalent about The Master Builder, both of these films arising from collaboration between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn are also retrospectively significant in considering the early picture. I went to Chicago to see Shawn's new play, Evening at the Talk House, and it also casts an interesting light on My Dinner with Andre. Shawn is our most ambitious playwright; he hunts for the biggest of big game and is unafraid to devise plays (and film scripts) driven entirely by ideas. And, although he has some New York quirks that are disagreeable, Shawn is incredibly smart, literate, and bold. All of this is incipient in My Dinner with Andre -- the film doesn't look like an anomaly now; rather, it's part of the development of an artistic sensibility shared, at least, as a contested dialectic between Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory.
I've probably written about this film before and, so, here I will just give an account of the movie's plot or narrative as it were. The speeches made by both characters are fantastically complex and intricate with picturesque details. But, perhaps, this outline will be helpful to those who wish to explore the movie on their own. (There is a wonderful Criterion set of My Dinner with Andre, Vanya on 42nd Street, and The Master Builder). At first, we see Wally walking through a poor part of New York. He narrates the film and sketches the situation: he's a playwright but can't make a living from his work; he has a girlfriend named Debbie who is also an artist but has to work as a waitress. Although he was raised as "little prince of the City" (his father was the editor of the New Yorker magazine), he is now very poor. Years ago, Wally was close friends with Andre who first produced one of his plays for the public. Something terrible has happened to Andre. People suggest that he has lost his mind -- he's been sighted talking "to trees" and weeping inconsolably on the street corner. (The film heightens reality: all the details about Wally Shawn's life and his relationship with Andre Gregory are, more or less, real.)
Wally is nervous about meeting Andre after the lapse of years, but he warms to him quickly after they greet one another in a posh, very expensive uptown restaurant. (We have seen Wally looking morose on a hideously graffiti-painted subway car -- this is before Rudy Giuliani and the city looks awful.) Andre embarks on a monologue that lasts 40 minutes. He is a mystic and his speech is vatic -- the film honors the nature of his speaking by letting him talk almost without interruption. The gist of Andre's speech is that life and art must be regarded a preciously sacramental. But the modern world is increasingly commercial, "robotic", pre-programmed and, therefore, inauthentic. Andre has attempted to escape this kind of life by traveling to exotic locations where he has various adventures. He is symbolically "reborn" and, then, "re-christened" by Jerzy Grotowski in a primeval Polish old-growth forest. In Scotland, he joins a commune that believes all parts of the earth are sentient and awaiting some kind of spiritual resurrection. These people are hoping for liberation by UFOs and talk to stones and trees. At Richard Avedon's estate on Montauk, a cult-like sect drags the naked Andre through cold forests and, in fact, buries him for a time alive. Andre has also traveled (unsatisfactorily) in India, lived on a farm in Tibet, and invited a rapacious Japanese Zen monk into the bosom of his family. Although these experiences have led to momentary instants of enlightenment, Andre feels lonely, alienated, and, even, perhaps suicidal. He is haunted by death and imagines that his immersion in these irrational, tribal cults is "fascistic" -- he compares himself to Albert Speer at one point and says he expects someone to prosecute him: one of the cults uses Sanskrit swastikas as part of its symbolic apparatus. (Andre has commissioned a banner marked with a swastika that everyone regards as lethal -- it ends up being burned.) During parts of his monologue, Malle puts the camera so close to Andre and lights his face in a sinister way -- he looks deranged, like Edgar Allan Poe on a bender and his normally handsome, classically aquiline features seems dark and wicked and fearsome. Andre's notion is that ordinary life has been stripped of its meaning and the only way to get people to feel is to "derange their senses." But his notions in this regard are gloomy and quixotic: he wants to drag people, Wally accuses, to "the top of Everest". He's upset because he was not allowed to stage the Bacchae using real cadaver parts, including a human head that would be passed from person to person in the audience.
Wally finally responds after Andre's monologue. He accuses Andre of being opposed to science and argues that science (and reason) give us a common world. Andre wants a world that is tribal, based on being, feeling, and irrational. Wally believes that such a world would be chaotic and horrible. He argues in favor of the idea of a rational common reality -- he says that he is happy when he wakes up and finds the coffee he has kept to drink cold in the morning hasn't drowned a cockroach. This pleases him and he says that he doesn't need to be dragged up Mount Everest to experience reality.
This discussion leads Wally to say that he thinks Andre's pursuit of what Wallace Steven's called "mere being" -- that is just existing in the present -- is pointless. Wally says that human beings are always doing. They can't just be, rather, they must be doing something. Andre's reply is that this ceaseless "doing" is just a fearful hedge against death. To truly "be" in the moment is to perceive the dissolution of being, the decomposition of the self into death. Andre, then, says that he feels that his world is dissolving, it's a haze melting into nothingness -- all roles that human beings play with one another are utterly meaningless: there is no husband, no wife ("what does it mean to be a wife?" Andre cries.) There are no children, no daughter, no son. People grow up -- "they take your hand, then, they are all grown up and can lift you themselves into the sky, and, then, they are simply gone." We are all alone, Andre argues.
The film succeeds because it reveals that Wally and Andre are not as different as they claim to be. Their debate reveals them as both troubled by the inauthenticity of modern life, afraid of dying, and desperate to find meaning. Blake says that in "Opposition is true Friendship" -- an idea that the film demonstrates. If one takes the both of their positions, although opposed, as comprising one reality, we have a good picture of what it is like to be alive.
Wally takes a cab home, reflecting that he has lived all his life in New York City, and that each street corner along the way has meaning for him. He tells us that reaching home, Debbie is already there, and resolves to tell her "everything about my dinner with Andre".
This is one of the world's most beautiful films.
I've probably written about this film before and, so, here I will just give an account of the movie's plot or narrative as it were. The speeches made by both characters are fantastically complex and intricate with picturesque details. But, perhaps, this outline will be helpful to those who wish to explore the movie on their own. (There is a wonderful Criterion set of My Dinner with Andre, Vanya on 42nd Street, and The Master Builder). At first, we see Wally walking through a poor part of New York. He narrates the film and sketches the situation: he's a playwright but can't make a living from his work; he has a girlfriend named Debbie who is also an artist but has to work as a waitress. Although he was raised as "little prince of the City" (his father was the editor of the New Yorker magazine), he is now very poor. Years ago, Wally was close friends with Andre who first produced one of his plays for the public. Something terrible has happened to Andre. People suggest that he has lost his mind -- he's been sighted talking "to trees" and weeping inconsolably on the street corner. (The film heightens reality: all the details about Wally Shawn's life and his relationship with Andre Gregory are, more or less, real.)
Wally is nervous about meeting Andre after the lapse of years, but he warms to him quickly after they greet one another in a posh, very expensive uptown restaurant. (We have seen Wally looking morose on a hideously graffiti-painted subway car -- this is before Rudy Giuliani and the city looks awful.) Andre embarks on a monologue that lasts 40 minutes. He is a mystic and his speech is vatic -- the film honors the nature of his speaking by letting him talk almost without interruption. The gist of Andre's speech is that life and art must be regarded a preciously sacramental. But the modern world is increasingly commercial, "robotic", pre-programmed and, therefore, inauthentic. Andre has attempted to escape this kind of life by traveling to exotic locations where he has various adventures. He is symbolically "reborn" and, then, "re-christened" by Jerzy Grotowski in a primeval Polish old-growth forest. In Scotland, he joins a commune that believes all parts of the earth are sentient and awaiting some kind of spiritual resurrection. These people are hoping for liberation by UFOs and talk to stones and trees. At Richard Avedon's estate on Montauk, a cult-like sect drags the naked Andre through cold forests and, in fact, buries him for a time alive. Andre has also traveled (unsatisfactorily) in India, lived on a farm in Tibet, and invited a rapacious Japanese Zen monk into the bosom of his family. Although these experiences have led to momentary instants of enlightenment, Andre feels lonely, alienated, and, even, perhaps suicidal. He is haunted by death and imagines that his immersion in these irrational, tribal cults is "fascistic" -- he compares himself to Albert Speer at one point and says he expects someone to prosecute him: one of the cults uses Sanskrit swastikas as part of its symbolic apparatus. (Andre has commissioned a banner marked with a swastika that everyone regards as lethal -- it ends up being burned.) During parts of his monologue, Malle puts the camera so close to Andre and lights his face in a sinister way -- he looks deranged, like Edgar Allan Poe on a bender and his normally handsome, classically aquiline features seems dark and wicked and fearsome. Andre's notion is that ordinary life has been stripped of its meaning and the only way to get people to feel is to "derange their senses." But his notions in this regard are gloomy and quixotic: he wants to drag people, Wally accuses, to "the top of Everest". He's upset because he was not allowed to stage the Bacchae using real cadaver parts, including a human head that would be passed from person to person in the audience.
Wally finally responds after Andre's monologue. He accuses Andre of being opposed to science and argues that science (and reason) give us a common world. Andre wants a world that is tribal, based on being, feeling, and irrational. Wally believes that such a world would be chaotic and horrible. He argues in favor of the idea of a rational common reality -- he says that he is happy when he wakes up and finds the coffee he has kept to drink cold in the morning hasn't drowned a cockroach. This pleases him and he says that he doesn't need to be dragged up Mount Everest to experience reality.
This discussion leads Wally to say that he thinks Andre's pursuit of what Wallace Steven's called "mere being" -- that is just existing in the present -- is pointless. Wally says that human beings are always doing. They can't just be, rather, they must be doing something. Andre's reply is that this ceaseless "doing" is just a fearful hedge against death. To truly "be" in the moment is to perceive the dissolution of being, the decomposition of the self into death. Andre, then, says that he feels that his world is dissolving, it's a haze melting into nothingness -- all roles that human beings play with one another are utterly meaningless: there is no husband, no wife ("what does it mean to be a wife?" Andre cries.) There are no children, no daughter, no son. People grow up -- "they take your hand, then, they are all grown up and can lift you themselves into the sky, and, then, they are simply gone." We are all alone, Andre argues.
The film succeeds because it reveals that Wally and Andre are not as different as they claim to be. Their debate reveals them as both troubled by the inauthenticity of modern life, afraid of dying, and desperate to find meaning. Blake says that in "Opposition is true Friendship" -- an idea that the film demonstrates. If one takes the both of their positions, although opposed, as comprising one reality, we have a good picture of what it is like to be alive.
Wally takes a cab home, reflecting that he has lived all his life in New York City, and that each street corner along the way has meaning for him. He tells us that reaching home, Debbie is already there, and resolves to tell her "everything about my dinner with Andre".
This is one of the world's most beautiful films.
Sunday, December 23, 2018
True Stories
David Byrne's 1986 True Stories is a wonderful movie. I use the adjective "wonderful" advisedly. The film is not a "masterpiece" -- movies of this sort are far more intentional and ostentatious. I also hesitate to call True Stories "great" -- a "great" film is one that, in additional to other pleasures, works through some important or complex theme. True Stories doesn't have that character -- but it is "wonderful" in the sense of being filled with "wonders". The picture has something of the quality of a work made by a precocious child -- it's naïve, emotionally direct, and strangely optimistic: although made by the essential New Yorker, David Byrne, the peculiarly robotic front man of The Talking Heads (and populated by Soho types: for instance, Spalding Gray and Stephen Tobolowsky), the film is conspicuously lacking in irony -- none of the odd events in the film is bracketed with scare quotes. Byrne's approach to the material is uncomplicated and direct, an aspect of the film embodied in the spare symmetrical imagery, the direct full-frontal aspect of the photography, the bright lighting and garish colors: Byrne seems to design the film in a childish way -- this is particularly apparent from some of the Criterion supplements that show Byrne's storyboards: primitive unadorned cartoons. In fact, the naive aspects of the movie -- Byrne's faux simple-minded narration and his use of slide-show montages and obviously stylized rear projection are initially disquieting: the tone of open-eyed and non-judgmental wonder is a bit wearing at first. You keep expecting the shoe of post-modern irony to drop. But it doesn't and what is initially irritating slowly becomes charming.
True Stories is a musical revue, inflected heavily by a pop art sensibility that gazes adoringly on big cars, Edward Hopper-like rural main-streets, shopping malls, and unadorned metal buildings. The plot, a series of vignettes, involves an imaginary town celebrating the sesquitennial (150th) anniversary of Texas, by staging a sort of variety show -- the show is labeled "A celebration of Specialness." Byrne's narrator (he is dressed in black with a black Stetson and drives a huge red convertible) shuttles between the various characters. As with most movie musicals, True Stories ends with a series of songs and dances (and other talent show acts) that climaxes with the leading man belting out a song. This was John Goodman's premiere movie and he is endearing throughout -- he's also a creditable singer. (Goodman who is heavy-set, a little melancholy, and self-effacing is the polar opposite of leading men like Fred Astaire or Dick Powell -- he's a big loveable lump without much discernible talent in the center of the film.) The movie is populated by various eccentrics: Spalding Gray plays a vivacious civic booster, the Mayor of Virgil, the imaginary town, who has not spoken directly to his wife for 32 years, and who is responsible for bringing a Texas Instruments-like high-tech firm (Veritech) to town. Goodman is Lewis Fyne, a worker at Veritech, who is desperately looking for "matrimony" -- he advertises for a wife on billboards and TV. Swoosie Kurtz plays a lady too lazy to get out of bed. Roebuck "Pops" Staples is a voodoo priest who uses his magic to help Fyne meet a woman. In less developed roles, there is a woman who loves things that are cute (in the original cut of the film, she dies of a heart attack during a parade featuring babies in strollers), a Latin lover, and a woman whose every word is a lie. A Veritech executive talks about Steve Jobst with adoration and, in deleted scenes, is trying to contact space aliens. He tells Byrne's narrator: "The world is changing. This is the center or one of many centers." These characters are deployed across a totally horizontal, flat as a board, landscape in which new, desolate suburbs are being built. At one point, the camera pans through an empty, newly built suburb, passing nice, but vacant-looking houses, as debris blows in the wind: "Who's to say that this isn't beautiful?" the narrator asks rhetorically. Slow pans across parking lots and the fronts of metal buildings and elaborate freeway access and exit ramps further display the horizontal landscape. Sometimes, we see great vistas that are mostly sky with hunters in the foreground or lovers strolling toward the horizon. The cube in which the talent show is performed glows from within, an enigmatic temple to some unknown god poised against the flat endless plains and the stormy sky. The film is prescient about the role that technology will assume in our lives and, indeed, prophetic as well in its imagery of the cheerless, barren suburbs engulfing the land, but, nonetheless, vibrant with their own kind of bleak beauty. At the climax, Goodman's character sings the Talking Heads' song "Someone to Love" with its odd, disquieting chorus: "We don't want freedom, we don't want justice/We just want someone to love." This mantra could be said to define many of Donald Trump's supporters today and, in fact, Byrne, who has now grown into his eccentricity and seems pretty much normal, acknowledges this fact in an oblique side-long way in one of the supplements on the DVD disc. The elites want to control everything, including esthetics, but Byrne's point is that people are intrinsically creative and, everywhere you go, there are indigenous forms of art that are beautiful and worthy of admiration in their own way: Byrne's camera gazes with something like love at small-town marching bands, drum majorettes, baton-twirlers, a surreal fashion-show in which people appear wearing urban camouflage (suits with brick and wall patterns) or coats covered with growing grass. It's like a State Fair -- everywhere you look, people are inventing new and wonderful things, making spectacular artifacts and, even, inventing bizarre, if beautiful, conspiracy theories. (One of the film's best musical scenes is a full gospel choir performing the song "Puzzling Evidence", a tune about the "trilateral commission" and the Kennedy assassination, among other things.) In Byrne's vision, this is democracy with a little "d" -- everyone is a star in one way or another, and all these disparate people are working together for something like the common good. "Be proud of what you are," is the film's slogan. True Stories is casually utopian and weirdly blissed-out. Byrne hasn't made any other films and this one seems like a happy accident -- it's hard to see what could follow this picture, but it's delightful from beginning to end.
True Stories is a musical revue, inflected heavily by a pop art sensibility that gazes adoringly on big cars, Edward Hopper-like rural main-streets, shopping malls, and unadorned metal buildings. The plot, a series of vignettes, involves an imaginary town celebrating the sesquitennial (150th) anniversary of Texas, by staging a sort of variety show -- the show is labeled "A celebration of Specialness." Byrne's narrator (he is dressed in black with a black Stetson and drives a huge red convertible) shuttles between the various characters. As with most movie musicals, True Stories ends with a series of songs and dances (and other talent show acts) that climaxes with the leading man belting out a song. This was John Goodman's premiere movie and he is endearing throughout -- he's also a creditable singer. (Goodman who is heavy-set, a little melancholy, and self-effacing is the polar opposite of leading men like Fred Astaire or Dick Powell -- he's a big loveable lump without much discernible talent in the center of the film.) The movie is populated by various eccentrics: Spalding Gray plays a vivacious civic booster, the Mayor of Virgil, the imaginary town, who has not spoken directly to his wife for 32 years, and who is responsible for bringing a Texas Instruments-like high-tech firm (Veritech) to town. Goodman is Lewis Fyne, a worker at Veritech, who is desperately looking for "matrimony" -- he advertises for a wife on billboards and TV. Swoosie Kurtz plays a lady too lazy to get out of bed. Roebuck "Pops" Staples is a voodoo priest who uses his magic to help Fyne meet a woman. In less developed roles, there is a woman who loves things that are cute (in the original cut of the film, she dies of a heart attack during a parade featuring babies in strollers), a Latin lover, and a woman whose every word is a lie. A Veritech executive talks about Steve Jobst with adoration and, in deleted scenes, is trying to contact space aliens. He tells Byrne's narrator: "The world is changing. This is the center or one of many centers." These characters are deployed across a totally horizontal, flat as a board, landscape in which new, desolate suburbs are being built. At one point, the camera pans through an empty, newly built suburb, passing nice, but vacant-looking houses, as debris blows in the wind: "Who's to say that this isn't beautiful?" the narrator asks rhetorically. Slow pans across parking lots and the fronts of metal buildings and elaborate freeway access and exit ramps further display the horizontal landscape. Sometimes, we see great vistas that are mostly sky with hunters in the foreground or lovers strolling toward the horizon. The cube in which the talent show is performed glows from within, an enigmatic temple to some unknown god poised against the flat endless plains and the stormy sky. The film is prescient about the role that technology will assume in our lives and, indeed, prophetic as well in its imagery of the cheerless, barren suburbs engulfing the land, but, nonetheless, vibrant with their own kind of bleak beauty. At the climax, Goodman's character sings the Talking Heads' song "Someone to Love" with its odd, disquieting chorus: "We don't want freedom, we don't want justice/We just want someone to love." This mantra could be said to define many of Donald Trump's supporters today and, in fact, Byrne, who has now grown into his eccentricity and seems pretty much normal, acknowledges this fact in an oblique side-long way in one of the supplements on the DVD disc. The elites want to control everything, including esthetics, but Byrne's point is that people are intrinsically creative and, everywhere you go, there are indigenous forms of art that are beautiful and worthy of admiration in their own way: Byrne's camera gazes with something like love at small-town marching bands, drum majorettes, baton-twirlers, a surreal fashion-show in which people appear wearing urban camouflage (suits with brick and wall patterns) or coats covered with growing grass. It's like a State Fair -- everywhere you look, people are inventing new and wonderful things, making spectacular artifacts and, even, inventing bizarre, if beautiful, conspiracy theories. (One of the film's best musical scenes is a full gospel choir performing the song "Puzzling Evidence", a tune about the "trilateral commission" and the Kennedy assassination, among other things.) In Byrne's vision, this is democracy with a little "d" -- everyone is a star in one way or another, and all these disparate people are working together for something like the common good. "Be proud of what you are," is the film's slogan. True Stories is casually utopian and weirdly blissed-out. Byrne hasn't made any other films and this one seems like a happy accident -- it's hard to see what could follow this picture, but it's delightful from beginning to end.
Saturday, December 22, 2018
De Palma
The documentary De Palma (Baumbach & Paltrow 2016) isn't particularly illuminating. The director, Brian De Palma, sits in front of gaping and cold-looking hearth talking to the camera. As he speaks, the film shows an anthology of De Palma's greatest hits: the power-driller murder from Body Double, Angie Dickinson slashed to death in a mirrored elevator in Dressed to Kill, various rape scenes from Casualties of War and Redacted, the bucket of pig blood scene from Carrie, and the gory explosion of John Cassavetes in The Fury. De Palma seems guarded and conceals his personal life from the camera -- at one point, he makes the remark that the cinema is his "wife", perhaps, as an explanation of his various marital failures. Of course, the notion that cinema is a demanding mistress is a cliché and De Palma, for most of his career, has trafficked in various forms of cliché -- in some instances, brilliantly, but, often, in a very derivative way: he imitates Hitchcock, for instance, to the point of plagiarism, but, generally, without Hitchcock's wit, glamor, and his moral underpinning. For better or worse, Hitchcock is a moralist -- his films are fables about sin and punishment; by contrast, De Palma is coldly post-modernist -- his films are, generally, transgressive but in the remote style of Pop Art. De Palma has some good back-stage stories, but he's not naturally eloquent and, in fact, has some curious verbal tics -- he uses the ejaculation "Holy Mackeral!" about seven times in the first half of the film without the listener really understanding what he means by expression: is he saying that he was surprised or that we should be surprised or that we should be offended? Of course, his films are famously bloody, but, he defends the gore in his pictures (usually the result of the mutilation of a young woman) as being artificial and unrealistic. (Godard used this defense long ago in interviews about his film Weekend -- "there's no blood in my pictures; what you see is just my use of the color red.") De Palma notes that his father was an orthopedic surgeon and that he often went to the hospital to see his father operate (which seems questionable to me)-- he says that there was blood everywhere during surgery, a dull substance that dried to a dismal brown color. By contrast, blood in his films is more colorful, enduring, and decorative. (This suggests that, perhaps, all the gore in his films is supposed to cancel out the real blood that he saw as a boy in the Philadelphia operating theaters where his father worked -- but the idea is not explored.) In comparison with Orson Welles, Fellini, or Werner Herzog, De Palma is not a good interview -- he's arrogant and self-serving although he is willing to recognize his failures. The film is valuable in an archival sense in that it presents a chronology of De Palma's early movies -- counter-cultural and heavily influenced by Godard, these pictures (which have more in common with Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In than Ingmar Bergman) are hard to see and difficult to access. De Palma made about six snarky political comedies before directing his breakthrough picture Sisters with a very young and translucently beautiful Margot Kidder. The documentary doggedly goes through De Palma's catalogue, showing memorable scenes from each of his films. The director doesn't talk much about his curious professional relationship with Pauline Kael -- she was a huge supporter of many of his films and brought them respectability that, perhaps, they didn't deserve. And De Palma doesn't much discuss feminist critiques of the creepy, nightmare voyeurism in his films -- and he steers away from any detailed commentary on the viciously misogynistic violence in his most famous and effective films. In some ways, De Palma seems to me bizarrely obtuse -- for instance, he argues that he wanted to apply Orson Welles film technique in The Magnificent Ambersons to filming Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities -- a manifestly bad idea. In fact, this notion seems so startlingly off-base as to be surreal. Curiously, De Palma seems most proud of the big-budget films that he made with expensive stars: he talks at length about the silly and meretricious Mission Impossible film he made with Tom Cruise and, also, asserts that The Untouchables was, perhaps, his best and most fully realized film. He deplores Scarface a little -- this is odd, but makes sense when we recognize the movie didn't make money when it was first released and only became famous later when it was adopted, as it were, by the hip-hop and rapper crowd. He's sadly realistic about the fact that filmmaking is a physical job that requires immense stamina and focus -- he admits, it seems, that he's now too old for the game. In my view, De Palma made three masterpieces Body Double, certainly the most audacious film ever made for a mainstream Hollywood audience: it's completely disorienting and a great unexpected masterpiece; Blow Out, and the brilliant Phantom of the Paradise (a movie that, for most of my life, has been almost impossible to see -- De Palma explains that this indy film was produced without Errors and Omissions insurance coverage and, almost, immediately got itself tangled up in litigation over copyrights.) To the extent that the film reminds the viewer of the risks that De Palma took, at least, during the first half of his career -- and the fact that those risks paid off, at least, a third of the time, the documentary is salutary.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Spiderman -- into the Spider-verse
About two-thirds of the way through the movie Spiderman -- Into the Spider Verse, the young hero's father comes to visit his son in his Brooklyn dormitory room. Behind a closed door, the youth, Miles Morales, is cocooned in spider-silk, bound to a chair with a wad of spider-web sealing his mouth. The boy's father is a New York City cop and he's drawn as a massive figure with a pentagonal chest and square-cut shoulders supporting a small head with closely cropped hair -- it's a caricature, although one that is reasonably expressive. Indeed, all the human figures in this animated picture are, more or less, crudely drawn -- they are, in fact, cartoons in a film that can't really be described in those terms: the graphics in Spiderman (SpiderVerse) are too vivid, too psychedelic, and too compelling to be described simply as animation or a cartoon. This is something else -- the manipulation of light as a stream of digitalized tints and textures, a bright, vivid computerized light-show. As I watched the scene with the cop at the door, I admired the subtle transition from shadows on the left of the image brightening imperceptibly to illumine the policeman and his anxious face and, then, brightening to a lighter, almost translucent color representing the locked door. In sheer graphic terms, the image made sense -- it provided a spectrum calibrated both in light, texture, and color, a tonal progression from left (dark) to right (brighter). Then, I asked myself: what is the color of the door? Here is where I was baffled: the door was a vivid color but one that I had never seen before, a color that I couldn't exactly describe except as a aquarelle wash of transparent pale blues, yellows, and purplish-green tints. The problem that I discovered in describing the hue of that door is a problem that confronts me in general terms as I write about this film: much of picture is literally indescribable -- the colors are luxurious, brilliant but, also, mixed with a sort of alchemy that we don't find in nature. These are colors generated by the brain of a computer -- hues that no one has ever really seen before and that don't have established names. Indeed, the last twenty minutes of the movie, a spectacular light-show involving animated figures battling one another against a void filled with jets and rays of brilliant color, amoeba-like stains spreading and twisting and turning, skyscrapers rising and falling like strange undersea polyps, the Brooklyn Bridge sometimes appearing as a cameo, the familiar network of struts and towers and supporting cable here as fragile as the gossamer of a spider's web, the bridge sometimes tilted upside down or turned on edge, a subway train scuttling like a centipede through this interdimensional abyss with its lights still shining, red blinkers winking at us, a witty reference, I think, to Einstein's trains rattling through the infinity of space-time in his explanation of relativity: a chaos but one that successfully bears a narrative burden in that we can see, sometimes as silhouettes and other times as statuesque three-dimensional figures the various superheros fighting their foes -- these effects are literally indescribable: they have to be seen to be imagined and nothing that I can write here will aid you in understanding what all of this looks like. There are huge spinning machines that cast off rays of floral colors, vast orbs blossoming and withering, parts of a landscape dissected into cubist arrays of cornices and windows and walls held up to our scrutiny like the blossoms in a bouquet of flowers. And all of this is witty and, even, on its own terms faintly credible.
Spiderman (Spiderverse) is successful not only as a vast and spectacular light-show but, also, as a story. A brilliant young man is sent from his home in Brooklyn (his father is a cop and his mother a nurse -- perhaps, the couple is not married because the boy doesn't carry his father's name, Davis. Of course, this would make him "Miles Davis", an appellation carrying, I think, too much weight for the character to bear.) The boy attends a sort of magnet school, some kind of residential academy, also in Brooklyn. Feeling lonely and out of place in the elite school, the boy seeks out his shady uncle and the two of them paint a glorious mural in an abandoned subway station buried somewhere near the Brooklyn Bridge. A radioactive spider -- and the beast is an electric neon day-glow arachnid -- bites the kid and he develops super-powers. Unfortunately, he can't control these powers and his first duels with evil characters result in his defeat. The principal villain, a huge rectangular black obelisk, equipped with a little belligerent head that's all bald skull and savage jaw, has harnessed an apocalyptic machine that accesses other universes. According to quantum theory, there are an infinity of universes and, therefore, as it turns out an infinite number of Spidermen. Peter Parker, Spiderman's feckless alter ego, is killed by the bad guy notwithstanding the hero's efforts. But, while mourning at the grave of Parker, the space-time continuum ruptures, an effect involving an explosion of jagged multi-colored crystals, and another Peter Parker appears. This version of Spiderman is overweight and unshaven -- he has brunette hair, is a wise-guy and palpable out-of-shape. He helps Miles learn how to harness his powers, although he's too cynical to be much of an instructor. Ultimately, several other versions of Spiderman appear: one of them is Peter Porker, a nebbish cartoon pig with spider powers; another is Spiderman Noir a black and white figure that appears against a shadowy black and white background with a gale always whipping through his hair (the hero speaks in the jargon of tough-guys in nineteen-thirties crime movies). There's a spider-girl and another version of Spiderman from Japan -- an anime maiden with huge long-lashed eyes, dressed in the uniform of a Japanese schoolgirl and accompanied by a crab-like robot war-machine. These different versions of Spiderman all come draped in landscapes appropriate to them -- thus, the Noir spiderman is surrounded by billowy black and white shadows, Peter Porker has Warner Brothers anvils and giant wooden hammers that he deploys and comes equipped with a Roger Rabbit toonville backdrop; the Japanese girl is deployed against the static but beautifully drawn backgrounds used in classical anime, and spider-girl is a white figure often surrounded by a sort of floral halo. The film's point is that there are an infinite number of spider-man heroes -- one for every race and gender and color and creed. Indeed, the film expresses the sentiment that ultimately everyone in the audience is potentially a spider-man, a point that is made in a very moving fashion in a final homage to Stan Lee at the end of the movie: we see Lee's signature glasses lying abandoned in a glowing void and there are words to the effect that "anyone who seeks good as its own reward" is a super-hero. The various versions of Spiderman, each associated with his or her own texture and style of animation all join forces for the grandiose final battle that takes place in a constantly morphing "spider-verse", an entangled web of multi-verses through which the characters plummet in a sort of infinite and endless fall.
This is a wonderful movie, exceedingly clever and witty, and spectacular beyond my ability to describe the film's imagery. It was made by armies of animators over many years -- one of the final titles in the picture lists the number of babies that were born to the people working on the film during its preparation: the list is about 20 or 25 names long. Make sure you stay for all the closing credits. First, there are a number of fantastically baroque and ornate stills depicting the notion of an infinity of spider-men. The final credits are literally wallpapered with them in Pop Art arrays that outdo anything that actual Pop Art ever accomplished. Then, there are several very funny gags appended to the end of the movie.
I suppose this film embodies the future of popular entertainment. I grieve for the absence of anything that seems real or human in an massive endeavor of this kind. But the recompense is that the movie is also beautiful beyond description. And, some of the most beautiful images, are the most modest ones -- feathery snow falling on the dark city and its alleyways, the trees in a autumnal forest, the rush and roar of traffic and the sleek, gleaming skyscrapers rearing up over the rivers and bridges. In one shot, we see above the character a junction box on a utility pole -- a mundane image: but the pole and box are bathed in preternaturally glorious light, a great sea of radiance that transfigures everything that it touches.
Spiderman (Spiderverse) is successful not only as a vast and spectacular light-show but, also, as a story. A brilliant young man is sent from his home in Brooklyn (his father is a cop and his mother a nurse -- perhaps, the couple is not married because the boy doesn't carry his father's name, Davis. Of course, this would make him "Miles Davis", an appellation carrying, I think, too much weight for the character to bear.) The boy attends a sort of magnet school, some kind of residential academy, also in Brooklyn. Feeling lonely and out of place in the elite school, the boy seeks out his shady uncle and the two of them paint a glorious mural in an abandoned subway station buried somewhere near the Brooklyn Bridge. A radioactive spider -- and the beast is an electric neon day-glow arachnid -- bites the kid and he develops super-powers. Unfortunately, he can't control these powers and his first duels with evil characters result in his defeat. The principal villain, a huge rectangular black obelisk, equipped with a little belligerent head that's all bald skull and savage jaw, has harnessed an apocalyptic machine that accesses other universes. According to quantum theory, there are an infinity of universes and, therefore, as it turns out an infinite number of Spidermen. Peter Parker, Spiderman's feckless alter ego, is killed by the bad guy notwithstanding the hero's efforts. But, while mourning at the grave of Parker, the space-time continuum ruptures, an effect involving an explosion of jagged multi-colored crystals, and another Peter Parker appears. This version of Spiderman is overweight and unshaven -- he has brunette hair, is a wise-guy and palpable out-of-shape. He helps Miles learn how to harness his powers, although he's too cynical to be much of an instructor. Ultimately, several other versions of Spiderman appear: one of them is Peter Porker, a nebbish cartoon pig with spider powers; another is Spiderman Noir a black and white figure that appears against a shadowy black and white background with a gale always whipping through his hair (the hero speaks in the jargon of tough-guys in nineteen-thirties crime movies). There's a spider-girl and another version of Spiderman from Japan -- an anime maiden with huge long-lashed eyes, dressed in the uniform of a Japanese schoolgirl and accompanied by a crab-like robot war-machine. These different versions of Spiderman all come draped in landscapes appropriate to them -- thus, the Noir spiderman is surrounded by billowy black and white shadows, Peter Porker has Warner Brothers anvils and giant wooden hammers that he deploys and comes equipped with a Roger Rabbit toonville backdrop; the Japanese girl is deployed against the static but beautifully drawn backgrounds used in classical anime, and spider-girl is a white figure often surrounded by a sort of floral halo. The film's point is that there are an infinite number of spider-man heroes -- one for every race and gender and color and creed. Indeed, the film expresses the sentiment that ultimately everyone in the audience is potentially a spider-man, a point that is made in a very moving fashion in a final homage to Stan Lee at the end of the movie: we see Lee's signature glasses lying abandoned in a glowing void and there are words to the effect that "anyone who seeks good as its own reward" is a super-hero. The various versions of Spiderman, each associated with his or her own texture and style of animation all join forces for the grandiose final battle that takes place in a constantly morphing "spider-verse", an entangled web of multi-verses through which the characters plummet in a sort of infinite and endless fall.
This is a wonderful movie, exceedingly clever and witty, and spectacular beyond my ability to describe the film's imagery. It was made by armies of animators over many years -- one of the final titles in the picture lists the number of babies that were born to the people working on the film during its preparation: the list is about 20 or 25 names long. Make sure you stay for all the closing credits. First, there are a number of fantastically baroque and ornate stills depicting the notion of an infinity of spider-men. The final credits are literally wallpapered with them in Pop Art arrays that outdo anything that actual Pop Art ever accomplished. Then, there are several very funny gags appended to the end of the movie.
I suppose this film embodies the future of popular entertainment. I grieve for the absence of anything that seems real or human in an massive endeavor of this kind. But the recompense is that the movie is also beautiful beyond description. And, some of the most beautiful images, are the most modest ones -- feathery snow falling on the dark city and its alleyways, the trees in a autumnal forest, the rush and roar of traffic and the sleek, gleaming skyscrapers rearing up over the rivers and bridges. In one shot, we see above the character a junction box on a utility pole -- a mundane image: but the pole and box are bathed in preternaturally glorious light, a great sea of radiance that transfigures everything that it touches.
Giants and Toys
A Japanese salary-man is coughing up blood due to overwork. His subordinate says that he wants to escape the mad pace of life in the Tokyo business world: "I will live like a human being," the subordinate proclaims. "Are you kidding?" his boss says, "this is Japan." Yasuza Masumara's comedy Giants and Toys (1958) explores the application of the samurai or Bushido code to business, specifically the candy industry. The film is an acerbic indictment of the anything goes morality of Japanese industry. And, it's more than a little crazed in itself with wild montages cut to the rhythm of a man flicking a cigarette lighter, images multiplying wildly, and bizarre characters, including fashion-photographer who fancies himself an heir to Lord Byron. Nothing, the film seems to propose, can be more weird and surrealistic than a Japanese ad campaign and the film luxuriates in images of commerce gone completely rogue. The picture's sardonic vision of Japanese business and advertising is directed with a ferocious attack that seems like combination of Billy Wilder and Frank Tashlin.
The premise in Giants and Toys is simple enough. Three competing companies manufacture caramel candies. These firms are World, occupying a low skyscraper surmounted by gimcrack planet, Giant, and Apollo. All three firms are perplexed and fearful that they are losing market share because an American candy manufacturer has invaded their territory with caramels that somehow change taste as you suck on them. These leads the marketing departments of the three competitors to work feverishly to implement advertising campaigns to rescue their products. (It doesn't seem to occur to anyone to make a better product -- the idea is to seduce the public into buying caramels on the basis of gaudy advertising campaigns.) At World, Mr. Goda has risen to the head of marketing because of his marriage to the boss' daughter -- this advantage just makes him work even harder and more frenetically. Goda' sidekick and lieutenant is Nishi, an earnest young man looking to get ahead. Goda sights a girl in a bar who seems well-suited to pitch World's caramels. This is Kyoku, who is said to look like a monkey -- she has rotten teeth, a tribute to her love of caramels. Nishi and Goda hire the girl (she works for a cab company) and make her into a media star -- Haramura, a fashion photographer, features her in a Manga spread and the public is enthralled by the persona that the company creates for her. (The aspect of the film is similar to My Fair Lady -- the two ad-men, like Pygmalian, create a sex-star out of the improbably plain and impoverished Kyoku; but their Galatea turns out to be impossible to control.) Meanwhile Giant promotes an ad campaign featuring a real giant who gives away product from his giant-mobile and loyalty prizes for customers that include small animals. Apollo's advertising staff, including a woman who is Nishi's girlfriend, promote the candy through a competition offering a "subsidized life from cradle to wedding." Giant's ad-man is a college buddy of Nishi. Nishi, Masami Kurahashi (the girl at Apollo) and Yokogama (Nishi's school chum) all get together from time to time to gossip and drink. But, in fact, everyone is engaged in industrial espionage -- everyone is spying on everyone else. Ultimately, the caramel factory owned by Apollo burns down. Far from lessening the competition, this just drives World and Giant into even more destructive and fierce competition -- it now seems possible to corner the market. Kyoku, who has become intractable, gets her teeth fixed and returns to the market as a refined lady -- she's now too dignified to pitch caramels. Instead, she appears in a lavish song-and-dance review, shrieking like Ima Sumac and hurling herself around half-naked -- her cabaret dance involves a "native woman" who saw blood spilling from a wounded man and, then, became possessed by the God of Death. World can't get her to appear at the Space Expo -- World's theme has been outer-space and Kyoku has made most of her appearances wearing a space suit and carrying a ray gun. Goda is going to don the space suit and carry the ray gun to the Expo but he collapses spitting blood from overwork. Nishi goes in his place and the film's last scene shows him dressed idiotically as a space-man strolling down a neon-lit street in Edo, his ray gun making a clicking sound when he fires it.
There's a lot of sound and fury in this film. Kyoku's dance number is way over-the-top and there is other music that features wailing saxophones and people howling barbarically to the sound of tribal drums. In one sequence, an aerial shot shows white-robed rioters -- the idea is that people can eat caramels while demonstrating in the street. The women are all horny and demand sex from the men who are too tired to accommodate them. At one point, the subtitles quotes Andy Warhol -- someone says that Kyoku has had her "fifteen minutes of fame". Except, of course, Warhol's statement to that effect was made in the 1960's and this film was premiered in 1958. A lot of the picture is astonishing. The idea that the film promotes is that Japanese commerce is driven by a misplaced zeal -- the Bushido spirit creates chaos, wild Banzai charges in all directions. At one point, Mr. Goda says that he stands for the "dictatorship of publicity" -- caramels and advertising circuses have so degraded the sensibility of the public that almost nothing excites them anymore. This leads to a self-destructive publicity spiral -- with each agency aiming to top the other with regard to vehemence of its advertising. The film is convincingly weird. Michelangelo Antonioni is said to have clambered out of his death bed to attend a ten-film retrospective of Masumaru's films and this picture certainly suggests the director as a figure requiring further study.
The premise in Giants and Toys is simple enough. Three competing companies manufacture caramel candies. These firms are World, occupying a low skyscraper surmounted by gimcrack planet, Giant, and Apollo. All three firms are perplexed and fearful that they are losing market share because an American candy manufacturer has invaded their territory with caramels that somehow change taste as you suck on them. These leads the marketing departments of the three competitors to work feverishly to implement advertising campaigns to rescue their products. (It doesn't seem to occur to anyone to make a better product -- the idea is to seduce the public into buying caramels on the basis of gaudy advertising campaigns.) At World, Mr. Goda has risen to the head of marketing because of his marriage to the boss' daughter -- this advantage just makes him work even harder and more frenetically. Goda' sidekick and lieutenant is Nishi, an earnest young man looking to get ahead. Goda sights a girl in a bar who seems well-suited to pitch World's caramels. This is Kyoku, who is said to look like a monkey -- she has rotten teeth, a tribute to her love of caramels. Nishi and Goda hire the girl (she works for a cab company) and make her into a media star -- Haramura, a fashion photographer, features her in a Manga spread and the public is enthralled by the persona that the company creates for her. (The aspect of the film is similar to My Fair Lady -- the two ad-men, like Pygmalian, create a sex-star out of the improbably plain and impoverished Kyoku; but their Galatea turns out to be impossible to control.) Meanwhile Giant promotes an ad campaign featuring a real giant who gives away product from his giant-mobile and loyalty prizes for customers that include small animals. Apollo's advertising staff, including a woman who is Nishi's girlfriend, promote the candy through a competition offering a "subsidized life from cradle to wedding." Giant's ad-man is a college buddy of Nishi. Nishi, Masami Kurahashi (the girl at Apollo) and Yokogama (Nishi's school chum) all get together from time to time to gossip and drink. But, in fact, everyone is engaged in industrial espionage -- everyone is spying on everyone else. Ultimately, the caramel factory owned by Apollo burns down. Far from lessening the competition, this just drives World and Giant into even more destructive and fierce competition -- it now seems possible to corner the market. Kyoku, who has become intractable, gets her teeth fixed and returns to the market as a refined lady -- she's now too dignified to pitch caramels. Instead, she appears in a lavish song-and-dance review, shrieking like Ima Sumac and hurling herself around half-naked -- her cabaret dance involves a "native woman" who saw blood spilling from a wounded man and, then, became possessed by the God of Death. World can't get her to appear at the Space Expo -- World's theme has been outer-space and Kyoku has made most of her appearances wearing a space suit and carrying a ray gun. Goda is going to don the space suit and carry the ray gun to the Expo but he collapses spitting blood from overwork. Nishi goes in his place and the film's last scene shows him dressed idiotically as a space-man strolling down a neon-lit street in Edo, his ray gun making a clicking sound when he fires it.
There's a lot of sound and fury in this film. Kyoku's dance number is way over-the-top and there is other music that features wailing saxophones and people howling barbarically to the sound of tribal drums. In one sequence, an aerial shot shows white-robed rioters -- the idea is that people can eat caramels while demonstrating in the street. The women are all horny and demand sex from the men who are too tired to accommodate them. At one point, the subtitles quotes Andy Warhol -- someone says that Kyoku has had her "fifteen minutes of fame". Except, of course, Warhol's statement to that effect was made in the 1960's and this film was premiered in 1958. A lot of the picture is astonishing. The idea that the film promotes is that Japanese commerce is driven by a misplaced zeal -- the Bushido spirit creates chaos, wild Banzai charges in all directions. At one point, Mr. Goda says that he stands for the "dictatorship of publicity" -- caramels and advertising circuses have so degraded the sensibility of the public that almost nothing excites them anymore. This leads to a self-destructive publicity spiral -- with each agency aiming to top the other with regard to vehemence of its advertising. The film is convincingly weird. Michelangelo Antonioni is said to have clambered out of his death bed to attend a ten-film retrospective of Masumaru's films and this picture certainly suggests the director as a figure requiring further study.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Roma
Late in the film, Alphonse Cuaron's Roma (2018) establishes a location by showing a Mexican residential street during a downpour. A man and boy stand under a precarious-looking shelter and speak to another. The subtitle says "Speaking an indigenous language". The language is apparently not Mixteca which the subtitles translate, albeit in square brackets -- and, of course, the two Indians are not speaking Spanish. We don't know anything about these people except that they look poor and they are huddled together against the cold-looking rain and speaking some Indian language that we are not expected to understand. This shot is one of very few in Roma that does not show the film's protagonist, Cleo, a Mixteca girl who works with another woman from her village as a domestic servant for a upper middle-class Mexican family living in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico City called Roma. Although the shot doesn't do anything but establish that the succeeding images will take place inside the family's home on the other side of the wall where the Indian father and young son are sheltering against the rain, the image is paradigmatic for the film -- Cuaron's movie, a serene neo-realist classic, is about the people who are outside the focus of most films and most narratives, the people without history, the poor who work as servants in people's homes or who sell food on the street or who labor in hot fields, the Mexican yeomanry, the campesinos speaking embattled Indian languages who have left the farm and their villages for an uncertain future in the big city. Set in 1970 and 1971, Cuaron's film patiently chronicles events in Cleo's life without, except for a few shots late in film, drawing any conclusions from what we are shown, not hectoring us about poverty and social responsibility, but, rather, simply, applying formally lucid means to show us how this woman lives. It is up to us to determine the ultimate significance of what the film's close study of Cleo's life reveals. Although the film is not a documentary and, indeed, has the design of a lyric poem in which certain images prefigure or rhyme (or comment on) other recurring images, many of movie's sequences have the appearance of a closely observed documentary.
The film's subject is demonstrated in Roma's title sequence. We see some nondescript tiles -- the sort of thing we walk over every day without taking any notice. Sudsy water spills over the tiles. Again and again, the tiles are flooded with soapy water. After about two minutes, the camera tilts up and we see an equally nondescript Indian woman, probably in her late teens, dumping water on the tiles to clean them -- the water swirls into a drain. The woman is cleaning the narrow driveway into the family compound, a place soiled by dog excrement from the affluent family's pet hound, Boraas. One of Cleo's chores is to sweep up the ubiquitous dog shit and wash down the driveway floor. The driveway is one of the film's leit motifs, both visually and thematically. The narrow driveway gated onto the residential street where the family lives is simply too narrow for the big GM or Chevrolet cars that the parent's drive -- they are forever scraping the sides of the car against the walls of the enclosure. (In traffic, the family's mother actually gets her car stuck between two trucks. The scene is slapstick but the point seems to be that the cars made in the USA are simply too large for their Mexico City environs. (The family owns a little VW beetle but, for most of the movie, its tucked-away in a corner of the courtyard at the center of the living quarters, gathering dust and rarely driven.) Cuaron shows that the pretensions of the upper middle class professional Mexicans living in Roma are too big for the city in which they reside -- the family for which Cleo works is headed by selfish medical doctor, Antonia, and his wife, Sofia, trained as biochemist, but, possibly, teaching in her profession. The doctor abandons his wife and family for reasons that the film never establishes and, after the first twenty minutes, is absent from the family home. (We see him very briefly in a chaotic scene in which Cleo goes into labor and, then, delivers a still-born infant -- as with his family, he makes a commitment to visit her but seems unreliable and doesn't follow through.) The travails of the middle class married professionals are tangential to the film's parallel plot -- the story of how Cleo gets pregnant with her vicious boyfriend, Fermin, and, then, is abandoned by him. At the heart of the film is the theme of unreliable men, the dark side of Mexican machismo -- selfishness that results in the women being alone. (In one key scene, the mother cries out to Cleo that it is the fate of women to be left by their men and "always alone.") The film's plot, if the gossamer tissue of events shown can be ascribed a narrative, is Cleo's unhappy liaison with Fermin, her pregnancy and the delivery of her child during the Tlat riots. These events mirror the collapse of Antonio and Sofia's marriage and the effect of Antonio's absence from the home (he claims to be working in Quebec) on the couple's four children. In default of their parents, who are occupied with their own sorrows, the children are, in effect, raised by Cleo, at least during the season of marital discontent.
Roma reminds me a bit of the similarly serene, almost indifferent, narrative in Linklater's Boyhood, also a film about a group of people that we imagine to be "outside of history" -- that is, children. As with Boyhood, Cuaron's film is resolutely quotidian, most of the picture involves day-to-day activities involving the family, or Cleo and her friends. Cleo appears in just about every scene in the movie. Indeed, her central role in the film is often to the detriment of other aspects of the narrative or the depiction of milieu. In two scenes, Cleo and her friend, the girl from the village, run down crowded streets -- the street scenes have been lovingly reconstructed and the imagery is dense with period cars, beggars, street vendors, and fascinating storefronts with little and big crowds of people everywhere. We would like to enjoy all this detail but find that our eye can't focus on the running girls and the street scene at the same time -- of course, we are guided to keep our attention on the two girls, thus, perceiving the fascinating anecdotally rich scenes occurring on the street around them as a confused blur. This is one of the techniques that Cuaron uses to keep our eyes steadfastly fixed on Cleo -- even in big crowd scenes, we keep looking for her to appear and, in almost all instances, our attention is rewarded: she appears in a door or walking down the street or amidst a crowd of people emerging from a movie theater. Even when she is inconspicuous amidst all the exotic scenery of Mexico City in 1970 and 1971, we have the sense that, nonetheless, she is somewhere present.
Roma is shot in lustrous black and white. The movie has no music and the events shown are depicted in sequence shots, often two or three minutes long, and usually recording events from middle-distance. There are very few close-ups. I identified two close-shots of Cleo in an early scene in which she sits up in bed watching her boyfriend Fermin practicing kendo in the nude -- his violence and swagger is contrasted with her passivity. There's a poignant close-up of Cleo, numb with grief, after she has lost her baby. But, otherwise, we don't see her in close-shots -- most of the time, the camera maintains its distance, both from her and the other characters, and I didn't really have a good sense for exactly how Cleo looks until the scene showing her grief. This is true of the other actors as well -- we rarely see anyone in close-up; rather, we observe the actors embedded in their interactions with others usually glimpsed across a room or street, part of an ensemble or crowd. The four children are not exploited for their "cuteness" -- similarly, the dog, Borass, as well as the other canines inhabiting the picture (there is a dog in just about every shot) is not idealized in any way: he's a typical, defiant, and insubordinate Mexican dog. The film's technique is not rebarbative -- it doesn't lock you out of the picture like some films of this kind (for instance, movies by Portugal's Pedro Costas): you can see what you need to see and hear what you need to hear. But the film's technique is fundamentally epic -- Cleo's suffering occurs in the context of a vast indifferent world: what happens to her happens to thousands of others amidst millions who are going about their business with no concern of any kind for the plight of the film's protagonist: she is one of a multitude all striving against the obstacles and hardships that life inevitably interposes. In this regard, Cuaron's epic sensibility casts the struggles of his characters against a background of natural hazards and calamities: there is an earthquake that hurls debris down on newborn babies (including a tiny child in an incubator that is covered with fragments of the roof -- this is a species of foreshadowing); a wild fire blazing in a forest on New Year's Eve nearly burns down a hacienda -- the party-goers seems to regard the blaze as just another, more spectacular form of entertainment: children play in the fire and a drunken man, dressed like a monster, sings a long, sad ballad. Near the end of the film, the characters, including small children, blithely venture into vicious-looking waves at a bedraggled resort near Vera Cruz -- Cuaron stages a sequence in the menacing surf that is intensely frightening and a master-class in how to deploy action across a wide canvas without montage. The film's Tolstoy-like epic qualities are best embodied in a scene that follows the forest fire: the family with Cleo walk over furrowed fields in a huge landscape shot to show the cultivated land, wooded hills, and a huge snow-covered volcano at the head of the valley. The camera tracks with Cleo who joyfully recalls the village in Oaxaca where she was born and observes that the air and the smell of the fields is like her home "except it was drier there." The shot is extraordinary because of the natural beauty that it shows, the clarity of the air, the great brooding volcano, and, most importantly, a couple of yapping black dogs that keep shepherding a small flock of sheep into tight spiraling circles in the scene's deep middle distance. The image seems, somehow, colossal, particularly after the alarming fire sequence -- a grandiose tracking shot that cuts against the urban grain of the crowded streets, the constricted driveway and car-park, the chaotic interiors in Mexico City.
Not only natural forces threaten the characters in Roma. In the background, there is a discrete, but menacing subtext of political violence. Paramilitary groups practice with clubs in the squalid Colonia on the hilltops around Mexico City. At the dinner table, one of the kids recounts how a boy was shot to death for throwing a water balloon at the police. Shady-looking military bands periodically march like zombies down the streets. These images presage a bloody riot that occurs when Cleo, heavily pregnant, goes to a furniture store to buy a baby crib. Outside, rioters surge forward to attack police and people are shot down in the street. Cuaron stages this scene with hundreds of extras as something only imperfectly glimpsed by Cleo -- there is no god's eye or privileged view of the bloody chaos. We see what Cleo sees -- rioters running up the center of the street, people firing guns from behind cars, a girl holding up her boyfriend's head as he bleeds to death on the pavement. A death squad pursues a demonstrator and his girlfriend into the furniture store and guns him down as the store clerks scream. (Here, the film relies upon an unlikely coincidence: Cleo's water breaks during the shooting, perhaps, because of the shock and Fermin appears, carrying his kendo stave in the furniture store, apparently part of the paramilitary death squads roaming the streets.) Cleo can't get to the hospital in time and the baby dies. A long grim scene shows medical personnel stitching up a tear in Cleo's vagina while other nurses wrap the dead baby like a Christmas present, swaddling it in white cloth, in the background of the image. Cleo's distance and isolation from the dead baby is palpable and seems to verify Sofia's claim that Mexican women must bear their suffering alone and without help or support from others.
In the film's last ten minutes, Cuaron discretely implies an identity between Cleo and Mexico. Although she doesn't swim, Cleo has fearlessly charged out into the turbulent sea to save two of Sofia's children caught in the undertow. (The family has gone to a shabby seaside resort so that Antonio can retrieve his book cases from the home -- an event that explains a number of long, tracking shots early in the film in which the books and book cases are prominently shown.) The movie opens up into a huge landscape -- only the second big landscape seen from a high perspective in the film. We see the family in their small car driving across a desert that seems archetypally "Mexican" -- cactus, rock outcroppings, and some distant mountains. The film cuts to the interior of the car where the children are excitedly discussing how Cleo saved them from drowning. After some dialogue in the moving car, the film cuts to an exterior shot in which we see Cleo's face behind the window, a panorama of the Mexican landscape superimposed upon her features. This image seems to suggest that Cleo is representative -- that she embodies certain aspects of the Mexican national character. I am ambivalent about representations of this sort -- I doubt that there is any "authentic" way to be Mexican just as there is no essential or fundamentally "authentic" way to be an American. Nonetheless, for a moment, Cuaron implies an identity between Cleo and the Mexican land. The ending is more subtle: the servants do laundry on the roof of the house. We see Cleo carrying a large basket of laundry up a steep, daunting iron stair, really more of a fire escape than steps for daily use -- we see her ascending upward toward the blue sky over Mexico City where a jet is slowly sailing across the heavens. She vanishes onto the rooftop and the film's title Roma is superimposed over the image together with a dedication, apparently to woman similar to Cleo who was important in Cuaron's life.
When I told my son, who attended the film with me, that Cuaron seemed to be equating Cleo with the Mexican people, he replied that this would mean that these people were ignorant, uneducated, docile, readily manipulated to their own disadvantage, and politically naïve. My response was that this was true but that Cuaron also had shown that these people are indefatigable, gentle, loving, selfless and courageous.
Roma has been shown in some select theaters to qualify for the Academy Award. The film will be on Netflix in late December or early January 2019. It's an achievement of high order and deserves your attention. (I'm unsure how the movie will look on TV -- many of the wide-screen images require the audience to scan the picture and pick out different zones of activity and secondary areas of emphasis -- for instance, the women walking along the hillside above the swirl of dogs and sheep that the dogs are either herding or harassing. I presume that audiences will be able to do this on smaller screens although some of the shots undoubtedly may prove puzzling.)
The film's subject is demonstrated in Roma's title sequence. We see some nondescript tiles -- the sort of thing we walk over every day without taking any notice. Sudsy water spills over the tiles. Again and again, the tiles are flooded with soapy water. After about two minutes, the camera tilts up and we see an equally nondescript Indian woman, probably in her late teens, dumping water on the tiles to clean them -- the water swirls into a drain. The woman is cleaning the narrow driveway into the family compound, a place soiled by dog excrement from the affluent family's pet hound, Boraas. One of Cleo's chores is to sweep up the ubiquitous dog shit and wash down the driveway floor. The driveway is one of the film's leit motifs, both visually and thematically. The narrow driveway gated onto the residential street where the family lives is simply too narrow for the big GM or Chevrolet cars that the parent's drive -- they are forever scraping the sides of the car against the walls of the enclosure. (In traffic, the family's mother actually gets her car stuck between two trucks. The scene is slapstick but the point seems to be that the cars made in the USA are simply too large for their Mexico City environs. (The family owns a little VW beetle but, for most of the movie, its tucked-away in a corner of the courtyard at the center of the living quarters, gathering dust and rarely driven.) Cuaron shows that the pretensions of the upper middle class professional Mexicans living in Roma are too big for the city in which they reside -- the family for which Cleo works is headed by selfish medical doctor, Antonia, and his wife, Sofia, trained as biochemist, but, possibly, teaching in her profession. The doctor abandons his wife and family for reasons that the film never establishes and, after the first twenty minutes, is absent from the family home. (We see him very briefly in a chaotic scene in which Cleo goes into labor and, then, delivers a still-born infant -- as with his family, he makes a commitment to visit her but seems unreliable and doesn't follow through.) The travails of the middle class married professionals are tangential to the film's parallel plot -- the story of how Cleo gets pregnant with her vicious boyfriend, Fermin, and, then, is abandoned by him. At the heart of the film is the theme of unreliable men, the dark side of Mexican machismo -- selfishness that results in the women being alone. (In one key scene, the mother cries out to Cleo that it is the fate of women to be left by their men and "always alone.") The film's plot, if the gossamer tissue of events shown can be ascribed a narrative, is Cleo's unhappy liaison with Fermin, her pregnancy and the delivery of her child during the Tlat riots. These events mirror the collapse of Antonio and Sofia's marriage and the effect of Antonio's absence from the home (he claims to be working in Quebec) on the couple's four children. In default of their parents, who are occupied with their own sorrows, the children are, in effect, raised by Cleo, at least during the season of marital discontent.
Roma reminds me a bit of the similarly serene, almost indifferent, narrative in Linklater's Boyhood, also a film about a group of people that we imagine to be "outside of history" -- that is, children. As with Boyhood, Cuaron's film is resolutely quotidian, most of the picture involves day-to-day activities involving the family, or Cleo and her friends. Cleo appears in just about every scene in the movie. Indeed, her central role in the film is often to the detriment of other aspects of the narrative or the depiction of milieu. In two scenes, Cleo and her friend, the girl from the village, run down crowded streets -- the street scenes have been lovingly reconstructed and the imagery is dense with period cars, beggars, street vendors, and fascinating storefronts with little and big crowds of people everywhere. We would like to enjoy all this detail but find that our eye can't focus on the running girls and the street scene at the same time -- of course, we are guided to keep our attention on the two girls, thus, perceiving the fascinating anecdotally rich scenes occurring on the street around them as a confused blur. This is one of the techniques that Cuaron uses to keep our eyes steadfastly fixed on Cleo -- even in big crowd scenes, we keep looking for her to appear and, in almost all instances, our attention is rewarded: she appears in a door or walking down the street or amidst a crowd of people emerging from a movie theater. Even when she is inconspicuous amidst all the exotic scenery of Mexico City in 1970 and 1971, we have the sense that, nonetheless, she is somewhere present.
Roma is shot in lustrous black and white. The movie has no music and the events shown are depicted in sequence shots, often two or three minutes long, and usually recording events from middle-distance. There are very few close-ups. I identified two close-shots of Cleo in an early scene in which she sits up in bed watching her boyfriend Fermin practicing kendo in the nude -- his violence and swagger is contrasted with her passivity. There's a poignant close-up of Cleo, numb with grief, after she has lost her baby. But, otherwise, we don't see her in close-shots -- most of the time, the camera maintains its distance, both from her and the other characters, and I didn't really have a good sense for exactly how Cleo looks until the scene showing her grief. This is true of the other actors as well -- we rarely see anyone in close-up; rather, we observe the actors embedded in their interactions with others usually glimpsed across a room or street, part of an ensemble or crowd. The four children are not exploited for their "cuteness" -- similarly, the dog, Borass, as well as the other canines inhabiting the picture (there is a dog in just about every shot) is not idealized in any way: he's a typical, defiant, and insubordinate Mexican dog. The film's technique is not rebarbative -- it doesn't lock you out of the picture like some films of this kind (for instance, movies by Portugal's Pedro Costas): you can see what you need to see and hear what you need to hear. But the film's technique is fundamentally epic -- Cleo's suffering occurs in the context of a vast indifferent world: what happens to her happens to thousands of others amidst millions who are going about their business with no concern of any kind for the plight of the film's protagonist: she is one of a multitude all striving against the obstacles and hardships that life inevitably interposes. In this regard, Cuaron's epic sensibility casts the struggles of his characters against a background of natural hazards and calamities: there is an earthquake that hurls debris down on newborn babies (including a tiny child in an incubator that is covered with fragments of the roof -- this is a species of foreshadowing); a wild fire blazing in a forest on New Year's Eve nearly burns down a hacienda -- the party-goers seems to regard the blaze as just another, more spectacular form of entertainment: children play in the fire and a drunken man, dressed like a monster, sings a long, sad ballad. Near the end of the film, the characters, including small children, blithely venture into vicious-looking waves at a bedraggled resort near Vera Cruz -- Cuaron stages a sequence in the menacing surf that is intensely frightening and a master-class in how to deploy action across a wide canvas without montage. The film's Tolstoy-like epic qualities are best embodied in a scene that follows the forest fire: the family with Cleo walk over furrowed fields in a huge landscape shot to show the cultivated land, wooded hills, and a huge snow-covered volcano at the head of the valley. The camera tracks with Cleo who joyfully recalls the village in Oaxaca where she was born and observes that the air and the smell of the fields is like her home "except it was drier there." The shot is extraordinary because of the natural beauty that it shows, the clarity of the air, the great brooding volcano, and, most importantly, a couple of yapping black dogs that keep shepherding a small flock of sheep into tight spiraling circles in the scene's deep middle distance. The image seems, somehow, colossal, particularly after the alarming fire sequence -- a grandiose tracking shot that cuts against the urban grain of the crowded streets, the constricted driveway and car-park, the chaotic interiors in Mexico City.
Not only natural forces threaten the characters in Roma. In the background, there is a discrete, but menacing subtext of political violence. Paramilitary groups practice with clubs in the squalid Colonia on the hilltops around Mexico City. At the dinner table, one of the kids recounts how a boy was shot to death for throwing a water balloon at the police. Shady-looking military bands periodically march like zombies down the streets. These images presage a bloody riot that occurs when Cleo, heavily pregnant, goes to a furniture store to buy a baby crib. Outside, rioters surge forward to attack police and people are shot down in the street. Cuaron stages this scene with hundreds of extras as something only imperfectly glimpsed by Cleo -- there is no god's eye or privileged view of the bloody chaos. We see what Cleo sees -- rioters running up the center of the street, people firing guns from behind cars, a girl holding up her boyfriend's head as he bleeds to death on the pavement. A death squad pursues a demonstrator and his girlfriend into the furniture store and guns him down as the store clerks scream. (Here, the film relies upon an unlikely coincidence: Cleo's water breaks during the shooting, perhaps, because of the shock and Fermin appears, carrying his kendo stave in the furniture store, apparently part of the paramilitary death squads roaming the streets.) Cleo can't get to the hospital in time and the baby dies. A long grim scene shows medical personnel stitching up a tear in Cleo's vagina while other nurses wrap the dead baby like a Christmas present, swaddling it in white cloth, in the background of the image. Cleo's distance and isolation from the dead baby is palpable and seems to verify Sofia's claim that Mexican women must bear their suffering alone and without help or support from others.
In the film's last ten minutes, Cuaron discretely implies an identity between Cleo and Mexico. Although she doesn't swim, Cleo has fearlessly charged out into the turbulent sea to save two of Sofia's children caught in the undertow. (The family has gone to a shabby seaside resort so that Antonio can retrieve his book cases from the home -- an event that explains a number of long, tracking shots early in the film in which the books and book cases are prominently shown.) The movie opens up into a huge landscape -- only the second big landscape seen from a high perspective in the film. We see the family in their small car driving across a desert that seems archetypally "Mexican" -- cactus, rock outcroppings, and some distant mountains. The film cuts to the interior of the car where the children are excitedly discussing how Cleo saved them from drowning. After some dialogue in the moving car, the film cuts to an exterior shot in which we see Cleo's face behind the window, a panorama of the Mexican landscape superimposed upon her features. This image seems to suggest that Cleo is representative -- that she embodies certain aspects of the Mexican national character. I am ambivalent about representations of this sort -- I doubt that there is any "authentic" way to be Mexican just as there is no essential or fundamentally "authentic" way to be an American. Nonetheless, for a moment, Cuaron implies an identity between Cleo and the Mexican land. The ending is more subtle: the servants do laundry on the roof of the house. We see Cleo carrying a large basket of laundry up a steep, daunting iron stair, really more of a fire escape than steps for daily use -- we see her ascending upward toward the blue sky over Mexico City where a jet is slowly sailing across the heavens. She vanishes onto the rooftop and the film's title Roma is superimposed over the image together with a dedication, apparently to woman similar to Cleo who was important in Cuaron's life.
When I told my son, who attended the film with me, that Cuaron seemed to be equating Cleo with the Mexican people, he replied that this would mean that these people were ignorant, uneducated, docile, readily manipulated to their own disadvantage, and politically naïve. My response was that this was true but that Cuaron also had shown that these people are indefatigable, gentle, loving, selfless and courageous.
Roma has been shown in some select theaters to qualify for the Academy Award. The film will be on Netflix in late December or early January 2019. It's an achievement of high order and deserves your attention. (I'm unsure how the movie will look on TV -- many of the wide-screen images require the audience to scan the picture and pick out different zones of activity and secondary areas of emphasis -- for instance, the women walking along the hillside above the swirl of dogs and sheep that the dogs are either herding or harassing. I presume that audiences will be able to do this on smaller screens although some of the shots undoubtedly may prove puzzling.)
Sunday, December 9, 2018
Eskimo
The story of how Eskimo (1933) was made is probably more interesting than what's on the screen. That said, the movie is pretty good and, certainly, fascinating throughout. The ethnographic imagery in the film is probably valuable today -- no one hunts or lives nowadays like the Yupik natives shown in the picture. Eskimo was one of three films directed by W.S.("Woody") Dyke in 1933 -- the other two were Penthouse and The Prizefighter and the Lady. (Dyke made White Shadows in the South Pacific, a picture started by Flaherty and related to Murnau and Flaherty's Tabu in 1929, directed Trader Horn in 1930, premiered Johnny Weissmueller in Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932 and inaugurated the sophisticated Thin Man series in 1934.) It's unclear how Dyke accomplished all this when the credits tell us that Eskimo was shot in the Northwest Territories over the course of two years -- presumably a second crew compiled the ethnographic footing and, then, Dyke added the complicated story using studio inserts and lousy rear-projection. The film is politically incorrect --no one uses the name "Eskimo" anymore and the leading female actors seem to me to be Chinese or Japanese. The hero, Mala (played by Ray Wise aka Ray Mala) was the son of a Russian Jew and a Yupik woman. (He also operated cameras, was promoted as the "Eskimo Cary Grant", and made a number of other films, both as an actor and cinematographer.) Although some academics have argued to the contrary, the film is not racist -- in fact, great care was taken to accurately depict Yupik life and the film was shot in Inupiak, the local language, at great expense -- the kh sound in that language caused "chopping" or the microphone to cut-off and the Asian leading ladies had to learn Inupiak to recite their lines.
The film is pre-Code and graphic. A woman breast-feeds her baby in close-up in an early shot and the film's subject, the Eskimo custom of sharing their women with outsiders, is exploited for all its worth -- in fact, the "weird moral code" of the North is the subject of the picture. (The film was sometimes shown under the titles of Mala the Magnificent or Eskimo Wife-Traders of the Arctic.) The movie is, in effect, a silent picture with the works spoken by the natives recorded and, then, translated in intertitles. The dialogue spoken by Europeans is poorly recorded, or has deteriorated with time, and is difficult to hear. Mala is a great hunter. In the opening scene, a sort of idyll, we see him filling up his canoe with salmon that he spear-fishes and ducks that she shoots out of the sky with his bow and arrow. He is happily married to Aba and has two sons. An Indian from another tribe comes to village and Mala shares his wife with him, demonstrating the "weird custom" that forms the backbone of the film's plot. Learning from the outsider that white men are nearby, Mala and his family travels across the tundra to see them and trade for a rifle. The white men are trapped in a boat stuck like Shackleton's Endurance in the Arctic ice. The captain of the boat seizes Aba and gets her drunk, apparently raping her. (There is a big close-up of her drunk and half-naked, giggling at the camera, and accorded full glamor treatment: she's shot in soft-focus with rim-lighting.) She staggers back to the igloo nearby that Mala has built. Mala is angry because the Captain "didn't ask his permission" to take his wife. The ship captain is a vicious fellow and he abducts Aba again, rapes her, and leaves her staggering drunk. She wanders out across the ice, collapses, and is, then, shot by a white hunter who thinks she is a basking seal. Mala goes to the ship and kills the captain with his harpoon. He, then, returns to his people. Another man in the tribe has two women -- perhaps, they are his wives or daughters. He gives them to Mala. But the hero is still grieving for Aba and can't perform sexually. Mala, then, goes on a vision-quest, changes his name, and takes the two sisters for his wives. Meanwhile, the R.C.M.P. has sent two Mounties to hunt down Mala for the killing of the white sea captain. The Mounties get lost and collapse in the snow, but are found, just in time, by Mala and his family. They save the two men who, then, repay Mala's kindness, which presumably includes a little wife-sharing, by luring the great hunter to a miserable stick-built hut far away at a trading post. Mala feeds everyone by hunting game and is much liked by all the white men. A judge appears (played by Van Dyke himself) and orders Mala be handcuffed. Mala rips his arm out of the cuffs in a disturbing and gruesome scene and flees with eight dogs and a stolen rifle and ammunition. Unfortunately, the ammunition is 363 caliber and not 30.06, the muzzle measure of the stolen rifle. Mala has to eat all of his dogs one-by-one and, then, is attacked by a starving wolf. He collapses and is about to freeze when his tribe rescues him. He returns to his two wives and children. (They have been starving in his absence and the movie shoes the drying racks for the meat as bare scaffolds.) The white Mounties appear and Mala leaves with his senior wife, dashing across the ice pack as it roars and crashes and breaks up. Knowing that he is doomed : he and his wife are committing suicide -- going to the "long sleep." The Mounties approach the ice-floe where he is trapped, aim their rifles at him, but are unable to bring themselves to shoot. A scrap of dialogue, added to the end of the film, assures the audience that Mala and his wife will be okay, that they will simply navigate the crumbling ice-floe to the other side of the bay and escape. But the audience would have to be idiots to believe that this optimistic scenario is possible.
The acting by the native people is very good. By contrast, the Europeans and Canadians are wooden and unconvincing. (The evil ship captain is played by the great Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and the movie is based, in part, on two of his novels set in Greenland.) Some of the ethnographic set-pieces are astonishing. There is a spectacular whale hunt and an even more impressive scene in which men in kayaks shoot and stab caribou who have been driven in a vast herd out into a sort of rocky fjord. Modern films always assure us that no animals were hurt during the production of the movie -- lots of animals were most assuredly killed during the production of Eskimo. We see walrus lanced, whales spouting black blood, caribou killed by the dozens, embattled polar bears, dogs being butchered, and, finally, a horrific scene in which Mala fights a starving wolf and, finally, beats the animal to death. (The scene was actually shot with a real starving wolf and a man with a rifle poised behind the camera to shoot the wolf if it got the upper hand in the vicious wrestling match with Mala.) The flight over the ice-pack that is fissuring apart is reminiscent of Lillian Gish's hike across a river, leaping from ice floe to ice floe, in Way Down East -- that's a terrifying sequence and the scenes with the ice-pack fragmenting are equally alarming. The film is unflinching in its depiction of hunting and the dangers of Arctic. The film remains worth watching despite its exploitative aspects.
The film is pre-Code and graphic. A woman breast-feeds her baby in close-up in an early shot and the film's subject, the Eskimo custom of sharing their women with outsiders, is exploited for all its worth -- in fact, the "weird moral code" of the North is the subject of the picture. (The film was sometimes shown under the titles of Mala the Magnificent or Eskimo Wife-Traders of the Arctic.) The movie is, in effect, a silent picture with the works spoken by the natives recorded and, then, translated in intertitles. The dialogue spoken by Europeans is poorly recorded, or has deteriorated with time, and is difficult to hear. Mala is a great hunter. In the opening scene, a sort of idyll, we see him filling up his canoe with salmon that he spear-fishes and ducks that she shoots out of the sky with his bow and arrow. He is happily married to Aba and has two sons. An Indian from another tribe comes to village and Mala shares his wife with him, demonstrating the "weird custom" that forms the backbone of the film's plot. Learning from the outsider that white men are nearby, Mala and his family travels across the tundra to see them and trade for a rifle. The white men are trapped in a boat stuck like Shackleton's Endurance in the Arctic ice. The captain of the boat seizes Aba and gets her drunk, apparently raping her. (There is a big close-up of her drunk and half-naked, giggling at the camera, and accorded full glamor treatment: she's shot in soft-focus with rim-lighting.) She staggers back to the igloo nearby that Mala has built. Mala is angry because the Captain "didn't ask his permission" to take his wife. The ship captain is a vicious fellow and he abducts Aba again, rapes her, and leaves her staggering drunk. She wanders out across the ice, collapses, and is, then, shot by a white hunter who thinks she is a basking seal. Mala goes to the ship and kills the captain with his harpoon. He, then, returns to his people. Another man in the tribe has two women -- perhaps, they are his wives or daughters. He gives them to Mala. But the hero is still grieving for Aba and can't perform sexually. Mala, then, goes on a vision-quest, changes his name, and takes the two sisters for his wives. Meanwhile, the R.C.M.P. has sent two Mounties to hunt down Mala for the killing of the white sea captain. The Mounties get lost and collapse in the snow, but are found, just in time, by Mala and his family. They save the two men who, then, repay Mala's kindness, which presumably includes a little wife-sharing, by luring the great hunter to a miserable stick-built hut far away at a trading post. Mala feeds everyone by hunting game and is much liked by all the white men. A judge appears (played by Van Dyke himself) and orders Mala be handcuffed. Mala rips his arm out of the cuffs in a disturbing and gruesome scene and flees with eight dogs and a stolen rifle and ammunition. Unfortunately, the ammunition is 363 caliber and not 30.06, the muzzle measure of the stolen rifle. Mala has to eat all of his dogs one-by-one and, then, is attacked by a starving wolf. He collapses and is about to freeze when his tribe rescues him. He returns to his two wives and children. (They have been starving in his absence and the movie shoes the drying racks for the meat as bare scaffolds.) The white Mounties appear and Mala leaves with his senior wife, dashing across the ice pack as it roars and crashes and breaks up. Knowing that he is doomed : he and his wife are committing suicide -- going to the "long sleep." The Mounties approach the ice-floe where he is trapped, aim their rifles at him, but are unable to bring themselves to shoot. A scrap of dialogue, added to the end of the film, assures the audience that Mala and his wife will be okay, that they will simply navigate the crumbling ice-floe to the other side of the bay and escape. But the audience would have to be idiots to believe that this optimistic scenario is possible.
The acting by the native people is very good. By contrast, the Europeans and Canadians are wooden and unconvincing. (The evil ship captain is played by the great Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and the movie is based, in part, on two of his novels set in Greenland.) Some of the ethnographic set-pieces are astonishing. There is a spectacular whale hunt and an even more impressive scene in which men in kayaks shoot and stab caribou who have been driven in a vast herd out into a sort of rocky fjord. Modern films always assure us that no animals were hurt during the production of the movie -- lots of animals were most assuredly killed during the production of Eskimo. We see walrus lanced, whales spouting black blood, caribou killed by the dozens, embattled polar bears, dogs being butchered, and, finally, a horrific scene in which Mala fights a starving wolf and, finally, beats the animal to death. (The scene was actually shot with a real starving wolf and a man with a rifle poised behind the camera to shoot the wolf if it got the upper hand in the vicious wrestling match with Mala.) The flight over the ice-pack that is fissuring apart is reminiscent of Lillian Gish's hike across a river, leaping from ice floe to ice floe, in Way Down East -- that's a terrifying sequence and the scenes with the ice-pack fragmenting are equally alarming. The film is unflinching in its depiction of hunting and the dangers of Arctic. The film remains worth watching despite its exploitative aspects.
Saturday, December 8, 2018
42nd Street
Everyone knows 42nd Street (1933), the movie musical that invented most of the clichés infesting the genre. The show must go on. Naïve chorus girls submit to the "casting couch." When the tough-as-nails leading lady breaks her ankle, a winsome chorine from the boondocks substitutes for her and becomes a star. With only five hours to rehearse, the show's director mercilessly drives the girl proclaiming that the results will be either "a star of the musical theater or a dead chorus girl." During the climactic song-and-dance numbers, cameras on overhead cranes record identically dressed women arrayed as the petals of great winking blossoms or regimented to embody strangely surrealistic rotating gears within gears. A camera at floor level glides through a corridor formed by the spread calves and lower thighs of chorus girls to finally frame the two young lovers cuddling in a pool of radiant light. (42nd Street is the first movie musical featuring extensive choreography and effects by Busby Berkeley.) The film is pre-code and is rife with raunchy, almost inexplicable, sexual innuendo. (Apparently, it was forbidden to pronounce the work "belly" on film -- so a song and dance number involving a shotgun wedding highlights the forbidden word by, first, having someone say it, and, then, abashedly, substitute the euphemism, "tummy.")
I've seen the film a number of times and, for me, the picture always delivers something unexpected, some quirk, or tone to the proceedings that I had hitherto not noticed, or not recalled. During this viewing, I noticed a couple features to the movie that didn't register with me before. First, the film is driven by a sense of panic. The Great Depression has just occurred and the director needs a hit in order to simply survive and pay his creditors. Everyone seems hungry, frightened, cynically ready to sell themselves for a little money. 42nd Street is very much a product of its times and, certainly, manifests a kind of profound anxiety as to the very sort of entertainment, glitzy and erotic production numbers, that it features. Second, the picture is pretty explicit with respect to sex. Casting couch sexual harassment is depicted as the norm in show business -- as in The Producers, big Broadway musicals require "angels" and the money invested by these people seems to be provided as a quid pro quo for sex. The climactic sequence showing a "just-married" couple "shuffling off to Buffalo" features various kinds of double entendre set in a sleeper car in which the honeymooners are incongruously bedded with a whole dormitory of pajama-clad and cynical platinum blondes -- it's not clear whether these women are supposed to be lesbian couples although, certainly, this seems to be one possibility. A dignified-looking African-American Pullman Porter picks up shoes from beneath the sleeper berths and the episode ends with him falling asleep while shining a pair of ladies high-heeled shoes. The big final production number, a wild, sprawling dance sequence set to the song "42nd Street" is genuinely startling. This number is huge and lavishly detailed: there are stilt-walkers, dwarves, prostitutes and cops street musicians and hustlers and all sorts of the demi monde depicted on the street and within the rooms of the joints overlooking the sidewalk. In effect, we are shown a "city symphony" -- a portrait of life in great metropolis immediately after the Depression. The song is sharp and abrasive and has more than a few hints of the kind of music Kurt Weill wrote for Brecht's lyrics in The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany --it's raw tough music, with a taut satirical edge, all bent blue notes and jazz saxophones. Furthermore, the dance sequence actually erupts in violence -- a rapist or murderer pursues a young woman who beats him away and, then, dives out of window onto a ledge from which she, then, hurls herself. One of the themes of German expressionism, clearly influential on this sequence, is the Lustmoerder (the "Lust-Murder") and 42nd Street comes perilously close to depicting this sort of thing, emblematic of the depravity and anomie of the great city, in the final song-and-dance number. At the end of song, we see the stage raked sharply upward toward a vista of grim black behemoths, mighty skyscrapers with their Babylonian setbacks (they are like ziggurats) towering over the stage in a dim, black void. These sets are based on Hugh Ferriss' architectural images in his 1929 book on skyscrapers, The Metropolis of the Future, huge monoliths suspended against a shadowy abyss. Like workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), the dancers march upward in a great phalanx, each of them seeming to carry a blunt, heavy tombstone on his or her shoulders. When the phalanx of the dancers reaches the top of the ramp, they spin around and we see that the tomb-stones and obelisks that they were lugging upward toward the cyclopean buildings above are, in fact, small four or five-foot tall images of skyscrapers -- no humans remain on the stage. Instead, we see the dancers transformed into buildings, a forest of them standing at the foot of the higher ranges of steel and concrete sierra. This is all startling and disquieting. The city grows monstrously but it's lightless, a dark empire of buildings that sprout in the darkness like mushrooms. The audience roars its approbation and the crowd pours out of the theater into the dark, greasy-looking night and, then, we see the director (Warren Baxter) whose efforts have made the little chorus girl into the star of Broadway -- he is disheveled and at the end of his tether and he collapses on a stoop while men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns hustle pass him, commenting among themselves that the young woman is a star and that her talent is unmistakably authentic and natural and that the director, collapsed in a crumpled and anonymous heap among them, had nothing whatsoever to do with her success. It's a curiously downbeat, almost tragic, ending.
I've seen the film a number of times and, for me, the picture always delivers something unexpected, some quirk, or tone to the proceedings that I had hitherto not noticed, or not recalled. During this viewing, I noticed a couple features to the movie that didn't register with me before. First, the film is driven by a sense of panic. The Great Depression has just occurred and the director needs a hit in order to simply survive and pay his creditors. Everyone seems hungry, frightened, cynically ready to sell themselves for a little money. 42nd Street is very much a product of its times and, certainly, manifests a kind of profound anxiety as to the very sort of entertainment, glitzy and erotic production numbers, that it features. Second, the picture is pretty explicit with respect to sex. Casting couch sexual harassment is depicted as the norm in show business -- as in The Producers, big Broadway musicals require "angels" and the money invested by these people seems to be provided as a quid pro quo for sex. The climactic sequence showing a "just-married" couple "shuffling off to Buffalo" features various kinds of double entendre set in a sleeper car in which the honeymooners are incongruously bedded with a whole dormitory of pajama-clad and cynical platinum blondes -- it's not clear whether these women are supposed to be lesbian couples although, certainly, this seems to be one possibility. A dignified-looking African-American Pullman Porter picks up shoes from beneath the sleeper berths and the episode ends with him falling asleep while shining a pair of ladies high-heeled shoes. The big final production number, a wild, sprawling dance sequence set to the song "42nd Street" is genuinely startling. This number is huge and lavishly detailed: there are stilt-walkers, dwarves, prostitutes and cops street musicians and hustlers and all sorts of the demi monde depicted on the street and within the rooms of the joints overlooking the sidewalk. In effect, we are shown a "city symphony" -- a portrait of life in great metropolis immediately after the Depression. The song is sharp and abrasive and has more than a few hints of the kind of music Kurt Weill wrote for Brecht's lyrics in The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany --it's raw tough music, with a taut satirical edge, all bent blue notes and jazz saxophones. Furthermore, the dance sequence actually erupts in violence -- a rapist or murderer pursues a young woman who beats him away and, then, dives out of window onto a ledge from which she, then, hurls herself. One of the themes of German expressionism, clearly influential on this sequence, is the Lustmoerder (the "Lust-Murder") and 42nd Street comes perilously close to depicting this sort of thing, emblematic of the depravity and anomie of the great city, in the final song-and-dance number. At the end of song, we see the stage raked sharply upward toward a vista of grim black behemoths, mighty skyscrapers with their Babylonian setbacks (they are like ziggurats) towering over the stage in a dim, black void. These sets are based on Hugh Ferriss' architectural images in his 1929 book on skyscrapers, The Metropolis of the Future, huge monoliths suspended against a shadowy abyss. Like workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), the dancers march upward in a great phalanx, each of them seeming to carry a blunt, heavy tombstone on his or her shoulders. When the phalanx of the dancers reaches the top of the ramp, they spin around and we see that the tomb-stones and obelisks that they were lugging upward toward the cyclopean buildings above are, in fact, small four or five-foot tall images of skyscrapers -- no humans remain on the stage. Instead, we see the dancers transformed into buildings, a forest of them standing at the foot of the higher ranges of steel and concrete sierra. This is all startling and disquieting. The city grows monstrously but it's lightless, a dark empire of buildings that sprout in the darkness like mushrooms. The audience roars its approbation and the crowd pours out of the theater into the dark, greasy-looking night and, then, we see the director (Warren Baxter) whose efforts have made the little chorus girl into the star of Broadway -- he is disheveled and at the end of his tether and he collapses on a stoop while men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns hustle pass him, commenting among themselves that the young woman is a star and that her talent is unmistakably authentic and natural and that the director, collapsed in a crumpled and anonymous heap among them, had nothing whatsoever to do with her success. It's a curiously downbeat, almost tragic, ending.
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Fake or Fortune?
As I grow older, I seem to spend more time reading art history and criticism and books about archaeology. Both of these fields are immense and variegated and, perhaps, due to old age, I don't really seem to retain much of what I read -- therefore, I have the pleasure of reading about the same interesting paintings and ruins time and time again. Further, these subjects are so intricate that I don't feel as if I have done more than scratch the surface -- but this is fine with me: I don't have any real personal or professional need to excel in these studies and can read for pleasure alone.
The British TV show Fake or Fortune? is available on Netflix. Four episodes constituting the entirety of Series 4 (2014) can be streamed from that service. In fact, there are seven complete series in the British Broadcasting vaults (although only 2014 is available on Netflix) with four 2018 programs on tap at the BBC. I hope that more of these shows are broadcast on Netflix. On the evidence of the 2014 series, the show is fantastically interesting and, indeed, addictive. Art dealer Philip Mould and his sidekick, Fiona Davis (a BBC journalist) are presented each program with works of questionable provenance -- if the paintings are proven to come from the hand of Renoir or some other noteworthy artist, the canvas will be worth several hundred-thousand pounds. If the painting is fake, or more importantly provenance can't be reliable (and, in the art world, indisputably) established, then the pictures are worth next to nothing. Often, the owners of the putatively significant paintings have something at stake -- a family legend must be verified or the paintings must receive maximum money at auction to save a deteriorating castle or pay the inheritance taxes on a farm in France. The show is genuinely suspenseful, primarily because the presenters fail in demonstrating provenance about as often as they succeed -- their batting average seems to be about 50 %. Works of art are inherently fascinating and the program delves in detail into the techniques used by artists to make their works: we learn about different types of canvas, secret marks hidden beneath the paint, various types of varnishes, and the chemical constituency of pigments both ancient and modern. Canvases are cleaned and x-rayed and subjected to all sorts of different techniques of analysis to show how the picture was made, what it was made of, and with what instruments it was painted. Mould is a connoisseur and so he applies his practiced eye to the stylistic and color elements of the painting. Fiona Davis does leg-work, tracking down witnesses and interviewing them or locating European and English experts to obtain their opinions. Sometimes, the two presenters go to the exact places where landscapes were painted and compare the modern vista with what is shown on the canvas. Various colorful art dealers and, even, rogues (fakers) are available to provide their opinions. A third member of the team is Dr. Bendor Grosvernor -- equipped with an Apple laptop, he surfs the web to find internet references to the painters and their work: his most important tool is a website run by Sotheby's that purports to capture every sale made in the art market during the past eighty years. Often the history of the people who once owned the paintings is as interesting as the paintings themselves -- we are introduced to a gallery of British aristocrats, politicians (including Churchill), and eccentrics. Each of the paintings studied poses genuine mysteries and there are even villains aplenty in the show -- in the cases of well-known artists, usually there are catalogues raisonne (indeed, sometimes competing catalogues) and, often, the inquiries by our intrepid hosts stir up dark clouds of professional jealousy and envy -- it seems that those who have made catalogues raisonne are intensely protective of their work and fiercely oppose attempts to add new paintings to their books -- to approve a new painting for admission to the catalogue seems viewed as an admission of failure by the art historian compiling the work. In several cases, in fact, paintings were rejected as authentic by the editors of the relevant catalogue raisonne notwithstanding what seemed to me like virtually irrefutable, albeit circumstantial, evidence of authenticity.
Fake of Fortune? has just the right mixture of British professorial attitude, continental arrogance, human interest, and good-old-fashioned detective work to delight most viewers. Indeed, the show has been very popular on the BBC and I hope that more episodes will soon become available in the United States.
The British TV show Fake or Fortune? is available on Netflix. Four episodes constituting the entirety of Series 4 (2014) can be streamed from that service. In fact, there are seven complete series in the British Broadcasting vaults (although only 2014 is available on Netflix) with four 2018 programs on tap at the BBC. I hope that more of these shows are broadcast on Netflix. On the evidence of the 2014 series, the show is fantastically interesting and, indeed, addictive. Art dealer Philip Mould and his sidekick, Fiona Davis (a BBC journalist) are presented each program with works of questionable provenance -- if the paintings are proven to come from the hand of Renoir or some other noteworthy artist, the canvas will be worth several hundred-thousand pounds. If the painting is fake, or more importantly provenance can't be reliable (and, in the art world, indisputably) established, then the pictures are worth next to nothing. Often, the owners of the putatively significant paintings have something at stake -- a family legend must be verified or the paintings must receive maximum money at auction to save a deteriorating castle or pay the inheritance taxes on a farm in France. The show is genuinely suspenseful, primarily because the presenters fail in demonstrating provenance about as often as they succeed -- their batting average seems to be about 50 %. Works of art are inherently fascinating and the program delves in detail into the techniques used by artists to make their works: we learn about different types of canvas, secret marks hidden beneath the paint, various types of varnishes, and the chemical constituency of pigments both ancient and modern. Canvases are cleaned and x-rayed and subjected to all sorts of different techniques of analysis to show how the picture was made, what it was made of, and with what instruments it was painted. Mould is a connoisseur and so he applies his practiced eye to the stylistic and color elements of the painting. Fiona Davis does leg-work, tracking down witnesses and interviewing them or locating European and English experts to obtain their opinions. Sometimes, the two presenters go to the exact places where landscapes were painted and compare the modern vista with what is shown on the canvas. Various colorful art dealers and, even, rogues (fakers) are available to provide their opinions. A third member of the team is Dr. Bendor Grosvernor -- equipped with an Apple laptop, he surfs the web to find internet references to the painters and their work: his most important tool is a website run by Sotheby's that purports to capture every sale made in the art market during the past eighty years. Often the history of the people who once owned the paintings is as interesting as the paintings themselves -- we are introduced to a gallery of British aristocrats, politicians (including Churchill), and eccentrics. Each of the paintings studied poses genuine mysteries and there are even villains aplenty in the show -- in the cases of well-known artists, usually there are catalogues raisonne (indeed, sometimes competing catalogues) and, often, the inquiries by our intrepid hosts stir up dark clouds of professional jealousy and envy -- it seems that those who have made catalogues raisonne are intensely protective of their work and fiercely oppose attempts to add new paintings to their books -- to approve a new painting for admission to the catalogue seems viewed as an admission of failure by the art historian compiling the work. In several cases, in fact, paintings were rejected as authentic by the editors of the relevant catalogue raisonne notwithstanding what seemed to me like virtually irrefutable, albeit circumstantial, evidence of authenticity.
Fake of Fortune? has just the right mixture of British professorial attitude, continental arrogance, human interest, and good-old-fashioned detective work to delight most viewers. Indeed, the show has been very popular on the BBC and I hope that more episodes will soon become available in the United States.
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