Long Pauses

Tag: Decade: 1980s

  • Films of the ’80s (part 1)

    Films of the ’80s (part 1)

    Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

    Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) leaves her controlling, bourgeois husband André (Guy Marchand) for Loulou (Gérard Depardieu), a petty criminal and top-notch lay, and all hell breaks loose. In my tweet about Loulou I described it as “the missing link (for me) between early New Wave & contemporary naturalism,” which, like so much of what goes on in the twitterverse, is pithy and imprecise. Like Jules and Jim and a number of films from Godard’s first phase — and also like so many of the classic genre films they’re riffing on — the love triangle here is a site of class conflict and shifting sexual and gender dynamics. Who’s the Whore here? Who’s the John? Pialat’s style allows plenty of room for the performers (is Huppert ever not amazing?) and ratchets up the cruelty and emotional suffering. My favorite scene takes place at a family reunion of sorts for Loulou and his kin, which plays like something from a Bruno Dumont film.

    Cruising (Friedkin, 1980)

    Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)

    Given Cruising‘s checkered reputation, I was disappointed to discover that it’s little more than an uninventive serial killer movie. That a film set in New York leather bars was financed and widely distributed in 1980 is fairly interesting in its own right (note to self: learn more about Lorimar, who also produced Being There the previous year), but the only aspect of Cruising that really piqued my curiosity was Al Pacino. I’m not refering to his performance, which is refreshingly low-key and out-of-balance, I guess. I’m talking about Pacino himself. He’s bulkier and more muscular in this role, which has the incongruous effect of making him seem smaller. That and his wardrobe made me consciously aware of his body for the first time. Cruising is structured as sensationalized tourism (“And on your right you’ll see that this breed of American Homosexual signals his fetishes with a brightly-colored bandana in his back pocket”), but its real transgression is its foregrounding of the gay male body, which, regrettably, remains a charged political act even now, three decades later. I guess it deserves some credit for that.

    Atlantic City (Malle, 1980)

    Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

    My only memory of Atlantic City, which I saw one other time nearly twenty years ago, was, of course, the lemon scenes. I had no idea it was such a strange film. Populated with quirky, two-dimensional characters and structured around over-written and weirdly implausible plot turns, it’s closer in spirit to Sundance-approved American indie cinema of the last decade than the continental drama I was expecting. But, really, it’s impossible to not love Burt Lancaster here. Lou Pascal, the aging and never-too-important gangster he plays, is quietly dignified and kind, which makes him pitiful in the best sense of the word. The final shot of Lou and Grace walking off together after one last score is as sweet and joyful an image as you’re likely to find.

    American Gigolo (Schrader, 1980)

    American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

    Another loose adaptation of Crime and Punishment, this time by way of Robert Bresson and Jerry Bruckheimer (there’s a pairing!), Paul Schrader’s third film as director is never less than watchable, thanks largely to Richard Gere’s performance, which is appropriately charismatic, pathetic, and vacuous. Schrader now admits he’s unsure whether the moral transformation Gere’s gigolo experiences in the final scene is authentic or “one that was simply imposed on him by his maker.” I share his ambivalence. That American Gigolo places a distant third in a race with Bresson’s Pickpocket and the Dardennes’ L’Enfant isn’t a surprise, but given their radically different modes of production, I find it hard to fault Schrader. It’s an interesting narrative experiment from a Hollywood release of 1980.

    Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980)

    Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

    Amidst the formal fireworks on display here — the mesmerizingly elliptical cutting, the fast zooms, the unexpected music cues — what I found most shocking was Theresa Russell’s performance, which gives life to a role that, on paper, is little more than a misogynist fantasy. But, damn, she’s good. The image I captured above is from a scene on a bridge, where her reunion with Alex (Art Garfunkel) is spoiled by his pettiness, and her response is so natural and solicitous that, for a second or two, she breaks the movie. All of Roeg’s machinations are undone by the sudden intrusion of uncalculated emotion.

    Grown Ups (Leigh, 1980)

    Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980)

    Made for BBC2 Playhouse, Grown Ups is about Dick (Philip Davis) and Mandy (Lesley Manville), a working-class Canterbury couple who are settling awkwardly into adulthood and their first home. Next door live one of their former teachers, Mr. Butcher (Sam Kelly), and his wife Christine (Lindsay Duncan), who, at first glance, seem the very models of middle-class civility. And that, of course, is the joke. Leigh has great fun contrasting the cold pedantry of Mr. Butcher with Dick and Mandy’s crass and loud-mouthed affection. The star of the film, though, is a nearly unrecognizable Brenda Blethyn, who plays Mandy’s older sister Gloria — a kind of spinstery, 30-something cross between Vickie Pollard and MadTV’s Lorraine. (Here’s a nice clip of Gloria in action. The entire film is available on YouTube.) Grown Ups reminds me that I need to spend more time with Mike Leigh.

    Voyage en Deuce (Deville, 1980)

    Voyage en douce (Michel Deville, 1980)

    Thanks to Dan Sallitt for making several mentions of Deville, the first great discovery of my little jaunt through the ’80s. I’m rarely caught off guard by a film these days, but Voyage en douce, a film I’d never heard of by a filmmaker I’d never heard of, offered one surprise after another. On paper, it sounds like late-night Cinemax fare: two women spend a weekend in the south of France, ostensibly in search of a vacation home, but devoting much of their time, instead, to remembrances of their sexual awakenings, casual flirtations, and, in the words of that old Monty Python sketch, “candid photography” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). From the opening sequence, though, Deville establishes his authorship and makes obvious that titillation is not his chief concern. About À cause, à cause d’une femme (1963), one of Deville’s collaborations with Nina Companéez, Dan writes: “[They] are interested, not in the mechanics of their commonplace plots, but in an affectionate and profuse evocation of the feminine principle, and in giving a deadly serious account of romantic love. . . . To give full play to their concerns while remaining faithful to their narrative task, Deville and Companéez direct us to the important stuff largely through cinematic form.” The same can be said of Voyage en deuce, particularly in its final act, when Bunuel-like moments of surreality disrupt the women’s stories by blurring the divide between fantasy and memory. A stunning film, and one certainly worthy of more than a capsule-length response.

  • Films of the ’80s

    Films of the ’80s

    At TIFF 2007, I caught Les Bons Debarras (Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), which screened in the Canadian Open Vault program. Regularly included on short lists of the greatest Canadian films, it’s about a precocious adolescent girl and her single mother surviving in a small town in Quebec. Steve Gravestock has written about the film in Cinema Scope, and Girish mentioned it in his post on Quebecois Cinema.

    While watching Les Bons Debarras, I was struck by how familiar it felt. I was eight when the film was released — near enough to the age of Manon (Charlotte Laurier) that I was able immediately to recognize that particular era of childhood, even if her experience of it is so much different from my own. Much of the credit for the film goes to its cinematographer, Michel Brault, who is best remembered for being a father of cinema verite and for his collaborations with Jean Rouch. We often associate naturalistic styles of narrative filmmaking with the ’60s and ’70s, and it’s obviously experienced a great revival in the last decade-and-a-half, but in the ’80s a film like Les Bons Debarras was something of an anomaly. I remember thinking at the time that I wanted to find others like it. I was reminded of that again last week while browsing through this “Best Films of the 80s” discussion at The Auteurs.

    Thanks to the fine folks at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, I was able to pull out the most critically acclaimed films of the decade and order them by overall rank (download pdf). Not too many surprises near the top. A lot of Scorsese, Kubrick, Lynch, and Spielberg. Among the films I’m eager to revisit or, in most cases, to see for the first time:

    • Once Upon a Time in America
    • Local Hero
    • The King of Comedy
    • The Dead
    • Love Streams
    • Reds
    • The Verdict
    • American Gigolo
    • Bad Timing

    Any other gems hidden among the wreckage of so many blockbusters? What are the other great, lost films of the ’80s?

  • Collins and Jost

    I’m treading in deep and unfamiliar waters here. I’ve seen maybe thirty or forty films that could be considered avant-garde, and I have only the sketchiest understanding of the history and evolution of the genre. (Is “genre” even the right word? Surely not. And is there a useful distinction to be made between avant-garde and experimental films? Hopefully I’ll learn a thing or two during today’s blog-a-thon.) My goals for this post are simply to illustrate a particular formal connection I’ve noticed between two films, Phil Collins’ they shoot horses and Jon Jost’s Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses), and to begin exploring the potential political implications of that formal device.

    First, the films . . .

    They Shoot Horses

    they shoot horses (2004)

    dir. by Phil Collins

    they shoot horses is currently installed at the Tate Britain in London. I saw it there when we visited in April. Or, to be more precise, I saw twenty random minutes of it — or roughly 5% of its 6 hour, 40 minute run time. The installation itself is a room of approximately twenty feet squared, consisting of only a sound system and two projectors positioned at ninety degrees relative to one another. Both project directly onto the opposite walls, presenting viewers with two video images that, consequently, are also at ninety degrees relative to one another. Imagine standing in a large, mostly-darkened room, staring directly into one corner of it, and having your peripheral vision on both sides engulfed by competing images. Graphically, the images are similar — both are long shots of people dancing against a pink and orange striped background (see above) — but the dancers and their movements vary from side to side.

    Gallery patrons hear they shoot horses before they see it; a din of break beats and pop vocals carries through much of the Tate’s contemporary art wing. In early 2004 Collins filmed two groups of teens in Ramallah as they danced all day without a break, and his installation is, in part, a visceral recreation of that moment. The low frequency thud of the disco music is as essential to the form and experience of they shoot horses as the piercing noise is to Michael Snow’s Wavelength. The only reprieves from the music come when the dance marathon is interrupted temporarily by occasional power outages and by calls to prayer from a nearby mosque. The dancers appear to have been given little instruction other than to dance and to stay more or less in the frame. I wasn’t able to watch enough of the film to describe Collins’ use of cuts (I never saw any), but the film reads as two simultaneous and continuous takes. I should also mention that, if I lived in London, I would gladly spend an entire day watching the film from start to finish. It has a simple but startling beauty.

    Plain Talk and Common Sense

    Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987)

    Dir. by Jon Jost

    Jon Jost has described Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987) as a “State of the Nation discourse.” Filmed in the wake of Reagan’s 525 to 13 electoral vote trouncing of Walter Mondale, Plain Talk is a critical portrait of an America in the final throes of its decades-long ideological battle with communism. Jost systematically appropriates and deconstructs American symbols throughout the film, beginning with an opening shot of leaves of grass and ending in a grain field located at the geographical center of the nation, a grain field whose amber waves happen to flow over missile silos.

    Plain Talk is an essay film that uses what I (perhaps naively) consider to be avant-garde techniques: collage (both images and sound), stop-motion photography, soundtrack manipulation, and a general preference for abstraction over narrative. Despite that preference, however, the film is rigorously structured like a traditional essay, with an introduction and nine chapters, each one building on the argument as developed in the preceding chapter. Plain Talk, as Jost writes:

    asks questions, poses riddles, and prods the viewer to ponder along with the filmmaker on the meaning of it all. And, in typical American fashion, at end it plops the matter directly in the individual’s lap, following in the manner of Walt Thoreau [sic]: in the recurring parlance of the times, “You are what you eat,” or what you do. America is, in sum, what Americans do, and let be done in their name.

    Plain Talk is a bit uneven. Two of the chapters, “Inside/Outside,” a send-up of Cold War America’s military and technology fetishes, and “Songs,” a travelogue of industrial excess, are more effective in theory than in practice. But I’m a great fan of the film, in general. “We hear the sound ‘America,’” Jost says in Chapter 3, “Crosscurrents,” “and instantly, without thought, our minds fill with received images.” Plain Talk is a clever, potent, and — two decades later — timely intervention that forces viewers to reconsider, thoughtfully, our images of America and our role in creating and propagating them.

    The Long Take

    Chapter 7 of Plain Talk, “Americans,” is a portrait series. Each is a medium shot against a black backdrop (see above); the framing erases all visual context, leaving viewers to deduce the subject’s location and social standing from other clues, such as accent or clothes or ambient sounds (street noise in the financial district of San Francisco, chirping insects in the rural South). Although no single portrait lasts for more than twenty or thirty seconds, the shots feel longer because Jost gives his subjects no direction. They step in front of the camera and do what they’ve been trained to do over a lifetime: they introduce themselves and smile directly into the lens, slyly posing to offer the camera their best sides. But when nothing happens, panic sets in. Their eyes begin to dart from the lens to Jost, back to the lens, back to Jost. Eventually the pose drops and we get a quick glimpse of the “real” face. (The screen captures don’t do them justice, but my two favorite examples are the woman in the left image and the man in the right.)

    they shoot horses has a similar effect. Over the course of the film, as Collins’ dancers become more and more exhausted from the marathon, their attitudes toward one another and toward the camera change in waves. They get bored, they lean against the wall or sit on the floor cross-legged, they flirt, they tap their toes and rock absent-mindedly, and then, from time to time, they find new stores of energy and return to their “performance,” dancing like the teenagers they see every day on satellite television.

    Jost’s film is explicitly political. It’s a Leftist critique of American military and economic imperialism, and of the degradation of American democracy. Its final chapter, “Heart of the Country,” takes place in the population center of the nation, a specific geographical location that, as Jost points out, was determined by statisticians and cartographers who worked from the assumption that every citizen exerts equal weight/power. Plain Talk attacks that assumption at every turn. Though much less explicit, they shoot horses offers a similar critique by finding a formal, egalitarian beauty in the citizens of a Palestinian city under Israeli occupation. I like the description in the Tate’s program: “The work is concerned with heroism and collapse and reveals beauty surviving under duress.”

    What most interests me — and what I lack a vocabulary to properly describe — is the direct connection between the form and political content in both of these films. That brief frisson that occurs when the pose drops — when a person who lives in an image-marketed and -mediated culture suddenly finds herself set adrift in the semiological flux — that moment, I think, is an instance of political resistance. It’s a temporary escape from the commodification and reification of our images and of our selves.

  • Chocolat (1988)

    Chocolat (1988)

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    Claire Denis’s debut film, Chocolat, opens with a two-minute static shot of a man and child, both black, playing in shallow ocean waters. When the camera does finally move, it pans nearly 180 degrees to the right before coming to rest on a young white woman. I thought little of the shot the first time I saw the film, but watching Chocolat again last night, I was struck by the economy of that single, simple camera movement. By dividing the frame in perfect halves, the shot’s composition introduces what will become one of the film’s central metaphors, the horizon line; by recontextualizing an idyllic image of a father and son (presumably) through what amounts to a cutless eyeline match, the pan firmly establishes the film’s tricky but essential subjective perspective.

    The young woman, we eventually learn, is traveling through Cameroon, visiting the lands where she was raised as the daughter of a French colonial district officer. France (Mireille Perrier) carries with her her father’s leatherbound diary of notes and sketches, and she fingers its pages as if the diary were family album, romance novel, and roadmap, all in one. Ten minutes into Chocolat, we leave the present to enter her reverie of the past, and all but the final few minutes of the film are a recreation of her childhood landscape. Specifically, France remembers a time when her father set out on a short trip, leaving her and her mother (Giulia Boschi) behind under the care of their houseboy, Protée (Isaach De Bankolé). Like an Edith Wharton novel, Chocolat appropriates the conventions of a romance plot to comment on restrictive social structures, specifically the complexities of a colonial system that simultaneously dehumanizes and hypersexualizes the colonized, while also degrading the colonizer. It’s brilliantly executed—a story told completely in small but significant gestures.

    Reviewers who have deemed “unnecessary” the framing device involving the adult France have completely misread Chocolat, I think. While there is much to recommend in the film—Agnes Godard’s cinematography, the many fine performances, and Denis’s typically seductive pacing, to name just a few—Denis’s handling of the film’s subjective perspective is what differentiates this film from other earnest and well-intentioned examinations of racism and/or colonialism. (There is probably room here for a discussion of the differences between Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, and Anthony Minghella’s also-good but differently-focused film adaptation, but I’ll save that for another day.)

    Take, for example, the most significant of Chocolat‘s many small gestures: the moment when the mother reaches slowly from her position on the floor to touch Protée’s calf. It’s a perfectly staged sequence, more charged and transgressive than anything imagined in a typical Hollywood sex scene. And Protée’s reaction retains its mystery and shock even on a second viewing. But who is “remembering” this moment? Although Denis’s camera shoots from the vantage point of the young France, three feet or so from the floor, France is not in the room. She could not have witnessed this event, and so we are left to answer any number of questions: Who is telling this story? From what evidence is she reconstructing her narrative? How does something so subjective as memory (not to mention love, faith, and power) distort our understanding of history, both personal and political.

    Near the end of Chocolat, France is told by her father, “The closer you get to [the horizon], the farther it moves. You see the line, but it doesn’t exist.” It’s one of those movie lines that screams significance. But recognizing the metaphor as metaphor and unpacking it are very different tasks, and I’m finding the latter a pleasant and surprising challenge. The most banal reading might be something like, “the line that separates the races is culturally-determined and, therefore, surmountable.” There’s nothing in the film to suggest such a rose-colored reading, however, and, really, the film would be dishonest crap if there were. Or, the father’s line might be exploded into some universal platitude about the hopeless quest for understanding. “No matter how hard we search, Truth always remains just out of reach.” But Chocolat is too grounded in specific historical conditions to be reduced to a platitude.

    The horizon metaphor begins to find its shape, I think, in juxtaposition with another scene: the moment when the mother reprimands her cook, who speaks in badly broken English. “Enoch, I don’t understand any of what you’re saying,” she tells him. (I can’t comment on the original release of the film, but the DVD wisely leaves the African languages untranslated.) I have always wished that someone would film Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, but Chocolat has made any effort to do so redundant, for at their core both are about the colonizer’s desire to understand the colonized, a desire that is human and noble, on one hand, but too disfigured by power and history to be anything more than patronizing. This is how Gordimer describes the terrifying moment when her heroine, Maureen Smales, recognizes that she is caught in such a trap with her servant, July:

    How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing that was to say between them that had any meaning.
    Fifteen Years
    your boy
    you satisfy

    But—and this is important—unlike the end of July’s People, which is a story of revolution, Chocolat does offer some portent of hope. The film ends, once again, in the present day. France has hitched a ride from the black man whom she first spotted swimming in the ocean, and whom she soon discovers is actually an American immigrant. This revelation once again recontextualizes Chocolat‘s opening image, calling into question the validity of France’s perspective. (Had she imagined herself witnessing some timeless ritual of real black African life? Did this fantasy put her in closer communion with her mother? With an imagined version of her mother?) Denis, who also spent much of her childhood in colonial Africa, clearly sympathizes with France’s plight. Her desire to understand, to write narratives that discover the human in inhumane circumstances, is noble, is essential, even if fraught with ambiguities and unavoidable landmines.

    The final image in Chocolat is another long static shot, the frame divided in half once again by the horizon. Three black men smoke and laugh as an unexpected burst of rain passes through. France is gone, but somehow we have retained her (its) perspective. Denis leaves the camera running for several minutes, inviting us to understand these men, or, at least, fostering in us the desire to do so.

  • Damnation (1988)

    Damnation (1988)

    I’ve wondered, on occasion, what it might look like if a contemporary filmmaker were to use Sculpting in Time as a style guide of sorts, deliberately mimicking Tarkovsky’s technique but toward very different ends. Would Tarkovsky’s style, siphoned through another imagination, produce a similar effect? Would any of that strange poetic logic survive the translation?

    Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s Damnation (1988) makes for an interesting case study. Many of the Tarkovsky trademarks are on display: stark black-and-white photography, elliptical editing, textured (for lack of a better word) mise-en-scene, wet floors, wandering dogs, and lots and lots of rain; Tarr’s camera creeps slowly through most of the film, typically from side-to-side, and shots last for minutes at a time. Damnation captures something of Stalker‘s dystopia and Nostalghia‘s sorrow, but Mirror casts the longest shadow. Vali Kerekes’s resemblance to Margarita Terekhova is, at times, uncanny; her make-up seems even to have been designed to remind us of the circles under Terekhova’s eyes.

    And so, as I watched Damnation, I thought often of Tarkovsky; and yes, at times, Damnation felt like a Tarkovsky film. I would agree with Jonathon Rosenbaum that it is “compulsively watchable” for that very reason. But Tarr’s and co-writer László Krashnahorkai’s imaginations are no match for Tarkovsky’s, and so the content of the film, ultimately, borders on the banal. Alienation and isolation and desperation are, of course, perfectly acceptable subjects for artistic meditation — Damnation joins an impressive body of work in that respect — but I was struck repeatedly by a clash of content and form that reduces the film, finally, to a string of platitudes and (even worse) symbols. Tarkovsky writes:

    in film, every time, the first essential in any plastic composition, its necessary and final criterion, is whether it is true to life, specific and factual; that is what makes it unique. By contrast, symbols are born, and readily pass into general use to become clichés, when an author hits upon a particular plastic composition, ties it in with some mysterious turn of thought of his own, loads it with extraneous meaning.

    The opening image in Damnation is a remarkable, three-minute shot of coal buckets soaring like cable cars into the horizon. It’s the high point of the film, I think, because it lacks context. We are forced to sit patiently (or not so patiently), listening to the mechanical hum, watching as the buckets come and go, suspended in a moment of Gertrude Stein-like presence: “A bucket is a bucket is a bucket.” The image is alive and contradictory and frustrating and beautiful. By the end of the film, though — after watching our hero repeatedly fail in his attempts to capture love, and, finally, giving up in his efforts entirely — those buckets have become just another symbol of meaningless motion. Acquarello draws an interesting parallel with one of the film’s final scenes:

    Using a near static camera, . . . Tarr reflects the desolation and spiritual lethargy of the directionless and morally bankrupt protagonists: the cloakroom attendant’s hollow recitation of religious scripture to Karrer; the dispassionate act of intimacy between Karrer and his lover; the somnambulistic group line dance that recalls the opening image of the sluggish, automated motion of cable cars.

    Likewise, the dogs that roam silently through much of the film (shades of Nostalghia) are transformed by Damnation‘s closing image into a trite symbol of man’s savage nature (or some such oversimplification). I haven’t decided yet if it is fair to call Damnation a failure because it doesn’t meet Tarkovsky’s standards, but I feel justified in my reservations. The film’s style implies a kind of intellectual and spiritual freedom (for the viewer, for man, in general) that is simply absent in the film itself.

  • Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “I was born in Ogden, Utah, the last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was 12. I struggled toward growing up, like others, totally confused. Married and divorced twice before I made it to 21. Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios.”
    – Hal Ashby

    The temptation, when writing about American filmmaker Hal Ashby, is to reduce his life and career to any of a number of ready-made, Hollywood formulae: the small-town boy done good who works his way up from the studio mailroom to the Academy Awards stage; the 1960s free spirit who champions individual rights in a world of oppressive authority and takes his fair share of lumps in the process; the cautionary tale of regrettable indulgences and falls from grace. Unfortunately, the relative dearth of critical and biographical writing currently available about Ashby makes such a trap unavoidable. This, despite the awards, the misty paeans from his collaborators and, most importantly, that amazing streak of films in the 1970s, a streak that rivals those of his more famous contemporaries, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman. With The Landlord (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979), Ashby proved himself a prodigious talent. That he disappeared behind a string of disappointing pictures in the 1980s and died before redeeming his reputation has led many critics of the Hollywood Film Renaissance to dismiss Ashby as a filmmaker who lacked a coherent voice or who was simply the competent beneficiary of remarkable collaborations. This essay will, I hope, become part of a larger critical reappraisal of Ashby’s films, for they document, with equal parts grace and polemic, a moment in America’s history that was defined by precisely that dichotomy.

    No biographer has yet made a subject of Hal Ashby, which is surprising considering the quality and influence of his films and the dramatic circumstances of his life. Soon after discovering his father’s body at the age of twelve, Ashby dropped out of school and began working odd jobs; by seventeen he had already been married and divorced (the first of his four failed marriages). According to Peter Biskind, whose Easy Riders, Raging Bulls offers the only readily-available discussion of Ashby’s life, the young Mormon decided in 1950 to leave the cold winters of Utah and Wyoming behind and to head off for the golden skies of California (1). After arriving in Los Angeles, and after three hungry weeks of fruitless efforts there, Ashby visited the California Board of Unemployment and requested a job at a film studio. He was sent first to Universal, where he worked in the mailroom, but by 1951 he had become an apprentice editor at Republic. He later moved on to Disney and then to Metro, where he met Jack Nicholson, then an aspiring unknown.

    Ashby’s film school was the editing room. “It’s the perfect place to examine everything,” he told Michael Shedlin. “Everything is channelled down into that strip of film, from the writing to how it’s staged, to the director and the actors. And you have the chance to run it back and forth a lot of times, and ask questions of it – Why do I like this? Why don’t I like this?” (2) After working as assistant editor under Robert Swink on William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956) and The Big Country (1958) and George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Ashby began to gain attention for his own cutting of films by Tony Richardson (The Loved One [1965]) and Norman Jewison. Ashby and Jewison would collaborate on four films: The Cincinnati Kid (1965), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), for which Ashby won a Best Editing Oscar, and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). It was Jewison, also, who recommended his friend to direct The Landlord, a project under development at United Artists. Thus Hal Ashby came to make his first film at the age of 40. “If I had it all to do over again, I would rather go at it a different way,” he later said. And, predicting the generation of young American filmmakers who would emerge in the 1970s, he then added: “I say, Good Lord, go out and somehow raise the money to make your own projects. It’s not easy, by any means, but the potential is there for becoming just as good a filmmaker in a much shorter time. I feel very strongly about this” (3).

    The Landlord is an outrageous debut, a film that, 34 years later, still feels daring, both stylistically and politically. Beau Bridges plays Elgar Enders, who at 29 leaves his opulent family estate and buys a row house in a New York City ghetto. His plan is to remodel the home once he has evicted its tenants, including Marge (Pearl Bailey), Mr. and Mrs. Copee (Louis Gossett Jr. and Diana Sands) and Professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart). When we first meet Elgar, he is reclining on a lawn chair, sipping brandy. He looks directly into the camera and tells us: “It’s just that I get the feeling that we’re all – I mean everybody, black, white, yellow, Democrats, Communists, Republicans, old people, young people, whatever – we’re all like a bunch of ants, see. See, the strongest drive we have as a true life force is to gain territory.” All of his preconceptions and values – racial, political, economic and otherwise – are tested, though, once his life becomes entwined with those of his tenants. Ashby’s skills as an editor, now freed by his creative control over the picture, are on display from the opening moments, as he crosscuts between high contrast footage of a racquetball game and the softer, more natural tones of the African-American neighbourhood, a visual motif that continues throughout the film. That divide between the white world and the black is heightened also by Ashby’s treatment of his characters: the Enders he turns into absurd and often hilarious caricatures; the tenants are afforded greater sympathy. The end result is an often brilliant, occasionally uneven film that (ridiculous as this might sound) resembles late Buñuel’s attempt at a blaxploitation film.

    Capsule reviews of The Landlord typically describe it as a bildungsroman in which an emotionally stunted white man comes of age through his first-hand encounter with the realities of African-American life. Elgar “grows fond” of his tenants, such reviews claim and, by witnessing his blossoming romance with a woman of mixed race, viewers are to learn something about the possibilities of racial reconciliation in America. What we actually learn, though, is just the opposite. Ashby’s film plays like the cinematic equivalent of Radical Chic, Thomas Wolfe’s 1970 account of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers held in the well-heeled home of Felicia and Leonard Bernstein. Like the “limousine liberals” who gathered there on Park Avenue to sip wine, write cheques and discuss – in the measured tones of the New York Review of Books – the “race problem”, Elgar is unprepared for the messy radicalism that greets and, even more significantly, that excludes him. “See, children? Some people can’t learn what we learn,” Professor Duboise tells a room full of students who are already well versed in the rhetoric of Black Power. Ashby captures this tension in a brilliant sequence near the end of the film, when Copee, who is threatening Elgar with an axe after learning that his wife is carrying Elgar’s child, stops and slowly lowers his weapon. Rather than turning his attention to the film’s protagonist, however, Ashby instead stays in a tight shot on Copee, and we’re made suddenly aware that the film has been his story all along. The white, liberal audiences that watch The Landlord root for Elgar because, like him, they (we) believe that their idealism and distant sympathies can somehow make the world “colour blind”. By forcefully shifting the film’s perspective from Elgar’s to Copee’s, Ashby reveals just how naive and politically charged such a position really is.

    Ashby inherited his second feature project, Harold and Maude, when executives at Paramount decided that Colin Higgins was too green for the job. Higgins, who wrote the screenplay while still a film student, had hoped to direct the picture himself but acknowledged that the project was never really his to lose. “I was going to make a half-million dollar film and they wanted to make a million-and-a-half dollar film,” he told Shedlin (4). The thematic similarities between The Landlord and Higgins’ script made Ashby a logical, if somewhat risky, choice for the studio. The story of a twenty-year-old rich kid who learns to love life through his encounter with a woman sixty years his senior, Harold and Maude delights in everyday transgressions: uprooting trees from manicured suburban streets and returning them to the forest; parading a yellow umbrella past the dark faces of a funeral line; flipping a bird to repressive authority figures, whether they be mothers, priests, psychiatrists, soldiers or highway patrolmen. That the film manages to do so without surrendering to the carpe diem-like sentiment that has made a respected actor of Robin Williams is testament to the fine performances of its leads, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, but also to Ashby’s deft direction, which transforms Higgins’ dark satire into a Brothers Grimm fable (mixed, perhaps, with a Charles Addams drawing or two). As with fairy tale, the moral of Harold and Maude is ultimately less important than the telling of the tale itself. The pure joy of Ashby’s story-telling frees the film to transcend its often banal symbolism and preachy didacticism, creating a filmed world that, like that of Wes Anderson, Ashby’s most gifted disciple, allows for the possibility of grace and childhood wonder in a fallen, cynical, adult world.

    And Ashby’s is, most certainly, an adult world. When, two-thirds of the way through the film, we learn that Maude is a Holocaust survivor – and we learn this only from a wordless, one-second shot of the identification tattoo on her forearm – the context within which the film is operating suddenly blossoms to include not only Nixon’s America but all of the impossibly tragic 20th century. Like Walter Benjamin who, in his famous description of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” imagines the angel of history propelled irresistibly forward by the storm of progress “while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”, Harold and Maude demands that viewers experience a glimpse of hope despite the tragedies of the past (5). Ashby accomplishes this to best effect in the final sequence, in which he dismantles and intercuts three events: Harold and Maude’s arrival at the hospital, Harold’s agonising wait for news of her death, and his high-speed drive up the California coastline. Accompanied only by Cat Stevens’ song “Trouble” and by the roaring engine of Harold’s Jaguar-cum-hearse, the sequence is marked by a tragic inevitability. There’s no question of Maude’s survival, no possibility that this dark fable will be appended with a Disney ending and yet, despite the sadness, Harold walks away in the end strumming his banjo, and the film is rescued from the nihilism of its day.

    Ashby’s follow-up is less optimistic. In The Last Detail, “Badass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young), two Navy “lifers”, are chosen to escort Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk, Virginia to the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire. Only 18 years old, Meadows has been court-martialled and sentenced to eight years for attempting to steal $40 from the base’s polio charity. Badass and Mule intend to deliver their prisoner as quickly as possible and spend their per diems and remaining leave in New York City, but they’re soon charmed by the young Meadows and become increasingly troubled by their mission. Written and produced during the dark, closing days of the Vietnam War, The Last Detail employs the picaresque structure of the standard World War II-era service comedy but undercuts its cliched devices at every turn. When a drunken Badass attempts to teach Meadows to be a signalman, for instance, Ashby drowns their dialogue (and much of the scene’s potential humour) in the sounds of gunfire and explosions emanating from the war film playing on the hotel room television. It’s an ironic reminder of the “good war” that precipitated America’s disastrous involvement in Southeast Asia and that helped to define masculinity and heroism for men of Badass and Mule’s generation. Those definitions are repeatedly called into question throughout the film: Badass’ attempts to seduce a young hippy (Nancy Allen) with his anachronistic tales of military adventure fall flat; Mule’s justification for his tour in Vietnam – “Gotta do what the Man says” – is less noble service than mindless obedience; Meadows’ first trip to a whorehouse ends with the most premature of ejaculations. When Badass and Mule do finally hand Meadows over to authorities at Portsmouth, they head home spouting their hatred for this “motherfucking chickenshit detail,” but there’s little doubt that the home they’re heading back to is in Norfolk. Unlike the wealthy Elgar and Harold, these blue-collar warriors have no other options.

    The standard critical line on The Last Detail is that its many and obvious merits are attributable, first and foremost, to the quality of Ashby’s collaborators, Nicholson and screenwriter Robert Towne chief among them. Towne certainly deserves much credit, both here and in his next teaming with Ashby on Shampoo, but the film soars on the strength of Ashby’s direction, and particularly on his restraint of Nicholson. By casting 6’4” Quaid and 6’2” Young in the supporting roles, Ashby turns Badass into an embodiment of aggressive overcompensation; Nicholson has never looked so small or his shtick so impotent. And when the actor does launch into full-on “Jack” mode – as when he trashes their motel room in a vain effort to rouse Meadows’ anger – Ashby refuses to allow Nicholson’s persona to subsume the character. Instead, he cuts abruptly to a quiet moment of Badass and the young seaman together on the edge of the bed, now bored and contained. Such a jumpcut works here only because Ashby’s verite approach with actors and with the staging of key sequences, an approach employed to even greater effect in Coming Home, allows room for freedom and improvisation. That so many actors – Quaid and Young, but also Cort, Gordon, Lee Grant, David Carradine, Peter Sellers, Jack Warden and Bruce Dern, among others – delivered arguably the best performances of their careers in Ashby films is perhaps the finest testament to his gifts as an actor’s director.

    As with The Last Detail, Ashby is often treated by his critics as merely a hired gun for his work on Shampoo, offering competent but unexceptional direction in what is essentially a Robert Towne and Warren Beatty picture. Beatty stars as George Roundy, a hip Hollywood hairdresser whose reputation is built as much on his prowess in the bedroom as in the salon. As the film begins he’s torn between three women: his girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn), his ex Jackie (Julie Christie) and Felicia (Grant), a client whose wealthy husband Lester (Warden) holds the purse strings to George’s dream of owning his own salon. When all five characters attend the same election night party, Shampoo collapses quickly into a sexual farce straight from the Restoration stage. But the film is seldom laugh out loud funny. Instead, Shampoo plays like a melancholy answer to The Graduate – complete with original Paul Simon music – except that Ben is now no longer fucking just Mrs. Robinson and Elaine, but also every other bored, vain housewife in the neighbourhood. The youthful naiveté and reckless adventure that mark those final, iconic moments of The Graduate have been replaced by disillusionment, pathetic posturing and moral apathy. When George tells Jackie, “I don’t fuck anybody for money, I do it for fun,” he’s accusing her of whoring herself to Lester, but he’s also deluding himself. George is the biggest whore of the lot, and he pays the highest price for it.

    Of the films he made in the ’70s, Shampoo feels the least like a Hal Ashby picture. It’s too restrained, too closely bound to the tight structuring of Towne and Beatty’s remarkable screenplay. At times, there is also an uncharacteristic staginess to the blocking of actors, as in the first scene between Christie and Warden, where they move unnaturally around Lester’s office, self-consciously hitting their marks in synch with the choreographed movements of the camera. Ashby’s films come alive, instead, when his actors are allowed room to move, as when George flies into a rage outside of a bank that has just denied him a loan. Here, Ashby shoots Beatty in an extreme long shot, watching silently from across the parking lot as the actor rips off his jacket and tie and throws them both into a trashcan.

    Such long shots are a trademark of Ashby’s films: Elgar standing in the street with his child in his arms, Maude’s introduction at the first funeral, Badass and Mule wrestling Meadows to the ground, Bob undressing at the beach in Coming Home, Chance walking off across the water in Being There. The extreme long shot serves, for Ashby, the same function that the close-up does for many filmmakers – heightening emotion at critical moments in the narrative – but it does so without forcing a shift to a particular character’s subjective perspective (Ashby, in fact, very seldom cuts on an eyeline match). We remain always detached observers, judging and, occasionally, sympathising with characters, but never coming to see the world exclusively through their eyes. Shampoo also makes effective use of popular music, another Ashby trademark. Except for the Paul Simon song, which returns like a Greek chorus five times in the film, the only other non-diegetic music is The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” which plays over the opening scene and returns again for the closing credits. Released in 1975, within months of Nixon’s resignation, and set seven years earlier on the day he was first elected, Shampoo is an elegy to the wasted potential of America’s cultural revolution. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” is wistful nostalgia, as ironic as the final words we hear uttered by the President-Elect on George’s television: “A teenager held up a sign that said ‘Bring Us Together,’ and that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset. To bring the American people together.”

    While Shampoo is, at times, stylistically different from Ashby’s other pictures of the era, it continues his investigation of the theme that most dominates his work – that is, the cost, both literal and metaphoric, of individual freedom and integrity in a world dominated increasingly by oppressive, dehumanising economic interests. Bound for Glory, then, is a logical, if ambitious, next step in that project. A document of four years in the life of folksinger Woody Guthrie – the “dustbowl” years when he was travelling through the southwest, living with and singing to camps of migrant workers – the film is part hagiography, part Waiting for Lefty-like agitprop, part old fashioned Western. Joseph McBride, writing for Film Comment in 1976, called it “a majestic film, the most ambitious film made in the United States since The Godfather Part II, and one of those rare pictures which are made with the lavish resources, meticulous care, and concern for epic breadth that characterize the way the great Hollywood movies used to be made” (6). While McBride might be accused of hyperbole, Bound for Glory remains a remarkable film, and it is an interesting artefact from Hollywood’s Film Renaissance. After the massive commercial success of Shampoo, Ashby had carte blanche for his follow-up, and he used that muscle to rescue the Woody Guthrie project from years of development problems and script rewrites. At a production cost of nearly $10 million and starring David Carradine, then known mostly for the television series Kung Fu and for low budget films like Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975), Bound for Glory was a sizeable risk for United Artists. It’s difficult to imagine a studio taking such a gamble at any time other than the mid-1970s, those few years when adventurous filmmaking was still occasionally rewarded at the box office and when studio heads had yet to learn the various lessons of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980).

    What is most striking today about Bound for Glory is Haskell Wexler’s photography, which turns Depression-era California into one more of Ashby’s many worlds of the haves and have-nots (7). Los Angeles, with its green lawns and sparkling sheen, couldn’t be more different from the small Texas town where Guthrie begins his voyage and where everything – even the people, it seems – is covered by an inch of dust. Wexler shoots it all in soft, muted tones; the sky is as brown as the desert landscapes through which Woody travels, slowly, for the first third of the film. Like Ashby’s and Wexler’s next collaboration, Coming Home, much of Bound for Glory was filmed with long lenses that pull characters into focus against an impossibly expansive backdrop. When Woody sits down to play his harmonica, for instance, he and his chair appear to float above a desert highway that stretches, in a dead-straight line, from Arizona to the Atlantic. The long lenses also allow Ashby and his crew to stay far-removed from the action, capturing the spontaneous “performances” of his lead actors and his large cast of extras. A two minute montage of such images lends the campground sequences, in particular, a documentary-like feel; Wexler and Ashby would later return to this technique for Coming Home‘s Fourth of July picnic sequence.

    In many ways, Coming Home epitomises Hal Ashby’s cinematic style, and it is also his most personal film. The project was conceived by Jane Fonda with the help of screenwriter Nancy Dowd, and was originally intended for John Schlesinger. When he left the project, however, the screenplay was reshaped significantly by the circle of talent who would eventually bring it to the screen: Fonda, Ashby, Wexler, Jon Voigt, producer Jerry Hellman and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Robert Jones. They were united by their opposition to the Vietnam war and by their concern for the veterans who were returning to an America unable or unwilling to reacclimatize them to life back home. Told as a love triangle between a young woman (Fonda), her Marine husband (Dern) and the paralysed vet (Voigt) she meets while he is overseas, Coming Home confronts head-on what had been treated already as a sidebar in Harold and Maude, The Last Detail and Shampoo: the lingering wounds – physical, psychological, emotional and political – from America’s involvement in Vietnam. The film earned Ashby Best Director nominations from the Academy and from the Director’s Guild; Voigt, Fonda and the team of writers won Oscars for their efforts; and Dern, Penelope Milford (as Sally’s friend, Vi), Don Zimmerman (editor) and the film itself were all likewise rewarded with Oscar nominations.

    If Coming Home is guilty, at times, of over-earnestness or of slipping into polemic, it is rescued from such potentially fatal missteps by its many fine performances and by the filmmaker’s palpable respect for his characters. Even Dern’s disgraced Bob, a Marine who could so easily have been reduced to a caricature, becomes instead a tragic figure capable of eliciting our deepest sympathies. Dern’s desperate delivery of the line, “What I’m saying is I do not belong in this house!” is one of the most affecting moments in any of Ashby’s films and it encapsulates, in a single breath, the crisis of the dislocated veteran. Ashby and Wexler once again blend dramatic set pieces with documentary style footage, most notably in the opening sequence, when Voigt’s character, Luke, listens quietly as a group of actual, paralysed vets discuss their very real feelings about the war. That same sense of verisimilitude also informs many of the scenes between the lead actors, as when Fonda and Voigt stroll down the boardwalk, discussing Bob’s impending return. On the DVD release of Coming Home, Wexler remarks that the scene was shot with an 800 millimetre lens from a distance of more than 400 yards, freeing us, once again, to remain distant and relatively objective observers, and allowing the actors room for spontaneous improvisation. The film’s showpiece, however, comes in its final sequence, when Ashby crosscuts between Luke’s speech to a group of draft-eligible teens, Sally and Vi’s trip to a grocery store, and Bob’s walk into the ocean, all of it accompanied by Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was”. Like the finale of Harold and Maude, this sequence balances tragedy – is Bob swimming off to his death? – with painful progress. Despite the still-lingering wounds of war, Sally’s new-found independence and Luke’s charity suggest that Ashby retains some measure of hope for healing.

    The last of Ashby’s signature films is Being There, his adaptation of the Jerzy Kosinski novel. After publishing Being There in 1971, Kosinski swore that he would never allow it or any of his other work to be filmed, but after learning that a movie project was in the early stages of development, and after experiencing first-hand Peter Sellers’ aggressive campaign for the lead role, the author set to work on a screenplay of his own. Ashby’s final product is, by most accounts, a smashing success, both as an adaptation of a much-respected novel and as a film, judged on its own merits. The story of Chance, a simpleton gardener who stumbles into America’s most powerful spheres of influence, Being There is a satiric jab at the co-opting of the nation’s public discourse by television’s empty images and content-free rhetoric. Such ideas were nothing new to Ashby, who had been toying with similar themes in his own work for years. In The Last Detail, Shampoo and Coming Home, in particular, characters are unable to free themselves from the constant barrage of political speeches, commercial advertisements, and reportage that emanate from the televisions, billboards, and radios that seem to have them surrounded. When Sally asks Bob what combat was like, his response echoes the main argument of Being There: “I don’t know what it’s like; I only know what it is. TV shows what it’s like; it sure as hell don’t show what it is.”

    For Ashby, the great challenge of Being There was sustaining its absurd premise for two hours without allowing it to slip, even for a moment, into farce. “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad. Peter’s character is a sponge. He imitates everything he sees on television and everyone he meets. In one scene, he imitated the voice of a homosexual. It was very funny, but we couldn’t allow it. It would have destroyed the balance” (8). Ashby’s film, like Sellers himself, plays the comedy straight-faced, refusing to rob the character of his allegoric simplicity by making of it little more than a cheap joke. Chance is, instead, the ultimate straight man, a tabula rasa against which his associates’ ridiculous behaviour might be exposed. In the film’s funniest scene, Eve (Shirley MacLaine) – the wealthy, sex-starved woman who first tempts Chance into the world of earthly delights – tries to seduce her guest while he watches a passionate romance on television. When the program ends, however, Chance is no longer able to imitate the “appropriate” behaviour and so he flips the channel, leaving Eve confused and frustrated. “I like to watch,” he tells her, which sends Eve to the floor, where she masturbates to climax. Ashby builds additional layers of commentary and humour onto the scene by having Chance flip to an aerobics program, whose instructor encourages viewers to “explore slowly.” By the end of the scene, Eve is panting on the floor, unaware that Chance is standing on his head, just like the woman on television. Self-indulgence and superficiality have never seemed more absurd.

     

    Being Thereis a strangely fitting conclusion to Ashby’s enviable run during the 1970s. Commenting on Kosinski’s prescient novel, Barbara Tepa Lupack writes, “while Kosinski did not live to witness the Chance-like candidacy of H. Ross Perot, conducted largely via television time purchased with his own millions, he surely must have appreciated the irony of actor Ronald Reagan’s two telegenic terms in office as well as understudy George Bush’s subsequent lacklustre performance in the White House” (9). Ashby’s career, like those of so many of his contemporaries, was derailed by sweeping changes in Washington, D.C., in Hollywood and in America at large. The studios, now on the lookout for blockbuster box office returns and wary of signing over creative control to “cost no object” directors, turned their attention away from smaller, more personal films like Ashby’s. Reagan’s America likewise awoke to a “new morning”, conveniently ignoring the traumatic events that had defined the previous decades. For Ashby, who had embodied the country’s counter-cultural spirit in thought and deed, the “Me Decade” must have been catastrophically disheartening. In an era of conservative piety and institutionalised greed, Ashby’s politically motivated irreverence and his simple faith in humanity’s potential for radical change were suddenly an anachronism.

    Ashby finished his career with a string of largely forgotten films. He reunited with Haskell Wexler for the first two: Second-Hand Hearts (1981), starring Robert Blake and Barbara Harris, and Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), a character study of two gamblers written by and starring Jon Voigt. Like the rest of Ashby’s final work (and The Landlord), neither is currently available on any home video format. He also directed Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982), a by-the-books document of the Rolling Stones’ 1981 tour, and followed it with The Slugger’s Wife (1985), an irredeemably bad translation of Neil Simon’s abysmal screenplay (10). The poor quality of the film is frequently attributed to Ashby’s growing dependence on drugs and alcohol, which had precipitated a physical collapse during the Stones’ tour. Because of his increasingly unreliable behaviour, films were taken from him during post-production and given to others for final editing. Ashby’s final feature, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), however, marked something of a return to form for the director. An adaptation of Lawrence Block’s popular detective novel, the film is an entertaining piece of film noir, with Jeff Bridges as the hardened ex-cop and Rosanna Arquette as his femme fatale. Though burdened by the stylistic influence of TV’s Miami Vice and by James Newton Howard’s cloying, synthesized score, 8 Million Ways to Die comes to life at surprising moments, particularly in the final act. When Bridges confronts the young drug kingpin, played by Andy Garcia, we are reminded of Ashby’s gifts as a director of actors; they appear to have set aside Oliver Stone’s screenplay and discovered a more palpable energy in their improvisations. Ashby’s final production was Jake’s Journey (1988), a television project developed by ex-Python Graham Chapman. After filming the pilot, both men were prevented by poor health from continuing their collaboration.

    Hal Ashby was diagnosed in early-1988 with a cancer that spread rapidly to his liver and colon and to which he succumbed, finally, on December 27. Ashby’s death at 59 prevented him from witnessing the re-birth of independent cinema that energised America’s filmmakers, young and old, during the early-1990s. Imagine how different our appraisals of Robert Altman’s career might be had it ended with Popeye (1980), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Secret Honor (1984) – had it ended before he made The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). Or, imagine how different our opinion of Francis Ford Coppola might be had he not retreated to his vineyards and re-emerged as an acclaimed producer of others’ films – had his career ended with One from the Heart (1982), The Outsiders (1983), and Rumble Fish (1983). Hal Ashby personifies, better than any other director, Hollywood’s Film Renaissance of the 1970s: its moral ambivalence and political rage, its stylistic audacity and deeply human voice, its supernova of energy that could not possibly burn so brightly for very long.

    Endnotes

    1. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York, Simon, 1998. Unfortunately, because Biskind’s book has become so influential, and because it is (sadly) the only text that devotes more than a few sentences to Ashby, what little we know of the director’s personal life has been reduced to a series of sensational anecdotes. There’s Hal the chain-smoking, hyper-obsessive editor, sitting at his Moviola for twenty-four hours at a stretch; Hal the recluse, holed-up in his beach house, unwilling to talk to anxious producers; Hal the Hollywood rebel, who promised to use his Oscar as a door stop; Hal the drug-addicted depressive, who fought suicidal tendencies throughout his life and whose addictions cost him several high-profile projects in the 1980s.
    2. Michael Shedlin, review of Harold and Maude, Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, 1972, p. 53.
    3. Shedlin, p. 53.
    4. Shedlin, p. 52.
    5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, Schocken, 1985. p. 285.
    6. Joseph McBride, “Song for Woody”, Film Comment, November/December 1976, p. 26.
    7. Wexler, in fact, was fifth in a line of talented young DPs to work with Ashby. He was preceded by Gordon Willis on The Landlord, John Alonzo on Harold and Maude, Michael Chapman on The Last Detail, and László Kovács on Shampoo.
    8. Quoted in “Chance Encounters: Bringing Being There to the Screen” by Barbara Tepa Lupack in Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, New York, Hall, 1998, p. 214.
    9. Lupack, p. 213.
    10. If watching Rebecca DeMornay sing a synthesizer-backed cover of Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” was not the most depressing moment of my film-watching life, then it’s only because I could imagine Ashby enjoying the irony of it all.
  • Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

    Images: All of the Kubrick trademarks are on display here: languid tracking shots, perfectly symmetrical compositions, slow dissolves, Barry Lyndon-style zoom outs, and thematic changes of color temperature (most noticeable in both blue-tinted scenes involving Pyle). Favorite images: Joker’s “war face,” the long shot of Mr. Touchdown’s crumpling body, the interview segments, “the Jungian thing, sir,” and Pyle’s “major malfunction.”

    • • •

    “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.”
    — Michael Herr, Dispatches

    Full Metal Jacket has been unfairly characterized by many as a deeply flawed narrative, a film whose brilliant first act overshadows the “in country” sequences that follow. I’ll admit to having spent some time myself in that camp. Lee Ermey’s kinetic performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is a sight of strange beauty; his uber-masculine, profanity-fueled taunts are terrifying both for their misogyny and for their undeniable appeal. Likewise, Vincent D’Onofrio’s turn as the pathetic Private Pyle invites us to experience Parris Island by way of a comfortable narrative convention: the bildungsroman. Though unusually impersonal and free of easy sentiment (both Kubrick trademarks), the basic training sections of FMJ essentially conform to our classic genre expectations, mapping out the well-worn path from raw recruit to U.S. Marine.

    That Kubrick undercuts his coming-of-age story with Pyle’s brutal murder/suicide has led many to call Full Metal Jacket an anti-war movie, one that challenges America’s call for “a few good men” and the very processes (militaristic and sociological) that create them. While that’s certainly true—and I’ll soon return to Kubrick’s critique of masculinity—I wonder if it might be more useful to call FMJ an anti war-movie movie. For the auteur is obviously fascinated, in a deliberately self-reflexive way, with the influence of images and storytelling on the formation of what might be described as ideological mythology, that is, the conventions of belief and behavior imposed upon us through cultural narratives by various makers of meaning. Kubrick, always an intellectual filmmaker (and I would deny the negative connotations so often attached to that word), destabilizes those familiar myths, appropriately representing the Vietnam War by way of a narrative that, like the war itself, frustrates expectations and refuses progress.

    Private Joker’s opening line—”Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?”—serves as a refrain throughout FMJ, making explicit the unspoken ties that bind America’s victory in WWII (and the subsequent cinematic representations of it) to the Cold War ideology that made Vietnam possible. In the film’s most self-reflexive sequence, a camera crew interviews a platoon of grunts, who affect bravado, but seem genuinely bewildered by the failure of their actual war experience to conform to their preconceived notions of “heroism,” “bravery,” and “sacrifice.” The aptly named Private Cowboy (Arliss Howard) describes the battle at Hue as the first to be like “what [he] thought a war was supposed to be. There’s the enemy. Kill him.” Another wonders why the locals are unappreciative of their efforts: “They’d rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards.” The stories of American masculinity and historical progress—written during WWII by their fathers, political leaders, and commanding officers—are revealed to be little more than Tall Tales.

    In that sense, John Wayne, I guess, is like Pecos Bill. Despite the interesting moral ambiguity of some of his finer roles, for many critics of the Cold War he serves more often as an icon, a shorthand referent to the nostalgia and arrogance that continues to characterize so much of America’s foreign and domestic policy. In Dispatches, journalist and FMJ co-writer Michael Herr complains that neither the Duke’s brand of flag-waving patriotism nor the traditional Hollywood films in which it was trumpeted could possibly make sense of the morally ambiguous Vietnam experience. “The Green Berets doesn’t count,” Herr writes. “That wasn’t really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.” Hartmann’s murder, then, is a symbolic gesture for Kubrick, a violent erasure of an anachronistic icon. Watch the scene again, and notice how closely Hartmann’s voice and swagger mimic John Wayne’s when he learns that Pyle’s rifle is loaded: “Now you listen to me, private pyle, and you listen good.”

    Like Herr’s and several of the other landmark accounts of Vietnam—Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, in particular—Full Metal Jacket proposes a new narrative form, one that capitalizes on the contradictions of war instead of reducing them to an impossibly coherent heroic myth. Gone are the noble feats of bravery that would lead, inevitably, to the taking of Pork Chop Hill or to victory at Iwo Jima. Gone are the rag tag group of soldiers who share stories from “back home” and pour over letters from Mom. Instead, Kubrick splices the “in country” acts into disjointed episodes, leaving viewers, like the soldiers onscreen, wandering without direction.

    Nowhere is Kubrick’s narrative strategy more obvious and effective than in the film’s closing sequence, that moment when we most desire closure. After showing Joker (Matthew Modine) fire his pistol into a dying female sniper, Kubrick cuts to a long shot of soldiers on the march from left to right across the screen, their figures silhouetted by the fires burning throughout Hue. Then, in the final cut of the film, Kubrick deliberately breaks the 180 degree rule: we now see Joker in a medium shot as he and the others march from right to left. By maintaining continuity through the soundtrack, Kubrick prevents the unusual cut from being as jarring as one might expect, but the implications are obvious: unlike traditional war films, Full Metal Jacket has refused to honor our journey by arriving at any prescribed destination. Instead, we continue to hump it back and forth, longing for the direction and ideological stability of Parris Island.

    • • •

    As a side note, I felt almost compelled to write this response after watching Full Metal Jacket last night—the first time I had seen it in several years. Despite my deep affection for Kubrick, I had always felt strangely ambivalent about this film, mostly, I think, because I considered it a retread of concerns that had already been tackled in better films: the possibility of noble action in war (Paths of Glory), technological hubris (2001), Cold War ideology (Dr. Strangelove), and the dehumanizing influence of the State over the individual (A Clockwork Orange). But after spending several months knee-deep in some of the best literature to emerge from the Vietnam experience, Full Metal Jacket struck me with something of the force of revelation. This really is an impressive film. One of Kubrick’s best.

    Reading suggestions:

    • David Rabe: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers, and Sticks and Bones
    • Michael Herr: Dispatches
    • Gustav Hasford: The Short-Timers
    • Tim O’Brien: Going After Cacciato
    • Bobbie Ann Mason: In Country
    • Joan Didion: Democracy

  • Broom of the System (1987)

     

    By David Foster Wallace

    Lenore Beadsman’s life is complicated. The 24 year old heir to the Beadsman baby food empire struggles to balance her career as a call center operator — where the lines of communication seem perpetually crossed — with her, um, complex relationship with her boss, Rick Vigorous, of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing. She also worries about her younger bother, who refers to himself as the Antichrist; her bird, Vlad the Impaler, which has a tendency to curse and prophesy; and her grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who has suddenly gone missing from her retirement home.

    The majority of Broom of the System, first published in 1987, takes place in the future (1990, actually), which allows Wallace the freedom to distort the otherwise recognizable landscape of his northern Ohio. Here, popular culture has literally shaped life: an entire city has, in fact, been designed to resemble Jayne Mansfield from above. College students meet to watch Bob Newhart and play drinking games; others gather at a bar built around a Gilligan’s Island theme. Wallace, a former philosophy major, had obviously been reading Baudrillard, as he has great linguistic fun interrogating the simulacrum — the copies of copies of copies that have come to replace actual experience in contemporary American culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made blot intended to serve as “A point of reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self.”

    Wallace’s first novel, written as his MFA thesis, is obviously heavily indebted to (but not entirely derivative of) Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Both are detective stories of a Post-Modern, epistemological bent, more concerned with the language that constructs meaning — both in their stories and in the world — than with the literal “truth” that their heroines pursue. And both authors push the conceit to hilariously absurd ends. Wallace even one-ups Pynchon’s famous final scene — Oedipa Maas sits, waiting like we do, for the mystery to be revealed — by actually ending Broom of the System mid-sentence. It’s perhaps too easy of a trick, and one that must surely make the more mature Wallace cringe, but it feels perfectly appropriate here.

  • Sculpting in Time (1987)

    By Andrei Tarkovsky

    My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

    I’ve never read another book like Sculpting in Time. In it Tarkovsky speaks as eloquently about art as he does faith and philosophy, and does so in a remarkably kind, concerned voice. To him, his subject —the unique ability of the cinematic image to touch the soul and inspire spiritual improvement — is quite literally a matter of life and death. “The goal for all art,” he writes, “unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36). And again: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning it to good” (43).

    That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.

    In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

    Finally, I would enjoin the reader — confiding in him utterly — to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? — Tarkovsky

    In the margin of my copy I scribbled, “Now that is how to finish a book.” Although my own appreciation of his sentiment is due, in large part, to our shared religious faith, I trust that such a faith is by no means a prerequisite for his readers. I can’t stress enough how refreshing it is to read a filmmaker speak of his craft using terms like “truth,” “love,” “sacrifice,” and (especially) “beauty.” Tarkovsky writes, “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art” (168). It’s a criticism of the commercial cinema that is both blatant and absurd — in an era when weekend box office grosses have become the stuff of water-cooler conversations, the word “beauty” is as alien to “movies” as Tarkovsky himself is to most American movie-goers.

    The greatest compliment I can give Sculpting in Time is to say that when I finished reading it I took a deep breath and watched his film, The Mirror, three times. Forgive my hyperbole, but Tarkovsky has quite honestly challenged me to adjust my entire understanding of film and of its potential.

    Much of Sculpting in Time is devoted to Tarkovsky’s fascinating and detailed explanation of his methods as a filmmaker. He addresses both his stylistic techniques and, more specifically, how he put them into practice in each of his seven films (Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice are given the most attention; Stalker and Solaris the least). Chapter V is the longest chapter and should probably be the starting point for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky, but not in reading the entire book. The chapter is broken into six film elements:

    The Film Image

    Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like “artistic image” could never be “expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable” (104). And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the film image to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

    Tarkovsky argues that such an image is captured only when the director abandons all attempts at objectivity, building instead from his own personal storehouse of memory and experience. The Mirror is the most obvious example of this principle put to practice — it is a film filled with images from Tarkovsky’s own childhood. His approach to the film image (in a nutshell) is that an image based on Truth (even a completely subjective truth) will resonate much more strongly with an audience than will a cliched image that comes pre-loaded with supposedly objective symbolism. Works for me. I can barely make it through The Mirror without crying.

    Time, Rhythm and Editing

    “Sculpting in time” is Tarkovsky’s metaphor for the construction of a film’s rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as “puzzles and riddles,” intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

    Instead, he writes, “rhythm . . . is the main formative element of cinema” (119). He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. “The film has no editing, no acting and no decor,” Tarkovsky writes. “But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development” (114). Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky’s films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of The Sacrifice) and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

    Scenario and Shooting Script

    For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading.

    The Film’s Graphic Realisation

    This section offers a glimpse of how Tarkovsky worked on set, describing his approach to collaboration. “It is essential that [the crew] should not be in any way mere functionaries; they have to participate as creative artists in their own right, and be allowed to share in all your feelings and thoughts” (135). He talks specifically about his relationship with the camera-man, who he refers to as a “co-author,” and explains how he worked with Georgi Rerberg and Vadim Yusov. This section is featured prominently in Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, the documentary that is included on The Sacrifice DVD.

    The Film Actor

    Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film.

    Music and Noises

    Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162).

    My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky

    As I mentioned above, I realize that I’ve slipped occassionally into hyperbole here, but since finishing Sculpting in Time last week, I’ve found myself viewing film (and all art in general) from a new perspective. We see this debate all the time: Film as “just entertainment” vs. film as “something more.” I’d been leaning towards the latter for several years; this book has completed that shift.

  • July’s People (1981)

    By Nadine Gordimer

    Note: The following was written for a graduate seminar on Postcolonial literature, but, aside from the first few paragraphs, it is a fairly straight-forward reading of what might just be my favorite novel.

    – – –

    How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.
    — Kate Chopin, The Awakening

    Nadine Gordimer prefaces July’s People with a passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” The line serves as both a warning — preparing the reader for the disorienting journey he or she is about to begin — and as the thesis of the novel. In a 1987 interview, Gordimer addressed those readers whom she felt had “misread” her work. “People always say that July’s People is about what happens after revolution in South Africa. But it isn’t. . . . it is during. . . .it’s about a time of civil war” (Bazin, 294). July’s People inhabits a world where traditionally assumed roles and rules are in a state of flux, where relationships and stations have become undefined, where everything, even vocabulary and language, has come into question. The novel is rife with the “morbid symptoms” of post-colonial nationalism: miscommunication, alienation, anger, and, ultimately, violence.

    In “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, Homi Bhabha discusses the Western nation as the “locality of culture”, which he describes as being “more around temporality than about historicity” (140). He contends that the space of the modern nation-people is never horizontal — a simple, linear sequence of determining events — and in doing so, he deconstructs political, social, and literary terminology. Bhabha’s representation of the nation as a temporal process assumes a form of living that is:

    more complex than ‘community’; more symbolic than ‘society’; more connotative than ‘country’; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of State; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centered than citizen; more collective than the ‘subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. (14)

    Like Gramsci and Gordimer, Bhabha views people/nations as being constantly between the dying old and the new which cannot be born. He describes the struggle as a “contested conceptual territory” where people must be both “objects” of the past — stereotypes based on a nationalist pedagogy — and “subjects” of the present — proof of a nation’s vitality (145). “It is through this process of splitting,” writes Bhabha, “that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation” (146).

    The ambivalence of the South Africa that Gordimer writes in July’s People is jarring. The first voice we hear belongs to July, a servant beginning his day “for them as his kind has always done for their kind” (1). However, the narrative does not allow us to settle comfortably into a world of established roles and easily recognizable caricatures. Instead, we are given four pages of unidentified pronouns, names without faces, and a setting that only slowly begins to come into focus. As if gradually waking us from a nightmare-filled sleep, the narrator forces us to struggle as we order our reality. Past and present. Here and there. Us and them. Binary oppositions are compressed, making us question their significance.

    The first paragraph of the second chapter, a description of an automobile which sounds as if it were cut and pasted from a tourist’s South African Cultural Guide, grounds the reader in fact. It is in the second chapter that the narration provides some of the back story. We learn that Bam Smales, a successful white Johannesburg architect, his wife, Maureen, and their three children have been rescued from violent revolution by their servant of fifteen years, a black man named July. In order to escape the burning, looting, and killing in the city, the six huddled together inside the Smales’s “bakkie” and rode dirt roads into the bush. The journey, lasting three days and covering more than 600 kilometers, ended at July’s home, the home of his people, the home he had been allowed to visit only every other year.

    Gordimer devotes most of July’s People‘s 160 pages to the development of the relationship between Maureen and July. Early in the novel, July comes to the Smales’s hut to fetch their clothes for his women to wash. The scene, which is the first to feature private interaction between July and Maureen, establishes the complexity of their association. Maureen, a woman who prides herself on her liberal beliefs and conscientious treatment of others, first responds by taking responsibility. “I can do it myself,” she says (27). July, a proud man who has served in order to provide for his family, denies her. Their conversation quickly becomes one of payment for services provided. A mutual, though unspoken, agreement is made: both will attempt to maintain their familiar roles. The result is an awkward moment when both realize July’s practicality and foresight, both understand that he is their savior. Despite her progressive politics, Maureen gives him the clothes, agrees to pay, and then seems surprised to find the villagers carrying their crumpled money with them; surprised, actually, to learn that they are “able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete” (28).

    The narration of July’s People speaks most often from Maureen’s perspective. As the novel begins, she imagines a bond between July and herself; “he and she understood each other well,” she thinks (13). But time in the bush strips away all certainties. Reading a novel, a past-time of hers, becomes impossible: “She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete” (29). She admits to looting (38). She chides herself for the superficiality of her experience: “Fangalo would have made more sense than ballet,” she tells Bam (45). Finally, Maureen rises one night, literally strips herself of all that belonged to her past, and stands nude in the rain. In this baptism, Maureen is described as being close to the night, her body the same temperature as the rain, as if she had been transformed into a living representation of South Africa’s confused present (48).

    But like Bhabha’s deconstruction of terminology, Gordimer’s baptism reveals the complexities of the archetype. Maureen is transformed — made new — but she is not awarded the assumed salvation. Instead, she becomes only more aware of her past self. Soon after Maureen’s re-birth, the narration becomes one with her, offering the reader Maureen’s “humane creed” (64). “[It] depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need?” (64-65). This creed, however, is problematized by Maureen’s new awareness. “The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody,” she realizes, “was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff” (65). Her roles — wife, mother, master — are suddenly as arbitrary and predetermined as that which she had assigned to July.

    It is interesting to note that Maureen’s thoughts about her creed are brought on by her preoccupation with July. She tries to imagine him. She wonders about his town woman, whether he loved her, whether he would have liked to have brought her to his home instead. Maureen’s thoughts are like those of a jealous lover. Although Maureen and July never literally share a sexual experience, the language depicting their private interaction is laced with a conscious eroticism. As Maureen stands nude in the rain, she sees and hears July. There is a “dimension between her and some element in the rain-hung darkness” and he is described as “savouring” and “burning” (48). When they meet to discuss who will hold the keys to the bakkie, an obvious symbol of power, they share the shame of their “affair.” “His chin was raised, trying to sense rather than see if Bam was in the hut behind. Her silence was the answer: not back; they both knew the third one had gone off” (69). Removed from the politically and socially accepted ideology which had governed her thoughts and actions, Maureen imagines herself as the peak of a triangle, her loyalties and desires torn between the blond man “back there” and her “frog prince, savior, July.”

    Their conversation dissolves into mean-spirited insults. Again like lovers, Maureen and July seem to know exactly which words will strike deepest. July chastises her for her dehumanizing lack of trust. “You looking everywhere, see if everything it’s still all right. Myself, I’m not saying you’re not a good madam — but you don’t say you trust for me. — It was a command” (70). He throws “boy” at her, a term of contempt for them both, and again shifts the topic to money, “refusing to meet her on any but the lowest category of understanding” (71). Truly hurt, Maureen retaliates by mentioning Ellen, the town woman, a rival. In doing so, “they stepped across fifteen years of no-man’s land, her words shoved them and they were together, duellists who will feel each other’s breath before they turn away” (72). But again, Gordimer refuses to allow Maureen’s “triumph” to simplify their relationship. Although some ideological boundaries between the two have been blurred, others are drawn with each of Maureen’s awakenings. In a beautifully effective narrative shift, Gordimer shows Maureen — and us — the consequences of her transgression (I love this line): “A servant replied uninterestedly to a dutiful enquiry on the part of the good madam who knows better than to expose herself to an answer from the real facts of his life” (73).

    The two separate, but Maureen again searches July out a few days later. She is drawn to him, leaving her husband behind. “Maureen felt it had been decided she had to come look for July; helpless before the circumstantial evidence that they were now alone, again” (95). Like reconciling lovers, they speak casually of mundane topics, both hoping to ignore all that had passed between them. But their civility is short lived. When July denies her any interaction with the women of the village, Maureen surprises them both with a venomous threat: “Are you afraid I’m going to tell her [your wife] something?” (98). Again Maureen fires back her knowledge of Ellen; again she is surprised by July’s response. “Before her,” Gordimer writes, “he brought his right fist down on his breast. She felt the thud as fear in her own” (98). It is the first time that Maureen ever fears a man. Her husband, “the architect lying on a bed in a mud hut,” is an anachronism, “a presence in circumstances outside those the marriage was contracted for” (98). But July threatens something within her, awakens another part of herself which she fears:

    How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing that was to say between them that had any meaning.
    Fifteen Years
    your boy
    you satisfy (98)

    Gordimer emphasizes place and time. It is only here and now, “in this interregnum,” that it is possible for Maureen to recognize any of the complexities which make it impossible for her to ever really know July.

    Maureen also recognizes that her interaction with July is effected greatly by language, by their inability to discuss “even the most commonplace of abstractions” (96). Gordimer describes July’s English as that which is “learned in kitchens, factories and mines. It was based on orders and responses, not the exchange of ideas and feelings” (96). In his discussion of the “national narrative,” Bhabha finds language to be the most appropriate analogy for the ambivalence of modern society. He cites at length the work of Claude Lefort:

    The enigma of language — namely that it is both internal and external to the speaking subject, that there is an articulation of the self with others which marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control-is concealed by the representation of a place ‘outside’ — language from which it could be generated. (146)

    Defined by a language external to his self and outside of his control, July is a construct, a patchwork of stereotypes and naïve assumptions. Conflicts arise in July’s People when Maureen becomes aware of her role in his construction, and when she realizes that her role is changing. Lefort acknowledges the contradiction inherent in his enigma. “Only the authority of the master allows the contradiction to be concealed, but he is himself an object of representation; presented as possessor of the rule, he allows the contradiction to appear through himself” (146-47). As Steven Clingman points out in The Novels of Nadine Gordimer, Maureen’s fear of July is simply the horrifying realization that even her language is a daily medium of his oppression (200). Removed from an ideology which has arbitrarily assigned power to her and those like her, Maureen is exposed, shown to be as much an “object of representation” as July.

    The final meeting between July and Maureen is also the most poignant. By the end of the novel all authority and power, symbolized by the bakkie and the gun, have been transferred to July’s people. Bam weeps openly in front of his children. He and Maureen interact “as divorced people might” (140). Their relationship becomes one composed of indeterminate pronouns — “Her. Not ‘Maureen’. Not ‘His wife’” (105). Maureen goes to July and demands that he return the weapon. This time she approaches him as one conscious of a shared past that can never be reclaimed. She flings “back at him his uprightness, his moralizing — whatever the rigmarole of form he had always insisted on establishing between them” (149). But like dry ice that evaporates instantly when removed from its secure environment, their posturing dissolves quickly in the bush. Again, each becomes frustrated with the other. Clingman calls the language of the scene a battlefield — “as much a battlefield as the realm of private and political relations it helps both constitute and conceal” (200). Maureen accuses July of stealing rubbish from her home, then tells him of the shame she felt because of it. All he can manage in response is, “You” before slipping into the eloquence of his native tongue. Clingman aptly characterizes July’s furious venting as a “machine gun barrage” of words (200). July’s weapon hits its mark.

    [Maureen] understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. But for himself — to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people. (152)

    Gordimer completes the scene by surrounding Maureen and July with the evening,”as if mistaking them for lovers” (153). Maureen strikes a grotesque pose against the hood of the bakkie, another message which means nothing to him. Defeated, she returns to Bam and asks, “Was it like this for him?” (154).

    Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier is reborn as a new creature, “opening [her] eyes in a familiar world that [she] had never known before” (124). Her awakening comes as she begins her swim towards death. Maureen Smales’s final destination is slightly more ambiguous, but no more promising. July’s People ends when a helicopter of unknown origins flies over the village and lands nearby. Maureen, acting on instinct like an animal, runs toward the sound, although she is unaware “whether it holds saviours or murderers; and — even if she were to have identified the markings — for whom” (158). Gordimer has referred to the finale as a Pascalian wager, “Salvation exists or doesn’t it?” (Wagner, 112). Stripped of all certainties, removed from all roles and expectations, and armed with only a new self-awareness, Maureen flees both the old which is dead and the new which has just been born.

    Works Cited

    Bazin, Nancy Topping, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, eds. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990.

    Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

    Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York: Signet, 1976.

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