Tag: Region: America

  • Hillbilly Elegy

    Hillbilly Elegy

    Dir. by Ron Howard

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    This essay was originally published at Cinema Scope.

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    In his 1892 inaugural address, governor William MacCorkle warned that in the coming years West Virginia would find itself occupying the same “position of vassalage” that Ireland held in relation to England, and for similar reasons: “But the men who today are purchasing the immense areas of the most valuable lands in the State, are not citizens and have only purchased in order that they may carry to their distant homes in the North, the usufruct of the lands of West Virginia, thus depleting the State of its wealth to build grandeur and splendor in other States.” Over the previous century, the Scots-Irish smallholders of Appalachia—a region that stretches more than 2,000 miles from western New York to northern Alabama—had been systematically dispossessed of their land and their makeshift livelihoods by a dysfunctional patchwork of property laws, by an influx of capital that trapped mountain people in structured indebtedness, and, in the decades following the Civil War, by the industrialized extraction of iron and coal, the clear-cutting of forests, the resulting erosion of topsoil, and, as technologies advanced, mountaintop removal. In Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, historian Steven Stoll compares the plight of the region to that of a colonized people: “The question we need to ask of every migration from country to city is whether it originated from a government scheme or corporate gambit that so degraded a people’s autonomy as to give them no choice.”

    MacCorkle’s concern was notable among politicians of his day, as many in West Virginia’s congressional delegation at the time were industrialists themselves and beholden more to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil than the citizens they represented. In subsequent decades, the governor’s worst fears were realized. The wholesale destruction of Appalachia’s subsistence economy created starvation-level poverty, which forced tens of thousands of people into wage labour and accelerated the first hillbilly migration—from mountain homesteads to mining towns, where workers were often paid in scrip that could only be spent at the company store. The region’s rich supply of natural resources and exploitable labour, along with its increasingly efficient transportation systems, resulted over time in the extraction and transfer of billions of dollars (by today’s accounting) from Appalachia into the capital reserves of east coast companies. The market crash of 1929 took most of that capital with it, necessitating mine closures and putting workers in a double bind: having traded what little value remained in their land for a steady, if inadequate, wage, they were left hungry, homeless, and indebted. When the elderly union members in Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976) conjure images of the violent confrontations of the ’30s, they are speaking on behalf of that collective, ever-present trauma.

    It should come as little surprise that none of this history is present in Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard’s adaptation of conservative commentator J.D. Vance’s 2016 rags-to-riches memoir. In interviews, Howard has gone to great pains to erase what he calls the “sociopolitical aspect” of Vance’s story, vanishing history, labour, capital, and public policy with a wave of his wand and with those magical, middlebrow incantations, “universality,” “shared humanity,” and “very relatable characters.” In that sense, he’s following Vance’s lead. “This book is not an academic study,” Vance writes in the opening pages, with a knowing wink to anyone back home who might accuse the Yale Law grad and venture capitalist of joining the class of elites for whom he expresses such resentment and envy throughout his bestseller. Rather, Vance offers as his one credential for speaking on behalf of an entire region—often literally in the royal “we”—the unimpeachable moral authority of authenticity, a sly rhetorical strategy that makes for good book-club discussions and bad art. Howard has made a habit of leveraging that ethos when framing his adaptation. He likes to tell the story of when Vance visited the set and then offered to call every member of the Academy on Glenn Close’s behalf because “she has somehow captured the absolute essence of my grandmother.” To reinforce the point, Howard inserts home videos of the Vance family into the closing credits, assuring viewers that, yes, Mamaw really was a larger-than-life character and, yes, Close’s transformation really is awards-worthy.

    Hillbilly Elegy is about the legacy of the second migration, when scores of young people, Vance’s Mamaw and Papaw among them, fled the mountains and settled in lowland burgs like Middletown, Ohio, where the postwar boom, union benefits, and company pensions offered the promise of middle-class stability. Howard reduces their journey to a montage of predictable images during the opening titles: a passing glance at a Route 23 road sign, a bustling small-town square, and a CGI rendering of the AMCO plant in its heyday, all colour-corrected in the nostalgic sepia tones of an America that was still great. Jump cut to 1997, and that wide-eyed promise is lost: what little we see of Middletown is now boarded up, the plant stands vacant and decrepit, and Mamaw and Papaw (Bo Hopkins), both of them bent-shouldered and sallow, are shuttling their troubled daughter, Bev (Amy Adams), and her two teenaged children, J.D. (Owen Asztalos) and Lindsay (Haley Bennett), back home after a family reunion in Kentucky. Despite his protests, Howard has, with that elision of six decades, stumbled into a fine cinematic analogue for the sociopolitical content of Vance’s book, which amounts to a portrait of ahistorical resentment, salved by doctrinaire conservative snake oil. For the Vance family story to be universal, Howard must likewise edit out the complex tangle of causes and simply accept the real-world effects—domestic violence, alienation, unemployment, opioid addiction—as natural and representative. (As an aside, Joseph L. Anderson’s Spring Night Summer Night [1967] is the best film about postwar Appalachia. John Crawford’s three-minute, regret-soaked barroom monologue renders most of Hillbilly Elegy redundant.)

    Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor have crafted a serviceable through line to Vance’s story by cross-cutting between his adolescent years, when his home life was at its most chaotic, and two days during his time at Yale, when a potential career-making interview for a prestigious internship is threatened by Bev’s most recent relapse. Howard’s and Taylor’s creative shuffling of events makes Hillbilly Elegy less a film about the life-saving influence of a take-no-shit grandmother, as Vance often describes his book, and more about the double consciousness of social mobility, the grievous push and pull between every aspirational dream and the life left behind. (Yes, the film is at its best when it strikes a universal note.) Gabriel Basso, who plays the older J.D., reminds me of my neighbours here in East Tennessee: he carries the character’s burdens convincingly and sympathetically, even when speaking in clichés. That the culminating scene between J.D. and Bev doesn’t quite land has less to do with the scenario or Basso’s and Adams’ performances than with Howard’s head-scratching lapses in taste. If, four decades into his career as a director, Howard still deems it necessary to insert a POV shot of piss filling a cup to express the emotional turmoil of a 13-year-old boy forced by his family to help his addict mother test clean, then there’s little hope he has a great film in him.

    I can’t decide if I agree with critics who accuse Hillbilly Elegy of poverty tourism. The film fails in the same banal ways most biopics fail: by racing too quickly from incident to incident and clumsily conforming a complicated life to the ready-made beats of a script outline. The film’s few markers of Appalachia—green hills and ramshackle houses, mostly—are too empty to signify anything at all. Howard shot parts of Hillbilly Elegy in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, a short drive from the Chattooga River where John Boorman made Deliverance (1972) and just south of the locations Michael Mann used as stand-ins for New York’s western frontier in The Last of the Mohicans (1992). You’d hardly notice. Unlike the directors who have made great films about Appalachia—I’d add Karl Brown’s Stark Love (1927) and Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) to the short list—Howard is untroubled by ghosts of the past and oblivious to the sublime. If I’m not offended by Hillbilly Elegy as I’d expected to be (in that respect I suppose it’s an improvement over Vance’s book), it’s because in his effort to elide history, Howard has made a film about a world of his own invention, a Middle America that exists only on Netflix.

  • Moments of Impact: A Conversation with Julia Loktev

    Moments of Impact: A Conversation with Julia Loktev

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

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    Midway through our conversation, Julia Loktev asked to go off the record. The plots of her two narrative features, Day Night Day Night (2006) and The Loneliest Planet (2011), turn on sudden, unexpected, transformative events, and while she’s happy to talk about the twists—“We’re so attached to this notion of spoiling, which I find a bit strange”—she’s cagier about her own points of entry into the stories, mostly for fear of ruining anyone’s fun. We agreed to keep the published interview spoiler-free.

    Loktev was born in St. Petersburg (then still Leningrad) and immigrated to the United States as a child. Her family settled in Colorado, where she lived until college, when she moved to Montreal to study English and film at McGill University. As a graduate film student at NYU, Loktev briefly put aside narrative filmmaking to work on a documentary feature about her father, who had been struck by a car a decade earlier. The accident, as Loktev later told Charlie Rose, left him “stuck between life and death, in a suspended state” and forced her mother to become a full-time caregiver.

    Moment of Impact (1998), which earned Loktev the Directing Award at Sundance and the Grand Prize at Cinéma du Reél, is claustrophobic and intimate without ever sliding into indulgence. Loktev shot, recorded, and edited the film herself, and her parents gradually emerge in it as accommodating, if not always eager, collaborators. Indeed, the question of her father’s ability to willingly and meaningfully participate in the project is a constant tension in the film, forcing viewers to confront the same inescapable unknowing that defined so much of everyday experience for Loktev and her mother. In his 1999 review for The Nation, Stuart Klawans writes:

    Surprising, inventive and canny, [Moment of Impact is] also about the emotional distance that exists between the subject of any documentary and the filmmaker – or for that matter between the subject and the audience. In some films that distance amounts to an imbalance of power, which the documentarian or the viewer is willing to exploit. Here, Julia Loktev makes the shrinking and yawning of the gap into a kind of drama – the only drama possible for people whose lives are now all anticlimax.

    From the vantage of 2019, Day Night Day Night is something of a time capsule. Shot in HD by long-time Gaspar Noé collaborator Benoît Debie, it has all the hallmarks of that brief transition period when digital images of various resolutions were transferred to 35mm for exhibition. It remains a fascinatingly strange-looking film— monochromatic and still for the first hour, super-saturated and manic for the second. Like so many other small-budget filmmakers at the time, Loktev and Debie seem also to have been under the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose hand-held close-ups and traveling shots redefined cinematographic “realism” in the 2000s.

    Inspired by a newspaper article Loktev read while visiting Russia, Day Night Day Night documents the last two days in the life of a young suicide bomber as she makes final preparations before setting off to kill as many people as possible in the middle of Times Square. Even more provocative is Loktev’s decision to strip away every sign and symbol that might suggest a specific ideological motive for the terrorist act. First-time actress Luisa Williams responded to a flyer seeking “someone who could pass for 19 and looked ethnically ambiguous.” The nameless handlers who feed and dress her in a non-descript hotel room speak in generic, unaccented American English. The subject of the film isn’t politics or religion or nationalism but the “moral clarity” (emphasis on the scare quotes) of the would-be martyr, an idea that resonates today but was even more confrontational in 2006, three years into the Iraq War and only a few months after the London train bombing.

    The Loneliest Planet opens with a mesmerizing image of a young woman hopping, nude and soap-covered, while her fiancé rushes to pour warm water over her. It’s the sharpest example of Loktev’s strategy of dropping us into their relationship in medias res. The signifying conversations of young love are already behind them; they’re well into the “Did you shit?” phase of commitment. While backpacking through Georgia, Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) stop in a small village and hire a guide, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), to lead them on a three-day hike through the Caucasus mountains. Loktev punctuates the journey with extreme long shots of the landscape, with the horizon line always near or just above the top of the frame, which turns the hillside into flat abstraction and traps viewers in a sublime and potentially dangerous world that recalls Michelangelo Antonioni, Gus Van Sant, and Bruno Dumont.

    When I first wrote about The Loneliest Planet in 2011, I described the dramatic plot twist as an “unexpectedly literary turn for a film like this, the kind of obnoxiously symbolic moment that would doom a Hemingway hero.” I was impressed at the time—and having watched the film a half-dozen times since am even more impressed now—by how masterfully Loktev and her cast rewrite that cliché. A rare film about the difficult act of reconciliation, The Loneliest Planet succeeds by choreographing the gestures, glances, and commonplace routines of intimate affection. (In that sense, it’s one of the few films I put in the same category as Claire Denis’s Beau travail.) A brief shot of Alex and Nica lying in their tent, his hand on her hip, one finger resting in the waistband of her panties, is more erotic, in the largest sense of the term, than most sex scenes I’ve watched over the past decade. As a result, the dramatic stakes in the second half of the film—they can reconcile, but will they?—are real and palpable.

    Special thanks to Julia Loktev for her time. We spoke via Skype on June 20, 2019 and discussed her career so far and her immediate plans to make another film.


    NOTEBOOK: Did you grow up as a cinephile?

    JULIA LOKTEV: No, not really. My mom would take me to the Colorado State University film series. I remember her taking me to Stranger than Paradise and Fanny and Alexander. I think she might have taken me to Blue Velvet, or that one I might’ve figured out on my own. That was very early on, but those were formative experiences at CSU.

    I was an English major with a concentration in film and communications, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. It started out with watching a lot of films and doing film studies classes, but then I realized I absolutely hated talking about movies after I watched them. I just didn’t want to share them. I had this very strange, selfish reaction where I hated seeing a movie and then coming out and having to analyze it with people. So I stopped taking film classes and started doing what was referred to at the time just as “theory”—that phase when post-structuralism and semiotics were fashionable. That’s what I ended up concentrating on.

    Then at the same time, I was DJ’ing at the campus community station there in Montreal, and that was for me the formative experience. I’m not a musician, I’m practically tone deaf, but I’ve always loved music. It was a real evolution going from DJ’ing post-punk to discovering experimental music and what we vaguely called “radio art” at the time. I began doing my own work on the air and using that as a kind of free-for-all space, which then led to adding image to sound. So unlike a lot of people who come to film from image, I actually came from sound.

    NOTEBOOK: I think we’re about the same age. College radio was really good in the late-’80s and early-’90s.

    LOKTEV: College radio was really good then. This was an amazing station in Montreal. It’s actually still an amazing station. At that time, it was everything to me. The radio station was my community, much more so than the university, because it had reach throughout Montreal, and people from different communities were coming in and doing shows. It was an incredible space, and I was this girl who had moved from a fairly small town in Colorado.

    NOTEBOOK: Were you collecting field recordings yourself? Or building from things you could find at the station? I remember digging through early CD collections of sound effects and royalty-free music in those days.

    LOKTEV: I was going out and collecting sound. It was things that I recorded and then elements of live performance— really structured audio art pieces. At the time, we would usually record with cassettes. I remember getting my first DAT, and it was thrilling! We edited on reel-to-reel. I remember sitting there with a razor blade held between my teeth, putting the tape on the editing block and splicing it together. The transition to film made sense. There was a physicality to cutting film that was already familiar to me. I still have an old editing block around.

    NOTEBOOK: What were your ambitions when you arrived at NYU for film school?

    LOKTEV: I always just had this image that I would… If I could make one film, that might enable me to make another film, and that would enable me to make another film. It might be very few films, but that’s how I thought of it.

    NOTEBOOK: You never considered a more commercial path?

    LOKTEV: No, never. That never really crossed my mind. The films that have meant something to me have not come from that. I’ve always just wanted to make films that are like the films I love. Although I do love different kinds of movies. I love Mission: Impossible movies. But that was not the kind of film I wanted to make.

    NOTEBOOK: We’re talking today partly because MUBI is showing Day Night Day Night and The Loneliest Planet this month. I wonder how you feel, in a general sense, about them today? Has your relationship to them evolved in any way?

    LOKTEV: A film, once you make it, is part of you. Someone else’s film that I saw ten years ago or five years ago, I can watch again and it’s completely new. I don’t think one has that opportunity with one’s own work. It’s inherently a part of you. I don’t go back and watch it and begin again to form a relationship. It’s the relationship I had with it at the time.

    Day Night Day Night

    NOTEBOOK: Is there a Francesca Woodman photo on the wall of the hotel room in Day Night Day Night?

    LOKTEV: No. I like Francesca Woodman, but no. In the hotel room there’s actually a reproduction of a Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, who painted empty rooms and very often the back of his wife’s head. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of? His paintings look almost monochromatic even though they’re in color, which fit the feeling of the location. We tried to have paintings that still had the sense of something you could imagine being in a hotel room, unlike possibly a Francesca Woodman photograph! It fit the palate of the space. There’s an empty landscape that is just sky and field, and a woman from the back. He’s one of my favorite painters.

    NOTEBOOK: That image of a young woman from behind is something of a signature in your films. My favorite scene in The Loneliest Planet is the long walking shot that culminates with Alex reaching out to touch a curl of hair falling over the back of Nica’s neck.

    [The painting I mistook for Woodman is Hammershøi’s “Interior, Strandgade 30 (1906-8),” which can be seen by the hotel window. The larger painting over the bed is “Landscape (1900).”]

    I thought Woodman made a certain sense because when I revisited Day Night Day Night, I was struck by how small—how vulnerable—Luisa Williams is. I found myself feeling worried for her, worried that she might even allow the men in the hotel room to rape her. And I’d forgotten about her encounter with the guy on the street that begins as fun and flirtatious and then gradually becomes more aggressive and threatening. I know it took you a while to cast that role. Was part of the challenge figuring out how to embody, literally, the contradictions in the character?

    LOKTEV: The power dynamic was certainly something I spent a lot of time thinking about. I was very aware of her physical presence. Her manner. That was very much a part of the character. I think the phrase we used was “willful submission,” which isn’t without context. It’s not entirely personal. It is about something larger. How she walks, how she moves, the way she carries her body, the way she tries to not take up space, the way she speaks.

    Usually when you get subtitles done, translators go for the content. The way she speaks in the film is, “Oh, excuse me, can I have two eggrolls please? Thank you. Thank you. Excuse me.” And the first draft of the French subtitles were, “Two eggrolls.” The scene wasn’t about the eggrolls! It was about the “Excuse me, please, may I? Excuse me, thank you, thank you.” The way she interacted with the world mattered more than the specifics, so we had to retranslate the entire film to get that sense, because that was everything.

    NOTEBOOK: I’d also forgotten that Day Night Day Night was shot on digital. I saw Godard’s In Praise of Love in a theater here in Knoxville, and when it switched to the super-saturated digital images in the second section, I remember thinking, “I didn’t know a film could look like that.” Day Night Day Night has a similar effect. The primary colors in the second half are so damn beautiful.

    LOKTEV: We shot on two completely different cameras. The first half was shot on a proper big camera. In Times Square, everything changes: the sound, the color, the camera, the way the camera moves. It was when HD camcorders first came out, one of the first two models, and we shot thinking we were going to transfer to 35mm.

    It’s a very different physical experience when you go into a place with a giant camera versus going in with a reasonable camera. I wanted to be able to shoot in the middle of a living Times Square, where things were going on around us, where we weren’t blocking off the street, where we were just inserting ourselves into the crowd. We would hang out at a cafe until there was optimal density, and then we would go surfing in the crowd.

    The first day we tried having a boom, and then that became impossible because we were moving through the crowd with Luisa, myself, and Benoît Debie. We were really just having fun. One time I nearly got Luisa killed because I’d say, “Run!” And Luisa would run and Benoît would start running with the camera, sometimes out into traffic. I’m surprised nobody ended up with broken bones because we were so focused on what we were doing and often moving, just the three of us.

    NOTEBOOK: I have to admit that when I saw Day Night Day Night at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, I was frustrated by it. I’ll word this carefully for readers who might not have seen the film yet, but I thought some of your decisions had the potential to turn terrorism into kitsch. That was a bold move in 2006, when we were all anxiously watching coverage of the “war on terror.” Now, I’m more intrigued by how my sympathies shift as the story progresses. Much of the film is like an exercise in Hitchcockian suspense, but the last 20 minutes are something else. I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s a fascinating viewing experience.

    LOKTEV: My entry point was very much tied into what happens, and how things happen, in the last 20 minutes. That’s what interested me in the story to start with. When I started out making the film, I would tell people exactly how it goes down in the last part because to me it was about the larger emotional and philosophical implications. I never set out to make a suspense film, and then people said, “You can’t give away the ending! That’s a spoiler! We want to be on the edge of our seats.” I understand that suspense is very much a part of it, but to me the film is about the way things happen towards the end.

    It’s so funny, with each of these films there is a moment that people prefer to not have revealed to them before they watch the movie, but to me that’s not the crucial part. The crucial part is how everything is played out emotionally around, before, and after that moment.

    The Loneliest Planet

    NOTEBOOK: Is sound design still a foundation of your work?

    LOKTEV: I think sound is tremendously important and very often ignored. More so than image, sound is very emotional and subjective. If you’re scared—that’s the most obvious example—how the world sounds to you when you’re afraid is very different from how it sounds when you’re secure in a space.

    NOTEBOOK: There’s a perfect illustration of that idea in The Loneliest Planet. Right after the big event, the three characters hike away in single file, and you cut to them walking towards the camera, one after the other. The sound design is heightened and more present, for lack of a better word. Do you remember if that was recorded live or assembled later?

    LOKTEV: Almost all of the sound in The Loneliest Planet, I’m going to say 99%, was recorded in Georgia at the time. But I would usually do a sound take and then do very detailed recordings of the space around, sometimes separately from the image. We’d do closeups of sound the same way you do of image and then reconstruct that. So it’s not that it’s created afterwards in a studio. It’s actually created from things that were of that space, at that time, but then sculpted afterwards.

    If I’m remembering correctly, that scene is also a different sonic space. It’s the one section of the film where they’re walking through trees, because most of the space in Georgia was very wide open and grass. A lot of what I did in planning that film was thinking about how to compose with landscapes. We used landscapes like one would use music. We would think, “What kind of landscape makes sense here?” And the sound became an extension of that. So obviously a place with trees had more insects, it had a different kind of sound, it had a different kind of emotional feeling. And, again, how you hear things is tied to what you’re feeling at the time.

    There are times when I’m very aware of my own footsteps or my own breath, to again use something very obvious that’s with you all the time. And then there are times when you’re absolutely oblivious to those sounds because your mind is elsewhere.

    NOTEBOOK: Fifteen years ago I had to tell my wife that her mother and father had died unexpectedly, and I can still hear the copy machine that was spitting out paper beside us when I told her.

    LOKTEV: Exactly. That makes sense to me as something you would remember. It becomes very much part of that memory. It’s the reason people often have a very hard time with interview recordings. You’re so focused on what the person is saying, and you think you can hear them, but when you listen to the recording you realize there were all these other sounds around you that you had no awareness of.

    NOTEBOOK: I have to tell you this story. When I first saw The Loneliest Planet, I was surprised to find myself weeping—like, to the point that I worried the strangers around me might become concerned. I’ve been trying ever since to piece together why it had such a profound effect on me. I think it was related to the trauma of the story I just mentioned, but also I married young, and after being together for 25 years I think we’ve both learned a lot about the process of humiliating ourselves and disappointing each other and then having to figure out how to reconcile. I’ve gotten in the habit of calling The Loneliest Planet my favorite film about marriage because the question of reconciliation is so central.

    As you said about the end of Day Night Day Night, I’d imagine the challenge then was figuring out how to chart the emotional journey each character takes before and after the turning point in the story. Maybe one way of approaching that is to talk about the lead performances, which are so physical and intimate and unaffected. How did Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg become involved in the project?

    LOKTEV: Well first, I want to acknowledge that what you just said is really lovely. That’s a very beautiful thing to hear.

    I knew Gael García Bernal’s work. We connected with him through some Mexican friends of mine, who put the script in his hands and he responded to it. So that was a fairly straight-forward stroke of luck.

    Hani Furstenberg is, excuse my language, a fucking genius. She’s brilliant. She’s my heart, and she’s still a dear friend. I discovered her really by chance. Early on, when I was still looking at what kind of man should play this part, somebody said, “You should look at Israeli men. Look at Israeli films. The men are macho but sensitive.” So I went looking at macho Israeli men and somehow came back with Hani Furstenberg!

    I saw Hani in two movies and it took me a while to recognize her from one to the other because she transformed so completely between the movies. I was Google-stalking her for a while and discovered that she’d actually gone to LaGuardia high school in New York, was from Queens, and is American. Once I fell in love with her, I had a really hard time thinking of anyone else in the woman’s role.

    Hani and I had a Georgian reunion dinner the other day with the editor, Michael Taylor, and with Lou Ford, who was the assistant editor and is now an editor in her own right and edited The Witch and The Lighthouse. We were talking about how great Hani is, and Michael said that in all the time he’s been an editor, he hasn’t really seen another actor who is so present in every take and reacting to whatever’s going on.

    NOTEBOOK: My favorite example of that is a tracking shot of Alex and Nica walking along a stone wall with fresh water dripping down it. It’s after the big event. They haven’t begun speaking to each other yet. Nica walks up beside Alex and, for just a second, has this look on her face that suggests she wants to break the ice. But Alex misses the signal and she second guesses herself and keeps walking. That little gesture wrecks me because it’s so familiar. I assume you can’t direct something like that?

    LOKTEV: No, no, no, that was very much Hani. She would be different in every take and really just present and responding. I’m raving about her in part because, how is she not super famous by now?

    NOTEBOOK: Bidzina Gujabidze has a moment in the film that is just as impressive. Right after the event, you have all three of them in a wide shot, and Gujabidze casts this pitying glance at Alex—like, he’s embarrassed for Alex—and then he turns away, basically absolving himself of all responsibility. It’s not his problem. He’s just the hired guide! So many of the film’s central ideas intersect in that one glance.

    LOKTEV: Bidzina is a professional mountaineer, and this was his first time acting. He really brought such emotional depth to that character, while, as you said, it’s a strange relationship because they’re not friends. Or, they’re friends for a few days while they go on this hike, but he’s also someone they’ve hired.

    NOTEBOOK: In a 2014 interview, Gujabidze mentions that while climbing a mountain in Pakistan several of his companions were murdered by terrorists. Was that before or after making The Loneliest Planet?

    LOKTEV: No, no, that was after. That was godawful. He was climbing in Pakistan and was at the second camp, while his entire team was at the first base camp. And, basically, a heretofore unknown local Al-Qaeda affiliate showed up and slaughtered all of those mountaineers. Nothing like that had ever happened there. It was horrible. [Ten mountaineers and one local guide died on June 22, 2013 in the Nanga Parbat massacre.]

    NOTEBOOK: I mainly brought it up because I was so moved by one of his comments in the interview: “For a climber, danger lurks at every step, and this is why he should keep an eye on the health of others as much as on his own. Both the physical and moral condition of his fellow climber affects him directly. If a man is wicked, deceitful and treacherous, climbing the mountain will not change him.”

    LOKTEV: There was this absurdity of taking Georgia’s most well-known mountaineer— he’s a celebrity in Georgia, where he would be approached on the street much more so than Gael—and having him play a regular village guide, who hikes on what the mountaineers call “the green stuff.” It’s a walk in the park for him. But he brought a lot of what he knew of the mountains to the character and to the story. I think that idea is true, even on a much less extreme expedition, that it brings out the fundamentals of who a person is. He talks about it in the film. Nature breaks things down to the basics of food, water, warmth.

    The Next Film

    NOTEBOOK: Can I ask if there will there be another film?

    LOKTEV: Yes, you can! I’ve gone through a couple years when that would’ve been a very painful question because I got very stuck for a while. I thought I didn’t like writing, but I’m now one scene away from finishing the new script and I’m super excited about it. I’ve realized it’s not that I don’t like writing, but that writing is the only part of filmmaking that you do alone, and I actually hate working alone.

    I’m co-writing a script with my girlfriend, Masha Gessen, who is a writer and journalist. It’s much broader in scope than the other films I’ve made. It takes place over ten years in three countries, in Russia, the United States, and Ireland. It’s a love story that unfolds through different phases of this relationship and through things that happen in the world around these two women. I think of the structure as like The Way We Were and Scenes from a Marriage. We’ve gone from two films that deal only with a couple of days to the story of a long relationship and the politics that surround it.

    NOTEBOOK: Is this off the record?

    LOKTEV: No! This is the thing I want to talk about most about. It’s funny for me to talk about old films because I’ve been in work mode, discovering the exhilaration of working again. The script is based on a lot of reporting and interviews we’ve done.

    NOTEBOOK: Are you ready to throw yourself back into the world of financing and figuring out how to get it made?

    LOKTEV: With the kinds of films I make, you have to reinvent the wheel every time, but I’m super excited about this.

    NOTEBOOK: Do you have specific aspirations for when it will start?

    LOKTEV: “Let’s cast it and shoot it!” That’s my aspiration. Sadly, the world does not work that way. I’m elated about the project, and it feels very present to me now. It’s more explicitly emotional than other things I’ve done.

    NOTEBOOK: I’m now expecting a big melodrama. That’s what I’d like to see.

    LOKTEV: With this one, you won’t be the only person crying in the theater.

  • David Lowery on The Old Man & the Gun

    David Lowery on The Old Man & the Gun

    This interview was originally published at Filmmaker.

    * * *

    In The Old Man & the Gun, Robert Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a true-life outlaw who spent most of his 84 years robbing banks or biding time in prison, always on the lookout for the first opportunity to escape. Set in 1981, the film finds Tucker in his early 70s, living in Texas and pulling off a string of heists throughout the South. He and his partners, played here by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, became known to authorities as the “Over-the-Hill Gang,” and their m.o.–efficient robberies, executed politely and with style–became legendary. “That was when I was a really good robber,” Tucker told David Grann, whose 2003 article in The New Yorker is the basis for the script.

    The Old Man & the Gun has all the appearances of a classic heist film, but writer-director David Lowery approached the material with “a degree of whimsy.” “I decided to remove as much as I could from the plot of the movie,” Lowery told me, “and leave just the bones of a cops-and-robber drama for people to pick at.” Rather than focusing on Tucker’s adversarial relationship with officer John Hunt (Casey Affleck), Lowery became fascinated, instead, by Redford’s image and by the idea of playing him against another iconic face, Sissy Spacek, who co-stars as his love interest. The result is a delight and a fitting capper to Redford’s career, if this does prove to be his final film.

    Lowery and I have corresponded for nearly 15 years, going back to our days as early film bloggers, but this was our first face to face conversation. That history informs the interview, which chases a few tangents and indulges at times our shared cinephilia. We spoke at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2018, the day before the Canadian premiere of The Old Man & the Gun.

    Filmmaker: I want to start by asking about a camera move in The Old Man & the Gun. From time to time when Robert Redford is on screen, the camera will just drift away, as if his character’s attention is being pulled in some other direction. What came first? That formal idea? Or Spacek’s line near the end of the movie, when she tells him, “You drifted off to space”?

    Lowery: I think the line did. I’m sure the line did because we were finding those drifts on set, sometimes spontaneously. That line is a reference to the line in Two-Lane Blacktop that we quote in the movie. I wasn’t going to do that but we were looking for a movie for them to watch in the theater and I thought, “I’m just going to put Two-Lane Blacktop in there.”

    Filmmaker: You found those shots spontaneously? It’s a really interesting move. My note from the screening is just, “What is the camera doing?”

    Lowery: There’s one scene where the camera drifts away from Bob and Sissy and onto all of these people at the back of the restaurant. When we were shooting that scene, we’d been in the diner for two days and were getting bored of shooting in that same booth. We had a dolly shot set up that was designed to zero in on Sissy, but I said to the camera operator, “Instead of doing that, let’s just leave them behind.” Everyone else in the diner that night was young kids, it was all teenagers, and I thought, “That’s kind of interesting. Let’s just focus on them.”

    Then, in the edit, I wondered if we could get away with playing the entire rest of the scene without ever cutting back to Bob and Sissy. Just leave them behind completely. For a while we did. The dolly shot just kept drifting. There’s something lovely and unexpected about it. Also, it was provocative–not like in Taxi Driver, when Travis Bickle’s on the phone and you’re panning away because you can’t handle it. There’s no real justification for it other than it was nice to look at some activity that was not directly related to this couple’s courtship.

    Filmmaker: I might be confusing the diner scenes in my memory, but at one point don’t you also cut to a relatively wide shot from the perspective of the back of the restaurant, where the teenagers are sitting?

    Lowery: That diner has booths and a bar. Two of the scenes use that bar space. We’re always playing back and forth between the two perspectives.

    The second of the three diner scenes is like their second date, so to speak. It felt like we should do something different there. Again, there’s no reason. There’s no character we’re following back there. Later on, of course, in the third scene that’s where Casey will be sitting–that’s where Bob will notice him–but at that point, we’re just letting Bob and Sissy be one couple amongst many couples. We were always talking to Bob and Sissy about how their relationship should feel like two teenagers going on a first date. Every step of the way, that’s how it should feel. Our assistant director had wisely cast teenagers for that night, so to pan off of this older couple to these younger couples doing exactly the same thing was a nice way to underline what was going on with the characters at that point.

    Filmmaker: I started with that question because there seems to always be a tension in your work between, for lack of a better description, your art-house formal interests and the pull of classic narrative and storytelling. I imagine that’s something you’re conscious of when you’re writing. A decade into your career, how would you characterize the pleasures of screenwriting?

    Lowery: Writing is always still surprising to me, but I don’t know if it’s ever pleasurable. I love to go exploring. With this film I wrote more drafts than anything I’ve ever written, and I kept starting over from scratch, which is interesting because this movie is so simple. It’s shorter than A Ghost Story. There’s not much to it. But I kept writing and rewriting and rewriting, and at some point I realized I was trying to figure out my reason for making this movie. Often, that’s what writing is for me: explaining to myself why I’m compelled to make this film. I forget who said this first–Kubrick quoted it–but when you sit down to write a script you should imagine yourself in the audience of a movie theater. One scene ends and then you ask, “What would I want to see next?” I’m always trying to do that.

    At the same time, occasionally I want to see nothing happen, or I want to see something perverse happen, or I want to change characters completely. Yes, it’s the tug of narrative but it’s also the tug of expectations, of what most audiences would want to see. So the writing process is often reconciling my own more bombastic or formalist inclinations with the knowledge that there’s an audience for this movie I also have to satisfy. That’s always hard to iron out, but it’s what writing is for me.

    Filmmaker: This thought just occurred to me. Am I right in remembering that one of your early short films [The Outlaw Son (2007)] includes a conversation set in a diner?

    Lowery: That’s right! I’ve been a fan of diner conversations since Heat, which was the first epic one I saw and which ties into this movie. Buffalo ’66 ends with them at Denny’s. Pulp Fiction, I suppose as well. But Buffalo ’66 was a big influence on that short film.

    A Ghost Story has almost no dialogue, but when we filmed the one scene that does have a lot of dialogue, I was so surprised to see Will Oldham perform it verbatim. He did amazing work with it, respecting the text. I’ve never been one to respect my own text as a director. I throw it out and let the actors have fun, but he came in and knew that scene and treated it with such respect that it gave me new confidence as a writer. In turn, I decided with this film that I wanted to start off with a really long dialogue scene. I knew there might not be much dialogue in the rest of the movie, but I thought, “Let’s start off with something that feels almost like a play. Let’s see how long we can keep it going.” Then I set out to shoot it in a way that is faithful to what is written on the page and lean in to the dialogue for once. And, of course, the best place to have a conversation is a diner.

    Filmmaker: That scene seems to be a good example of the push-and-pull between those formalist and narrative urges we were talking about. In most films of this genre, Danny Glover’s and Tom Waits’s characters would be much more prominent, but at some point, I assume during the writing, you must have decided, “No, they’re only going to be on screen for a few minutes so we can carve out more time for the diner conversation.”

    Lowery: Yeah, it’s so weird, the balance of those two things. The characters Tom and Danny play had even less presence in the screenplay than they do in the movie. When they came to town, I thought, “I can’t not use them.” So then I’m up all night writing lots of dialogue for them, most of which inevitably gets cut out of the movie because there isn’t really a place for it. There’s a reason the parts were small in the script. With this movie in particular, there was a degree of whimsy in the writing, where I was trying to see how much I could cut out, how little I could get away with and there still be a movie. And yet that 12-page scene was always going to be there.

    The first draft was about 150 pages and did not feel like my movie. I kept working on it, working on it, then went off to make Pete’s Dragon, and then kept working on it. Pete’s Dragon gave me a chance to work with Redford, so I was able to do another pass on the script specifically for him, now that I knew his strengths and how he liked to work.

    We were supposed to make this right after A Ghost Story, but I didn’t know if I was a cops-and-robbers filmmaker. I’d already made Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which had cops and robbers, and then Pete’s Dragon had my maximalist, Blues Brothers car chase, so I’d done the things I wanted to do. What kept me going is that I love Redford, I love his spirit, and I wanted to do something that capitalized on that. So I decided to remove as much as I could from the plot of the movie, to take as much incident out of the script as I possibly could, and leave just the bones of a cops-and-robber drama for people to pick at. I wondered if I could get away with almost no cat-and-mouse interaction between the two protagonists and yet hold on Redford’s face for a solid minute. Those are the kinds of ratios I was working out in my head. Hopefully you watch it and enjoy what’s left of the genre conventions, but the long shots of Redford driving or the pan in the diner are what make the movie meaningful to me.

    Filmmaker: A few years ago, after an interview, I asked an actress if I could take a photo for the piece. She agreed, looked at the lights around her, adjusted her posture, and stared straight into the lens. When I looked at her through the viewfinder, she’d transformed from the woman I’d just had a nice conversation with into a capital-M movie star. I’d never had that experience before. When you went into production, you had characters on the page, but then at some point you had to frame Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek in closeup. I can imagine how that kind of star power might actually break a director’s intentions.

    Lowery: I was lucky to have had the chance to make Pete’s Dragon with Bob and get used to that. There’s never a moment when you don’t think, “Oh, there’s the last icon of cinema in front of me.” He often sits on set and reads the paper, and every day it’s, “Well, there’s Robert Redford reading.” When you put them on set in costume and frame them up, you instantly put it in the context of the history of that image. You free associate to other films with similar images. You bring so much baggage to every composition.

    I soon realized that I could get away with less–not just in terms of the script, but as the director, I didn’t need to tell them what to do. In Bob’s case, he knows what he does well and he’s been doing it for 50 or 60 years. The best thing I learned from him is just to pay attention. On Pete’s Dragon, I asked him to try something different on take two and he said, “Oh, I did that on take one. You just didn’t notice.” That night I looked at the dailies, and he was right.

    Filmmaker: There’s a car chase scene late in the film, and when Redford’s character is finally stopped, he gets out and you cut to a tight shot as he raises his hand in the shape of a gun. He’s wearing a blue shirt and brown suede jacket and has a slight grin on his face. Did you design that scene with the idea of adding one more iconic shot to his highlight reel?

    Lowery: 100%. That sequence was originally a bigger part of the film and gradually became superfluous, but I felt we still needed it because it’s all about digging into that iconography and adding to it. At that point in the movie, for the John Hunt character, we needed that iconography to justify what he was doing–the fact that five minutes later he will make this relatively significant turn on a dime. The iconography gives us leeway to do that to the narrative. But the image was 100% designed to be part of his legacy.

    Filmmaker: That must be fun.

    Lowery: It’s great. And he knew it. He gets out there on this windswept highway in the middle of nowhere with all of these cop cars and he knows exactly what’s going on. He took a look around and said, “Yep, I know how to do this.” That was day one of production. Everyone says to not do something hard on the first day, but because that scene was an island unto itself, and also because car chases are tons of fun to shoot, we decided to kick things off in grand style and get that scene out of the way and have fun with it. Then we could go make the rest of the movie.

    Filmmaker: Casey Affleck, on the other hand, often acts at a whisper-quiet energy level. I imagine the danger with him is that he can steal control of the pacing of a film. How do you prepare for or accommodate for that?

    Lowery: There absolutely is that danger, and he’s very aware of it. I brought him on this movie because I wanted that quality in this character–that hang-dog, dragging his feet, woe-is-me quality that he can do so well. If you were to watch the dailies, you’d watch us work through a lot of different interpretations, many of them wildly incorrect. But then we would gradually dial into just the right amount of lethargy, the right amount of that ineffable Casey Affleck quality!

    Several people on our crew worked with Joaquin Phoenix on You Were Never Really Here and they said it’s very similar. They’re actors who, in the process of trying to get into character, throw a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Once I understood on Ain’t Them Bodies Saints that that’s what Casey likes to do–be alive in the moment and try things out and throw things at you–then I learned to give him time to do that. At a certain point, we always find the right rhythm. Also, now that we know each other, I’m able to say, “Listen, can you please just stick to the script for this take because we’re running out of time.”

    Filmmaker: Does that mean the first few days of production are a bit of an adventure while you search for the right balance? Or is it a constant process throughout the shoot?

    Lowery: The whole process. It’s all character based. He goes through the script and talks about the character in great depth. And with this character, there’s not much there, there’s not much in the script to dig into. But we’ll go through it as if it’s War and Peace and talk about it, and then he’ll use all of that.

    Often, we’ll do a couple takes where he will externalize everything that is going on with the character. We have a scene with him in the car with the kids, and in the first couple takes he just laid the entire weight of his life on those kids’ shoulders. It was amazing to watch–the most inappropriate thing for a father to do to his children! He explained to them how his life is going horribly wrong. It’s raining and dramatic and his kids are so confused by it all. But there’s a poop joke in the scene. That’s kind of the point of that scene, the poop joke. Gradually all of that extraneous stuff falls away and the spirit of it remains. He does the scene exactly as I need it, often with some extra spin, and he makes it better in the process.

    Filmmaker: I imagine you’ve been asked questions along this line before, but is there something nostalgic in your basic makeup?

    Lowery: There definitely is. I’m nostalgic to a fault. I hang on to things way too long, both objects and sentiments. My affection for the past is something I recognize as dangerous: It’s a trap, and yet the movies I make are inherently nostalgic. They’re all period pieces. I’m not sure how much longer I can get away with it, to be honest.

    The Old Man & the Gun is nostalgic in a very specific way, and in making it, I felt like I couldn’t keep doing this gauzy, sun-dappled nostalgia anymore. If I’m going to do nostalgia, then I at least needed to make it ugly! So with this one I said, “Let’s do non-pretty nostalgia. Let’s make it feel old and like it was made in a different era and evoke the kinds of films we want to evoke, but let’s not drench it in honey.” Because I’ve certainly done that on the others. I’m trying to get in the way of my own affection for the past.

    Filmmaker: The upside is you get to do fun things like long reverse zooms and whip-pan montages.

    Lowery: It’s so fun. It just makes you happy on set to try something you’ve seen a million times in other films and discover why it works. “Oh, that’s why I’ve always enjoyed this: because it works so well on a technical level.” It’s great, but you’re also definitely looking over your shoulder while you do it, and there’s a danger to that.

    Filmmaker: So how do you combat those tendencies in your writing?

    Lowery: I’m figuring it out. I’ve had glimpses, especially when I was working on Upstream Color. I knew I was working with someone who is pushing the medium. I don’t ask, “What would Shane Carruth do in this situation?” But I do look at projects with an eye toward doing things that have never been done before.

    Filmmaker: A Ghost Story is certainly a step in that direction.

    Lowery: It was. It’s weird to have The Old Man & the Gun coming out now because it’s of a piece with Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and Pete’s Dragon–my vintage cop car trilogy. A Ghost Story ended up being made between them, so it feels like I’m backtracking a bit, but I plan to get back to what I was doing with A Ghost Story. If you know my taste in cinema, then you can see the templates it’s based upon, but it was definitely me pushing forward on my own terms. Hopefully the next movie I make will do that. But I can also see us talking again in a couple years, and I will have made something that’s a throwback to yet another era.

    Filmmaker: As a viewer, one of the pleasures of a period piece is that it’s an escape from the everydayness of our lives. Like, it’s hard to for me to imagine you having much interest in a character who spends all day working in a cubicle or looking at his phone. Watching The Old Man & the Gun, I thought of David Fincher’s Zodiac, in that both crime sprees would be solved immediately if they were committed today because of the speed of communications, and both films seem to be partly about that change. I wonder if what we’re calling your nostalgia is partly a heightened sensitivity to something we’ve lost, whether that’s human connection or a spirit of adventure or just the sensation of touching newspapers and paperclips and photographs rather than scrolling through a digital interface?

    Lowery: It’s funny, none of those things you mentioned are actually lost, although they feel as if they are because we’ve been so monopolized by the overwhelming convenience of modernity. I don’t want to completely fetishize these more sensory aspects of day-to-day life; I certainly do more than my fair share of scrolling. But I do like shifting an emphasis back towards things that are tactile, that have a physical texture to them.

    I get very excited by sensory detail! And it certainly helps with storytelling. A Ghost Story is ostensibly a modern film but certainly doesn’t feel like it. And Pete’s Dragon and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints wouldn’t have worked on a narrative level with modern technology, just like Zodiac wouldn’t. I actually watched Zodiac a lot in the early days of writing The Old Man & The Gun. I watch it a lot, in general, because it’s an endlessly watchable masterpiece, but as I was writing I really paid attention to the way information moved in that film. There’s a reference to fax machines in The Old Man & The Gun and I definitely was thinking about the telefax joke in Zodiac when I wrote that.

    Filmmaker: This is a bit of a tangent, but I revisited A Ghost Story a day or two before seeing the recent IMAX rerelease of 2001, and the coincidence was uncanny. I can’t think of many other films that have so much fun playing with shot/reverse-shots. I’m thinking of the final sequence in the white room, when middle-aged Dave is in the bathroom and Kubrick cuts on what seems to be an eyeline match to old Dave sitting at the table. You use the ghosts in a similar way. I remember smiling at the audacity of it when I saw A Ghost Story for the first time.

    Lowery: All of those shot/reverse-shots were in the script! In fact, there were more of them. That was always our way of moving through time. But it wasn’t until afterwards that I saw 2001 again and thought, “Oh, that must be where that came from.” It’s a brilliant idea. There’s a new book about the making of 2001 [Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson], and Kubrick was making that up on the set. It’s amazing to read that book and find out how much of 2001 was discovered by Kubrick and his team. They went into production without a finished script and were figuring it out as they went along. Of course, they also had massive amounts of money from MGM to do it, but it’s wonderful evidence of how much luck plays in a movie working. So many ideas came to them on the day and now they’re an indelible part of cinema history.

    Filmmaker: You once told an interviewer that you were genuinely surprised by the positive response to A Ghost Story and that it made you realize you weren’t as out of touch with other people’s emotional lives as you thought. Given that, I wonder what it is about a film set that is so appealing to you. You’re putting a lot of effort into a career that requires you to be surrounded by throngs of people who look to you for answers.

    Lowery: I ask myself this all the time! Why am I fighting so hard to be in this space that … being on set is miserable. There are some directors who love it and thrive in it. I’m not one of them. There’s something about the aftermath of making a movie, though, when you’re in the edit and you’re putting these images together that is so satisfying and compelling. That’s where moviemaking happens for me–once you’ve gathered all of the raw material.

    I’m an introvert. I don’t have trouble empathizing, but I have trouble connecting with people on an emotional level, and I’m learning this more and more as I get older. That’s something where, as a human being, I see room to improve. I made A Ghost Story for myself. Every choice was made to make me happy. If I were to go see it in the cinema without any idea of what it was, it would please me. That was the goal. I figured there were five or six people, most of whom I knew, who would probably like it, and maybe there would be some affinity for it in the art-house scene. Maybe. But the fact that it connected so widely really made me look at myself more objectively and accept that maybe I understand more than I thought I did about other people, maybe I’m able to communicate in this form in a way I’d taken for granted.

    Even before the Telluride premiere of The Old Man & the Gun, I thought, “No one’s going to like this thing. There’s nothing to it. It’s just a whiff.” But people were moved by it and I have to remember that I’m using a very effective tool to communicate. If I do my job well, which I always endeavor to do, people will care about these movies, and I need to take that affection seriously and respect it.

    Filmmaker: I guess one way you’ve mitigated the miserableness of the job is by building your career alongside your producing partners, James Johnston and Toby Halbrooks. You’ve directed a big Disney film, but The Old Man & the Gun is, I believe, the biggest Sailor Bear production. It feels like a significant next step.

    Lowery: I’ve been working with James since I was 19 and with Toby since a few years after that, so on the one hand, this film just feels like the latest in a long line of awesome collaborations with my best friends. But you’re right, this is also the biggest film we’ve made together, and I think it was an important stepping stone.

    With the exception of A Ghost Story, every film we’ve made prior has had other producers on it, who helped us learn the ropes and understand just what it was we were doing. And certainly there were other producers on this film, too, but it was James and Toby who were physically on the ground every day, getting shit done, alongside our line producer Patrick Newall. And when we got to the end of it, I think we all collectively realized that we’d taken a big step forward. We knew what we were doing in a way that we didn’t just a few years ago, and I feel like we could make any film at this point, on any scale. That doesn’t mean that we won’t collaborate with others in the future–far from it, we love collaborating–but we won’t be afraid to lead the charge in the future. We’ve got a pretty good idea how to put a movie together at this point, and more than that, we know how we like to do it.

    Filmmaker: One last thing. You told me last week to be on the lookout for an obscure visual reference in The Old Man & the Gun.

    Lowery: Oh, right!

    Filmmaker: I have two theories. One is the reflection of the light off of the gold bars, which reminded me of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly.

    Lowery: I did think of that film, but that’s not the reference I was talking about.

    Filmmaker: Okay, the other is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. There’s that shot of Sissy Spacek in the car and then the focus pulls …

    Lowery: … to Bob in the gas station. No, but that’s closer. It’s Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties. There was an Akerman retrospective in L.A., which was amazing–seeing all of her films on the big screen. They brought in a print from France and hadn’t checked it the night before, so it turned out it wasn’t subtitled. Most of the audience left, but I love watching movies without subtitles.

    When we were talking about the aesthetic of The Old Man & the Gun, the vibe of it, and the fact that it’s set in 1981, obviously a lot of ’70s stuff seeped in. But there was something about Golden Eighties. I thought that was the look we should go for, so I showed everyone the trailer, which is a true delight and is on YouTube. The whole film takes place in this weird sub-level shopping mall. There’s a scene in The Old Man & the Gun where Bob and Sissy are at a jewelry store in a mall, and that mall looked almost exactly like the one in Golden Eighties. It’s even below ground. I thought, “This was meant to be!”

  • Committed to Paper: Writer/Director Paul Schrader on First Reformed

    Committed to Paper: Writer/Director Paul Schrader on First Reformed

    This interview was originally published at Filmmaker.

    * * *

    With Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which has topped many critics’ lists so far this year, on iTunes today, we’re unlocking from our paywall Darren Hughes’s interview with the writer/director from our Summer print edition.

    When discussing his latest film, First Reformed, Paul Schrader regularly recounts a conversation he had over dinner with the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. Schrader, who famously discovered cinema as a college student after coming of age in a strict Calvinist home, has very intentionally spent his career exploring darker, more transgressive aspects of the spiritual condition. He was intrigued, however, by Ida, Pawlikowksi’s quiet, black-and-white study of a young woman preparing to become a nun. “I left that dinner and was walking and thought to myself, ’You know, it’s time,’” he told Ariston Anderson for Filmmaker. “’It’s time for you to write one of these movies.’”

    The protagonist, Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke), ministers dutifully to the sparse congregation who still turns out for Sunday services at First Reformed, his small relic of an upstate New York church. During the week he quietly bides his time, guiding tourists through the building and teaching visiting schoolchildren about the sanctuary’s role in the Underground Railroad. As the church prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, Toller is assigned a minor role in the ceremony by Pastor Jeffers (Cedric “the Entertainer” Kyles), whose suburban evangelical megachurch, Abundant Life, and its wealthy benefactor keep the doors open at First Reformed. 

    Divorced and mourning the death of his son, Toller is a familiar Schrader type—a soul-sick recluse whose efforts to stave off despair through ascetic discipline are upended by intrusions from the outside world. Toller’s crisis is precipitated by an encounter with a young pregnant woman, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), whose husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), has recently returned home after serving time in Canada for vague crimes he committed as an environmental activist. When Mary asks Toller to counsel her husband, the two men engage in a wide-ranging, thrilling debate that offers Michael cold comfort and infects Toller with a new kind of agony. It’s one of the finest scenes of Schrader’s career.

    Essentially a reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, and packed with self-conscious allusions to the work of Robert Bresson, Carl Th. Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasujiro Ozu, First Reformed is exactly the kind of film one might have expected from Schrader—in 1972, when at the age of 26 he published his influential critical study, Transcendental Style in Film (recently revised and reissued by University of California Press with a new introduction). That it took him so long to finally make “one of these movies” owes partly to new economic realities that have forced him to experiment with new financing and production models. 

    I spoke with Schrader at the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he screened First Reformed (appropriate, given Calvinism’s roots in The Netherlands) and presented a master class in which he discussed, with typical frankness, the 2014 film Dying of the Light, which was taken from him and re-edited without his input. Schrader responded at the time by assembling a team of young and relatively inexperienced collaborators, and by throwing off all pretensions of politeness for his follow-up, the wildly grotesque and hilarious caper, Dog Eat Dog, starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe. It was clearly a liberating and instructive experience for Schrader, who used much of the same creative team for First Reformed.

    HUGHES: I knew you were working on an updated version of Transcendental Style in Film, but during your master class today was the first time I’d heard you mention a few of the directors you’ve added to the study: Wang Bing, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Béla Tarr. Are you proposing a new canon of transcendental filmmakers?

    SCHRADER: That book ends just before Tarkovsky. So, what happens next? I do a cosmology as a graph at the end of it that starts with narrative here. [Schrader draws a small circle in the middle of a piece of paper.] As filmmakers escape from narrative, they can go one of three places. [He draws three lines extending outward from the circle.] They can go toward the mandala. They can go to the art gallery, where it’s just colored light. Or they can go to the surveillance camps. I chart where all the various directors are in this world. 

    Right here is something I call the Tarkovsky ring. [He adds another circle, also centered on the page but larger than the first and intersected by the three lines.] When you’re leaving narrative, once you pass through the Tarkovsky ring, you move from theatrical and commercial cinema to museums and galleries and festivals.

    HUGHES: It’s been a while since I last read Sculpting in Time, but doesn’t Tarkovsky imagine a film that’s basically the lived, 24-hours-a-day experience of a single person? That would be pure surveillance, I assume?

    SCHRADER: Yeah, yeah. 

    HUGHES: I’m intrigued by your interest in Wang Bing. Talking about First Reformed, you describe making formal choices that “pull back” from the viewer and make him or her a more active participant in the experience. Wang seems to me an extreme example of this. He creates a space that makes me think deeply about essential questions in life—more so than any other contemporary filmmaker.

    SCHRADER: Well, yeah, he’s way out here. [Schrader taps his pen on the word “surveillance.”] You know, it all starts with neorealism. And it starts with that famous shot that both Bazin and Deleuze talk about. The maid wakes up in the morning and goes over to light the stove to make some coffee. She gets a match out and strikes it, and it doesn’t light. She strikes it again. It lights, but the match goes out. She gets another match, she strikes it, it stays on, and she lights the stove. And Bazin was saying, “This is what is radical here—the use of time, real time.” Everything we’ve been doing [in classical cinema] is to tighten time. And now, time is starting to become the subject—you know, what happens. So, it starts with [the maid] and then she becomes Jeanne Dielman.

    HUGHES: You gave a talk at the Berlinale a couple of years ago about how the opening moments of your films are designed to teach the audience how to watch the movie. First Reformed opens with a long duration, planimetric dolly shot toward the exterior of the church where most of the action takes place. It puts us immediately in the world of Bergman’s Winter Light.

    SCHRADER: It’s a 1.33:1 image, and that immediately sends a message. No sound, that sends another message. The slow, incremental move. Obviously, this is this kind of movie. Get used to it. And just because the move has stopped, we’re not going to cut just yet. We’re going to wait a little bit longer. You have no idea how long we’re going to wait. 

    The one shot that I put in to really tell the viewer, “This is this kind of movie,” is when Toller visits the house of the young couple. The camera is locked off over here. [Schrader sketches a 1.33:1 frame and draws a house in the middle of it.] A woman with a dog walks across the screen, walks all the way across the screen. She exits. Then I cue Ethan. This is how we’re going to treat your need for information. The information right now is a person with a dog walking across the screen!

    HUGHES: You return to almost the exact same composition later in the film, but the second time the camera isn’t locked down. You dolly to the right so that we can watch Ethan and Amanda walk back to the garage. Each time I’ve watched First Reformed, that camera move has been a pleasant surprise.

    SCHRADER: One day, as they were leaving the garage and going into the house, I said to the cinematographer, “Do you have a dolly track in the truck? We’re going to lay some track.” And he said, “We don’t like track.” I said, “No, we’re going to do it now because I’m just watching this, and I think I need to break the rule just so that I don’t have to reinforce the rule again.” The one thing I learned when studying slow cinema, static cinema, is “make a rule, break a rule.” The first people to break the rules are the people who make the rules. So, you make a rule: “The camera is never going to move—no tilt, no pan, nothing.” And then, of course, you break it. 

    HUGHES: You just said “slow cinema” and then you corrected yourself and said “static cinema.” Do you make a distinction between them?

    SCHRADER: No, no, no. Slow cinema is a very wide term. Static cinema is locked-off cinema. Béla Tarr is not static cinema. He’s slow. Ida is static. When I was talking to Pawel, I said, “You know, the last two shots are moving, but you do have one tilt and one pan earlier.” He said, “Oh, you mean shots 18 and 36?”

    HUGHES: Speaking of formal choices, I timed it yesterday, and the conversation between Toller and Michael is twelve minutes. After watching too many movies over too many years, nothing gives me more pleasure as a viewer than that moment when I realize a scene isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

    SCHRADER: This is a warm bath. Just settle in. The master [shot] was 15 [minutes], and it was our first day. I said to them, “The first day, we’re going to do a 15-minute master.” They were really prepared. And the trick there [is] you don’t want to move the camera, but you need to keep it alive for 12 minutes. So, there’re two voiceovers and one move. The voiceovers—where you hear what he’s thinking while the other person is talking, like he’s writing in his journal—just break it up and allow you to come back in again.

    One of the things I learned from doing The Comfort of Strangers with [Harold] Pinter was if a scene is good, there’s no arbitrary length. Just let it play. But you do have an internal clock. That script is 85 pages long, so the financier said we had to deliver a 90-minute movie. And I said, “The movie’s going to be long.” I put everything in the film for the first cut. Usually, I whittle it out right away, but I just didn’t know how long this film could hold. And it was two hours and two minutes. After I watched it with a bunch of people, I said to the editor, “I got a feeling for it in the room.” Because that’s what you do when you’re with other people. You just feel it in the room. I said, “I think the running time of this movie’s an hour and 46 minutes.” And it ended up at an hour and 47. I just had a sense that that’s how long this movie could hold.

    HUGHES: I’m curious to know where that long conversation between Toller and Michael came from. You’ve told the story many times of growing up in a strict Calvinist home and not getting to see movies until you were a teenager. I wonder, 50 years later, how much of your own internal monologue still speaks in that Calvinist voice? Was writing that conversation an opportunity to purge something?

    SCHRADER: No. I mean, I remember those kind of conversations from being a kid in the church. It’s a delicious situation because Toller can talk about a sickness unto death, a Kierkegaardian despair. And he’s describing it to the kid, but he’s the one who has that. He’s describing himself.

    I don’t know if I told you the story about the softcore house in Grand Rapids?

    HUGHES: No!

    SCHRADER: There was a cinema that showed softcore porn—Radley Metzger kinds of stuff—and it was not doing very well. The owner had this idea to do a month-long Ingmar Bergman festival. And, of course, for everybody from Calvin College, it was the first time they saw these films. And no one from Calvin was really aware that you could make films in their arena that had quality. That’s where it started for me. It started with Through a Glass Darkly.

    HUGHES: I’m glad you mentioned that film in particular because I was reminded of it by the final shot in First Reformed. I don’t know if you remember, but after Harriet Andersson’s character has her schizophrenic breakdown and is flown off to the hospital, her father offers her younger brother words of encouragement about love and hope. The scene is so wise because his sincere advice is undercut by the terrifying scenes that preceded it. I like the dissonance—in Bergman’s film and in yours.

    SCHRADER: I haven’t seen it in a long time. I wrote this script, and the ending was more or less from Diary of Country Priest. Toller drinks the plumber’s fluid, he dies on the floor, and the camera pans up to the cross. I asked Kent Jones to read it, and he said, “Oh, you went with the Country Priest ending. I thought you were going to go for the Ordet ending.” The Ordet ending is you have a miracle, and the response to the miracle is not saintly. It’s carnal. His dead wife comes back, and it’s not, “Oh, praise God!” It’s just, “How much I desire you!”

    HUGHES: “I loved her body, too,” he says. That adds a nice complexity to the hymn being sung over the final embrace in First Reformed: “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

    SCHRADER: People say, “That’s from Night of the Hunter. That’s the song Lillian Gish sings.” But I didn’t take it from there. That was a real staple of the Billy Graham campaigns, and my father used to take us. George Beverly Shea was singing that song. I’ve never really forgotten it.

    HUGHES: The thought of you attending a Billy Graham crusade is hard to reconcile. I suppose First Reformed gave you a chance to revisit the world of American organized religion.

    SCHRADER: It’s so easy to make fun of the church. The church really helps you in that way. So, I had to figure out how to make this an interesting drama, without making the church seem too superficial. That’s why I cast Cedric. Because I knew that if I cast [the head pastor] as an old white guy, like Pat Robertson, it would just be so obvious. And Cedric has such a great personality. When you walk around with him, you see people actually light up when they see him. That’s why I went to him—because he was black and because he had that comic aura that I could get him to be a much more interesting character.

    HUGHES: I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s but in an environment probably not too dissimilar from your childhood. By the ’80s, it had become Reagan-era evangelicalism, an earlier version of Abundant Life Church in the film. 

    SCHRADER: Yeah, well, what killed my church was, of course, TV because you can’t live in isolation when TV is coming into your house every day. You weren’t able to lock off the outside world at that point. But my relatives who came from this country [The Netherlands] came because they were the oppressed and nobody liked them. So, they came to Michigan and they came to New Jersey and Ohio, and they tried to set up a theocracy.

    HUGHES: American churches have learned a lot of lessons from TV over the years. The marketing and branding of Abundant Life that is sprinkled throughout the film might play like satire to some audiences, but I live in the land of megachurches and know that world well, and your version is hardly over the top. For example, the conversation between Toller and the choir director (Victoria Hill): They sit together in the church cafeteria and then you cut to a wide, planimetric shot that reveals a wall behind them that is decorated with Bible verses.

    SCHRADER: Yeah.

    HUGHES: Like the unexpected dolly shot, that 90-degree cut is thrilling. What other tools does static and slow cinema make available to you as a director? And how predetermined was your approach?

    SCHRADER: When you go 1.33:1, one of the first things to go is the overs because there’s not much room for a shoulder here. There are no overs in First Reformed, which has a subtle impact. People are so used to seeing overs. And when they’re not seeing overs, they don’t know they’re not seeing overs, but they know there’s something different. 

    The other technique is a recessive acting style. As I said to Ethan, “This is a lean-back performance, not a lean in.” And he knew exactly what I was saying right away. He only leans in once in the whole film, and this is when he starts to come apart at the end, when the minister tells him he’s got to do something. I didn’t know Ethan was going to do that. After the take, he said, “I know that you didn’t want me to do that, so I’m happy to do it again.” And I said, “No, I think your instinct was absolutely right.” You know, make a rule, break a rule.

    HUGHES: During your master class, you mentioned that when you began editing Dying of the Light, you realized you had made some mistakes when you were filming it and that the footage wasn’t there.

    SCHRADER: Yeah, well, because of the lack of support I had, I had become progressively more cowardly.

    HUGHES: In what sense?

    SCHRADER: Because every time I would think of something that wasn’t totally predictable or the way it should be, I would get real strong feedback. And it doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re in that environment, that takes its toll, and you stop thinking outside the conventions. I didn’t have a producer who knew movies.

    HUGHES: Is that the new normal? Is it possible to build a strong creative team on relatively small budgets?

    SCHRADER: When I came to First Reformed, I took it over to Killer Films. I already had Ethan. I couldn’t deal with financing, but it was the same people who had financed Dog Eat Dog, so I knew their mindset. I said to Christine [Vachon], “You’ve got to get me a producer to protect me,” and that’s what she did. That was Killer’s contribution.

    HUGHES: Who is that?

    SCHRADER: Frank Murray. He’s Ang Lee’s guy. That was really indispensible. If I had had Frank on [Dying of the Light], we wouldn’t have made these mistakes. Of course, if I had had Frank, he would’ve gotten fired.

    HUGHES: You worked with the same team of relatively young collaborators that you first assembled for Dog Eat Dog. How did the process evolve with First Reformed?

    — Well, it’s totally different. Dog Eat Dog, there are no rules. We can do anything. First Reformed, it’s all rules. 

    HUGHES: I’ve heard you say that because so much is possible now in post, it almost doesn’t matter who shoots the film.

    SCHRADER: Cinematographers used to have secrets, and they held their secrets very close to their chest. If you wanted a James Wong Howe look or a Gordon Willis look, you paid for them and they gave you their look. Now digital is so malleable that you can go to an NYU film student, show them a [Vittorio] Storaro and say, “That’s what I want,” and he’ll do it. I mean, they just knock it off. There are no real secrets anymore. The lights are so small, and it’s all computerized. They’re lighting from their iPads. They can re-light in post. The idea of the cinematographer’s secrets is not what it used to be. But that said, you do need a cinematographer who is really smart.

    HUGHES: Has anything been lost for you in that transition? 

    SCHRADER: No. I mean, I miss having a trailer. There’s no time for them anymore. You set up the shot and you go to your trailer, and by the time you get there, there’s a PA behind you calling out, “We’re ready.” Oops, didn’t make it to the trailer today. 

    There was so much downtime in old moviemaking—guys sitting in their trailers and smoking dope and hanging out with their friends, just killing time. There’s virtually no downtime for actors now. We shot First Reformed in 20 days. It would’ve been 47, 20, or 30 years ago. And we got more dailies in 20 days than we would’ve gotten in 45. The actor never stops working. He never gets out of the sun. Ethan was saying, “I think this is better. You don’t get out of character. You don’t have two hours where you’re sitting and start making phone calls.”

    There’s another school of thought here. You lose the time to live with the process, when you move so fast. Like, The Graduate was shot in 100 days. Today, it’d be shot in 25. Dustin Hoffman was talking recently and said it wouldn’t have been as good in 25. Well, who knows? Other people, like me and Ethan, say, “Quality improves because you never get out of the mindset.” You’re doing it 12 hours straight all the time. You’re always at a high point of creative urgency.

  • Better Than Wages: Chloé Zhao Discusses The Rider

    Better Than Wages: Chloé Zhao Discusses The Rider

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Midway through The Rider, Lakota cowboy Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) takes a job at a local grocery store. Forbidden by his doctors from ever riding again and with few prospects near his home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, he’s humiliated to find himself wearing a name tag and waving a barcode scanner. Brady, the actor, later told Chloé Zhao that filming those scenes was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Like the character he plays, Jandreau had recently survived a near-fatal skull fracture during a rodeo, and the painful prospect of giving up his cowboy life was still fresh. 

    The Rider is the second feature film Zhao has made at Pine Ridge, following Songs My Brothers Taught Me in 2015. “I wanted to make a movie about the cowboys I met there,” she told me, “but I didn’t have a story until Brady’s accident.” Working quickly with a small crew and a small budget, Zhao assembled the cast from Brady’s everyday life, including his father (Tim Jandreau) and sister (Lilly Jandreau), the pack of cowboys he’s lived and competed with, and Lane Scott, a young rodeo champion who was paralyzed in an accident and is now confined to a rehabilitation facility. Zhao and Director of Photography Joshua James Richards made the most of the South Dakota landscape and natural light, shooting as often as possible during magic hour. The results are, to borrow Zhao’s description of the location, “majestic.”

    The Rider is like The Misfits (John Huston, 1961) as re-imagined by Claire Denis, an archetypal story about the knotty tangle of work, masculinity, identity, and the natural world, told in a subjective and sympathetic formal style. Clark Gable’s weathered and wandering horse trader Gay Langland haunts this film, with his mantra, “It’s better than wages, ain’t it?” finding a new resonance in the 21st century. Zhao, a Chinese immigrant, is herself ambivalent about the ties that bind men and women like Brady to their land—shutting them out of other economies in the process—and The Rider likewise presents a conflicted, observational portrait of their cloistered and enviable world. 

    This interview took place on September 10, 2017, the morning after The Rider had its first screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. When I introduced myself, I explained that I was visiting Toronto from Knoxville, Tennessee, where I live on a small horse farm, and that before buying our place we’d boarded our horses for years at a rodeo stable. I asked if we could talk horses. Zhao agreed happily and said she only wished Brady could’ve joined us. 

    * * *

    CHLOÉ ZHAO: What kind of horses do you have?

    HUGHES: A Tennessee Walking Horse and an Appendix Quarter.

    ZHAO: Ooh, the Tennessee Walking Horse is amazing to ride. Some of these horses you see in the movie are rough, but Walking Horses . . . 

    HUGHES: Ours is getting old, but when he gets into his full gait, it’s beautiful. 

    ZHAO: They’re amazing.

    HUGHES: I appreciated your attention to the details of horse life. There’s a scene in which Brady considers pawning his saddle, and you step viewers through the entire exchange. Brady says exactly what he paid for the custom work and the guy in the shop explains that they usually offer 25 cents on the dollar. There are more saddles on the wall behind him, so we know immediately that horse tack is a kind of currency in this community. And the same with horses. You show them being bought, sold, and traded throughout the film. The horse world is like a separate economy. 

    ZHAO: That’s Brady’s saddle. Every day on set he’d ask, “Is my saddle in back?” “Yes, Brady, it’s in back.” Or once I put his hat on the dashboard [for a shot]. “Chloé, the hat needs to be upside down. It’s going to collapse!” I thought, “I don’t have a production designer. Leave me alone!” [laughs] These things are so important to them. 

    I’ve spent so much time with rodeo cowboys, so much time. Two years. After Songs, my first film, I met these Indian cowboys on the reservation and went to my first rodeo. I knew nothing before. I’d only seen images [on TV]. And you know how with “extreme sports,” once the sponsors come on, everything becomes much fancier? I’d never seen a backyard, “let’s just have a rodeo” type of thing. These kids, every day they grab a couple bulls and put them in the corral and have a bullfight. I would watch this and think, “Oh my God.” But it’s the heart of it. They live so close to the animals and the land. It’s such a part of their DNA. I became fascinated with it. Obsessed. All of these little details you’re talking about are just the accumulation of my experience watching and listening for two years.  

    HUGHES: In my experience, there’s a real generosity baked into the ethics of rodeo culture. People take care of each other. 

    ZHAO: That’s what I’ve seen. Again, we’re talking here about the reservation, and a lot of these kids didn’t have their parents when they were growing up. Or they do but the parents have a lot of kids and they have their own stuff to deal with. So a lot of these young people raise each other. Lane, Brady, Tanner, James, those boys have been together for so long on the road with rodeo. They spent all of their free time together as kids, climbing trees, hunting. There’s a brotherhood before anything else.

    HUGHES: Brady has “Brother” tattooed on his arm, right?

    ZHAO: Yeah, it says “Brothers” if you look at it one way and “Forever” if you turn it. At Telluride, Lane said we all needed to get a bald eagle feather on our calves and it was going to say “The Rider” at the bottom. “Chloé, you’re going to do it too, right?” “No, I’m not going to have the name of my movie tattooed on my calf.” [laughs

    HUGHES: Earning that trust and building those relationships must have been 90% of the work. In my experience, along with their generosity and religious faith, which The Rider touches on occasionally, rodeo culture can also be a bit leery of outsiders. And a bit macho. 

    ZHAO: Pine Ridge is like my second home, so they all knew I existed—this weird Chinese woman making films on the reservation. It’s such a tight-knit community. Everyone is sort of related. That all makes it easier for me to convince them I’m not an outsider.  

    Other things were hard. It’s hard to get them to be vulnerable. It’s hard to get Brady to cry. And it was hard because we had a six-person crew. Just wrangling them was hard. “Can you please just be there at this time? Just do it!” And then the dad would be, like, “I’ve got a horse in Montana. I’ve gotta go pick it up.” I literally hid his keys [laughs]. “Where’s my truck?” “I don’t know. I think Tanner took it.”  

    You’d be surprised by how maternal horse people are, even though the stereotypical image of the cowboy is very misogynistic. Even Brady’s dad is a big softy. I have to not be defensive. I have to be open. And then very quickly you can tap into that soft side.

    And they’re rodeo cowboys, so they’re used to having cameras on them all the time. They’re performing. As you know, in rodeo, how do you judge a winner if both people ride eight seconds? Especially saddle bronc? It’s all about how you spur, how you throw your hat. It’s all a performance. They have to make a good show for the audience. They know these things. During the Q&A yesterday Brady said, “Even when I’m training horses, I’m performing. I have to project a certain character of myself to manipulate a horse.” That stuff came quite naturally. 

    HUGHES: In the scene where Brady’s coaching his younger friend, I thought, “He would be such a good teacher, of any subject.” 

    ZHAO: Brady is a kid who loves to learn. That’s how he approached acting. “This is a job. I’m going to learn this craft.” So by the end, he was an expert. He’d say, “Chloé, you need to edit that out.” And I’d have to say, “Do you mind? Can I do my job?” He’s such a quick learner. That’s one of the things that gave us confidence at the beginning, when there were so many unknown factors. This kid had incredible focus. That’s the only way you can train wild horses. He’s very adaptable. 

    HUGHES: In Songs, there’s a scene where a teacher goes around the classroom and asks everyone, “What do you want to be doing in four years?” And they all have the same answer: ride bulls and own a ranch. It’s obvious from watching the film that Brady is a fast learner and curious and has tremendous potential in any number of career paths. But the economic and cultural situation you’re documenting in these films doesn’t readily facilitate those other paths.

    ZHAO: We’re talking about that even now. “What opportunities do you want, Brady?” That’s something I had to wrestle quite a bit, coming from the outside and having only lived in big cities. Going in there, I wanted to say, “There are so many other lives? Why don’t you leave?” In my first film I kind of explore that. It’s one of those questions that’s not black and white. Because when you’re out there, after a storm, and you’re riding a horse near the Badlands, you understand why someone wouldn’t trade anything in the world for this. There is a sense of groundedness there that I never really had growing up. I was searching. All of the anxiety, all of the constant thoughts in my head, just washed out when I settled into that pace of life.

    Those kids in the classroom, I didn’t tell anybody how to answer the question. It was what they really want. And the question is, “Is it better to be working on Wall Street? In that box?” I think we all look at others and wish we had some of that. Some people want to have their house and livestock and get away. Meanwhile these kids are on Snapchat, looking at life in cities. One is not better than the other.

    HUGHES: Part of the story of the American Dream, though, is that we’re born with the potential to pursue any goal. Which, of course, isn’t true. 

    ZHAO: Because we forget about the psychological conditions. 

    HUGHES: And the economic conditions. 

    ZHAO: Which are linked. Again, we’re talking about the reservation here rather than the “heartland” of the country. People own the tribal land but don’t have the capacity to fully use it because of the complicated history with the US government. They get onto the system of welfare and government support, and the kids are raised in that mentality. They know they can work off this land, they can start a ranch, they can have a farm, they can do anything on this land, but some of them will sell it back to the tribe because in their minds it’s just easier to make the quick money. They’re all on social media, so they [feel peer pressure] and think, “I need money right now.” It’s heartbreaking to see how that connection to the land is being cut off for this generation. 

    So when I meet someone like Brady, it’s incredibly encouraging. He went to college, you know. This is someone who could go get a job at Wal-Mart, be a manager there, or work in an insurance company in Rapid City, but no. “I’m gonna fish every day in the White River. And I’m gonna eat that fish. And I’m gonna go hunting in the winter. That’s what I’m going to be.” So how do we celebrate that without sensationalizing it? A lot of kids get stuck. They need to see a different perspective. 

    HUGHES: How did Brady like college? 

    ZHAO: He didn’t finish. A lot of kids do that. I know this one girl who got a Gates scholarship, went away to a school in Omaha that has a rodeo team, and after a couple years went back home because she missed her horses, her ranch. Maybe you understand?

    HUGHES: As I was walking out of the film yesterday, I was trying to explain to a friend why I was so overcome with emotion. I finally said, “The single most beautiful thing I have ever seen is a foal running for the first time.” Watching Brady work a horse in a pen moved me in the same way. 

    ZHAO: I remember driving at certain times of the year, when all of the babies had been born, and they’re all running next to their mothers. It’s just… And Brady’s probably out there somewhere. He treats them like they’re his children. That cannot be taken away.

     HUGHES: You mentioned earlier that you had a six-person crew and no production designer, but did you paint the walls in Brady’s room?

    ZHAO: [Smiles] Yes! You got that one! [laughs] Me and my DP went to Wal-Mart and picked it out. That’s the trailer that Brady’s dad and Lilly and Tanner and all of those cowboys live in. It’s on the ranch where I met Brady and spend a lot of my time. So I asked, “Can I paint the walls?” Because it was all still the original colors. 

    One of the things we talked about was honoring nature exactly the way it is. That’s a big contrast in reservation life. They live in these government houses that have stripped away their connection with the land for generations. They’re stuck in this man-made, fluorescent, industrial-looking world. It’s claustrophobic—like, eighteen people per house. And then you go outside and it’s just majestic. That contrast is quite confusing. It says everything about what we did to the Native Americans. So we wanted to use colors that are found in nature in the house: blue for Brady, pink for Lilly. And then use a lot of fluorescent light.

    HUGHES: I asked because you talk often about how you’re not making documentaries. You want your films to be cinematic. So, the obvious follow-up question: what’s the difference? Does painting those rooms fit into that strategy?

    ZHAO: I was talking to someone last night from True/False Festival about how we have these films like The Act of Killing and Tangerine and Heaven Knows What and The Rider that are all over the spectrum. I think it’s human nature to need both truth and poetry. We gravitate towards both of them, and we all arrive at different shades of gray in the middle, even if we start on different ends [of the spectrum]. A documentary filmmaker can’t help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand. 

    HUGHES: I’ve heard you say that you were glad to find Brady because he has a great face for the screen. I want to ask you about Lilly’s and Lane’s faces too. Lane’s has been transformed by his injury. And Lilly’s gentle expression and the tenor of her voice are sweet and pure in a way that couldn’t be scripted or performed. [Note: Lilly has Asperger’s Syndrome, which Zhao intentionally avoided addressing. “She’s just her. It doesn’t need to be about autism. It’s just part of our community.”] I wonder if they each bring a kind of poetry to your film.  

    ZHAO: That’s the truth. How you film is the poetry. I’ve found that if you go to that part of America, we already have a lot of preconceived notions of what these images mean, and you have to unlearn that. It’s really hard. To just point the camera, like the media do, that’s actually not the truth. The emotional truth is what’s hard to capture. When you’re having a rough day with all of these boys in your face, and then Lilly comes and sings you a song? You can’t get that feeling with just documentary.  

    And Lane… these people are part of the landscape. Nature isn’t perfect. You see an actor who is perfect, all made up, perfect hair, who lives on a ranch in South Dakota? I don’t buy it. If you really are part of the landscape, part of nature, you’re going to be imperfect. There will be scars.

  • “Something, Anything”: A Conversation with Paul Harrill

    “Something, Anything”: A Conversation with Paul Harrill

    This interview was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything, which co-premiered recently at the Wisconsin Film Festival and the Sarasota Film Festival, is a portrait of a young woman in crisis. Peggy [Ashley Shelton] has already achieved her “stereotypically Southern” (as she’s described in the press kit) ambitions: a successful career in realty, a husband, a house in the suburbs, and a baby on the way. In the opening moments of the film, however, she’s forced to confront her dissatisfaction with it all. A family tragedy sends Peggy on a sojourn that leads her to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and, eventually, to a simpler life in a small apartment overlooking the Tennessee River.

    Harrill first gained recognition in 2001 when his short film, Gina, An Actress, Age 29, won the top prize at Sundance and enjoyed an impressive run of screenings at international festivals. Starring Amy Hubbard and Frankie Faison (Burrell from The Wire), Gina is about a woman who answers an audition call and soon finds herself performing the role of real-life union buster. Harrill’s second fiction short, Quick Feet, Soft Hands (2008), stars Greta Gerwig and Jason Von Stein as a young couple eking out a living on the minor-league baseball circuit. Harrill also produced Ashley Maynor’s documentary, For Memories’ Sake (2010), and last year returned to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as an Associate Professor of Art.

    I met Harrill a decade ago, when he and I were invited by a mutual friend to present on an academic conference panel. I spoke about cinephilia in the digital age; he screened what was then his most recent work, Brief Encounter with Tibetan Monks, a five-minute documentary that was part of Jay Rosenblatt’s Underground Zero project. We became friends, formed a small cinema club here in Knoxville, and then lost touch when he left to take faculty positions first at Temple University and then Virginia Tech. I ran into him again three years ago at a local screening and was happy to learn that he’d begun pre-production on his first feature.

    The plot of Something, Anything fits neatly into a number of American indie genres, but Harrill is slightly out of step with most of his contemporaries. Like the other movies he’s directed, Something, Anything is very much an East Tennessee film, but it avoids the traps of regional cinema. There are no picturesque shots of abandoned storefronts and dusty crossroads (although both can be found a short drive from the film’s locations) and no mentions of Knoxville’s literary and cinematic icons, Clarence Brown, James Agee, and Cormac McCarthy (although McCarthy fans might be interested to know that Peggy’s apartment is straight up the hill from where Suttree anchors his skiff). “Place isn’t about landscape,” Harrill told me. “Place is about values.” It’s a useful distinction, I think, and Harrill takes those values seriously. There’s no nostalgia in his voice. He doesn’t exoticize the South or the people who live here. There’s only affection and a careful attention to the social, economic, and spiritual (for lack of a better word) pressures that determine so much of our behavior.

    In an era when “contemplative” filmmakers tend to evoke Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Malick, and the Dardennes, Harrill’s style is decidedly conventional—old-fashioned, even. Peggy’s appearance might allude to Vivre sa vie-era Anna Karina, but Harrill’s treatment of her owes less to Godard than to American studio directors like Henry Hill (I was reminded more than once of The Song of Burnadette), George Cukor, and, as he acknowledges in our conversation, Frank Borzage and Leo McCarey. Harrill seldom leaves Peggy’s side, typically filming her in medium shots and closeups. The cutting is standard continuity, and the pace, though slower than most multiplex fare, will feel familiar to viewers of classical Hollywood. Finally, though, Something, Anything has the soul of a Bergman film—if not its style—remaining agnostic on questions of God and putting its faith, instead, in human affection. A film about a woman of few words who swallows her emotions and fends off despair, Something, Anything manages, in its final moments, to capture two minor miracles, both of them earth-bound and sublime.

    * * *

    HUGHES: Knowing you as I do, I’m going to assume you sympathize with Peggy’s retreat into her own Walden woods? Did writing this story in any way qualify as a kind of wish fulfillment for you?

    HARRILL: It’s a very personal film on that level. I’ve certainly wanted to give up all of my possessions and retreat and find quiet. You do that as a filmmaker if you’re a writer. It’s so solitary. And writing is the part I most enjoy, which goes along with being an introvert. I don’t like production. I like editing and I like writing. I mean, I hate them both when they’re not going well, but when they are going well, they’re the reason I do this.

    I did a lot of research in preparation for the film. To the point of procrastination, really. Reading and reading and reading, the way someone might research before doing a dissertation. I read a lot of monastic writings, whether it was the early ascetics living in caves or Thomas Merton, and I read Tolstoy’s religious writings. But those ideas, romantic as they are, ultimately don’t appeal to me.

    HUGHES: True monasticism, you mean? Becoming a monk?

    HARRILL: Right. And, you know, Peggy doesn’t become a nun. She simplifies her life and becomes a seeker.

    So the film is not wish fulfillment for me because I already feel like a seeker. I haven’t given up my phone yet, but I think about giving up Facebook everyday. We’ve been trying to put together a social media strategy for the film, and I keep thinking, “What would be appropriate for this film is to have no social media presence whatsoever.” [laughs] People should write me letters and I’ll write them letters back.

    HUGHES: I’ve only lived here for fifteen years, but my sense is that Knoxville, like much of the South, has a real ambivalence about seekers. On the one hand, we are church-going folks and most people I know practice some kind of faith that shapes their lives. But Knoxville is also a very comfortable, very middle-class place that is suspicious of paths that stray too far from convention.

    There’s a scene midway through Something, Anything when Peggy’s old friends confront her about her behavior. I half expected one of them to invite her to a Bible study—and I say that as someone who recognizes the characters in this film, who lives among them. To me, the one questionable moment in the film is when Peggy has to photocopy pages from a Bible because she doesn’t own one. She and her parents strike me as the type who would’ve gone to church every Sunday if for no other reason than out of social obligation.

    HARRILL: First, regarding your comment about one of her friends inviting her to a Bible study, I wrestled with whether to put in something like that. It would certainly be true to life. There was a scene in an early draft of the script where she goes to church with friends, but I eliminated it for two reasons. First, I felt that an audience who knows these characters—and, by the way, people like this certainly aren’t limited to the South—I felt those audiences would fill that in. They already know those women and they recognize that subtext.

    I say this without any judgment, but I think of Peggy’s friends as the kind of women who will accessorize their faith—you know, they’ll wear a gold cross and so on. I wanted to steer away from things like that in costuming because—and this is the second part of it—it makes Christianity into an easy target. To have those two women, who become antagonists, also be “the Christians” wouldn’t be fair. It would simplify the characters, and it would horribly oversimplify Christians.

    I want this film to speak to a lot of people. I don’t think it’s necessarily a film that was made for a lot of people [laughs], but I want it to reach not only the Peggys of the world—the seekers—but also the Hollys and Jills. If you type them in that way it’s too easy for audiences who recognize themselves in those women or their husbands to just check out of the film. That’s where there’s a danger of satire. Or perhaps it’s that audiences have seen those characters portrayed satirically so many times before, they might assume that’s my intention as well. That’s why I ultimately stripped out any overt critique of mainstream Christianity. I felt it would be superficial. And probably unfair.

    As for Peggy not having a Bible, you’re probably right. She would have a Bible, but it would be back at home. Maybe she and Mark [Bryce Johnson] got one as a wedding gift. She probably got one as a kid, too, but it’s at her parents’ house and she never read it.

    But that misses the point, in a way. I think Peggy is doing something pretty sophisticated there. She’s taking those words out of their familiar context—you know, that thin, Bible-grade paper? She’s putting them onto something with more heft, and that helps her look at it critically, and engage with it as something whose meaning isn’t defined or predetermined for her. At least, that’s how I look at it.

    HUGHES: Peggy eventually leaves her apartment, gets in her car, and drives to Gethsemani. It’s a significant moment, I think, because it marks an important shift both in her character and in the form of the film.

    HARRILL: She’s a seeker and, at some point, the road has to become part of her search. On a narrative level, it’s important for her to get out of the city and be in a different space. To take action. Travel is about removing yourself from your surroundings so you find out who you are without them. On a formal level, it’s important because the film has up to that point been such a chamber drama. It’s so interior. And then she gets into the car for the first time and we hit this big blue sky. There’s something important about seeing that openness. The film needs to breathe at that point.

    HUGHES: Something, Anything is shot fairly conventionally, but there are occasional moments where I can almost feel the formalist in you wrestling its way out. When Peggy arrives in Kentucky, the camera watches her approach from the door of the abbey. It’s almost Antonioni-esque. Is that shot about her? Is it about the abbey? Is it about situating her in that new space?

    HARRILL: I think it’s all of those things. I mean, I want it to be all of those things. If I’m not mistaken it’s the widest shot in the film. It’s the longest shot. It’s the smallest we see her. That seems appropriate for where she is—both metaphorically and concretely.

    HUGHES: The scenes at the abbey strike an interesting balance. I especially like her brief exchange with the monk who tells her, “Every day is a choice.” It’s all very warm and human. And at the same time, the film depicts the abbey as a genuinely holy place.

    HARRILL: That’s interesting. You’re talking about it as if it’s a dichotomy: human and holy. Obviously those two things are different but they needn’t be separated.

    Getting access to film at the monastery was a long process. But the monks never asked to see the script, not even the pages that were shot at the abbey. They only asked us what the story was about, in the most general sense. They wanted to get to know me, and once they got to know me, they were very trusting. Our guide while we filmed was Brother Paul Quenon, who is a photographer and poet and who’s been there since he was seventeen years old. Thomas Merton was his novice master. It was really satisfying when we filmed that scene with the monk in the hallway. We were shooting in places where the public isn’t allowed, so Brother Paul was observing, and he really loved the scene. He felt it was true to his experience.

    They’re people. They’re different, but they’re people. You know, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but there’s a DVD underground at the abbey, and there are a couple monks who are cinephiles who wanted to talk about Ozu! When they found out I had a Region 2 copy of Ruggles of Red Gap, they asked me to send a copy.

    HUGHES: Peggy becomes a seeker in response to her growing realization of just how alienated she’s become. If this were the real world instead of a film, her condition would be diagnosed by those around her as dysthymia or depression. The film resists psychologizing her, though, both in the script and in the form. None of her friends say, “Peggy, have you thought about seeing someone about this?”

    HARRILL: I think there’s value in psychology, in real life. But as a filmmaker, I think it can be creatively deadly. People are mysterious, and characters need mystery too. For me to identify the crisis she’s going through—for me to label it, or explain it in the terminology of psychology—well, at that point I’ve done three things. First, I’m telling the audience how to understand the character, which I think disrespects the audience. Second, I’ve taken away some of the character’s mystery. And finally, I’ve basically said, “I have all the answers, I understand all of this, everything about these characters.” That’s a lie.

    If someone watching the film views Peggy psychologically—if they see her and think “that’s depression”—or whatever, it’s far more powerful for them to do that without my prompting.

    HUGHES: I asked because, getting back to that dichotomy—”What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be holy?”—Something, Anything offers, I think, a real analysis of what degrades our humanness and our holiness. There are, of course, whole genres of film that attack the values of suburbia, but your film is not a portrait of alienation in a generic sense, it’s alienation in a very specific sense. I’m tempted to call it alienation in the Marxist sense.

    HARRILL: Well, first let me say this: I don’t think the film has an answer for what it means to be holy. The question is important, though. Certainly, the main character wants to know what it means to be holy.

    I’ve always admired a sensibility in Raymond Carver’s work. He has a deep affection for his characters while also remaining critical of them. But what’s so remarkable about his writing is how concrete the incidents are. In Something, Anything Mark gets upset because someone dings his car. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood. I don’t have an axe to grind. But the parking lot scene, Mark’s anger—it’s a concrete detail.

    HUGHES: Or the scene in which Peggy meets with a couple who are being foreclosed upon. You open it with a montage of simple, static images of empty rooms—a kind of portrait of the house they’re about to lose.

    HARRILL: Right. We only see them once, but that couple, like Peggy, is in a period of transition. If we were to see that montage before they move into their new home those images would be filled with hope and promise, but it’s obviously the opposite. They’re in trouble.

    HUGHES: Have you seen Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy?

    HARRILL: Sure.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene in that film in which an older security guard who has befriended Wendy recognizes she’s in trouble and gives her some money. Reichardt inserts a shot so that we see he’s giving her seven dollars, but it’s clearly seven dollars he can’t afford to lose. When Peggy goes back to her real estate office, her boss asks her to help out the team: the couple is going to lose $40,000 on one deal so that the company can make an extra $35,000 in another deal. I appreciate the way money is always real and consequential in Reichardt’s films, and it’s real in yours, too.

    HARRILL: That’s true. Money is very much a common thread in the last few movies I’ve directed. It’s not evil, but how people relate to money is important. Albert [Faison’s character] in Gina willingly compromises his integrity to pay his bills. Money is central to the characters in Quick Feet, Soft Hands.

    HUGHES: Near the end of Quick Feet, Soft Hands, Jim tells Lisa, “One of us should go to college,” which is certainly dialog in the Carver vein. And like the couple who are losing their house in the new movie, it’s also a time stamp. These are Great Recession films. My favorite moment in Something, Anything is when Mark asks Peggy if she needs any money and she replies, “I pay my bills.” It’s a gut-kick of a line reading. She’s proud and hurt in equal measure. On the page, I would think Peggy has the potential to become a type herself, but Ashley Shelton seems to always be performing at multiple registers.

    HARRILL: I can’t even remember how many actresses I met with before we found Ashley. It might have been in the triple digits. I met her very late in the game and, especially after auditioning her with Linds Edwards (who plays Tim, one of Peggy’s old friends who has become a monk), knew that she could be vulnerable and strong, which was essential for the character.

    HUGHES: You posted an article at filmmaker.com about your experience with the IFP Narrative Lab, where Something, Anything was workshopped. It sounds like it was a productive experience.

    HARRILL: We thought we were pretty close to picture lock when we submitted the film, but we knew that if we were selected it would be an opportunity for some more feedback, and a different kind of feedback than we’d been getting. We knew on one level, this could change everything. But we were eager to hear that because we wanted to make the best film possible.

    HUGHES: But you’re also opening yourself up to the possibility that the feedback will recommend more than small tweaks. That would be terrifying.

    HARRILL: Yeah, there was this initial burst of excitement for being selected, because it’s very validating to know you’re one of ten projects out of something like 140 that applied. We’d been making this movie in such isolation. For someone to select it confirmed that we were on the right track, that there was something of value here—and not just to us but to others as well. But then day two of the first week was “the crit” and excitement turned to anxiety. What if the feedback is, “You need to reshoot”? In fact, the feedback we got was very focused on what I wanted to hear—how specifically to tighten it up, while maintaining the sense of rhythm, and getting a bit more into the character’s interior life.

    HUGHES: How would you describe the film’s rhythm?

    HARRILL: [laughs] Isn’t that your job?

    I’ve been rewatching Stan Brakhage films lately for a class I’m teaching, and he mentioned in an interview that most of his films are silent because rhythm is such a fragile thing—that putting any sound to his films would inevitably change and redefine that rhythm. Obviously I’m not making films like Stan Brakhage, I’m not making films that I would compare to Stan Brakhage in a qualitative or quantitative way, but I connected with that comment because rhythm is what I think about more than anything.

    I wouldn’t say that the film has a rhythm; it has various rhythms. This sounds pretentious, but like an extended piece of music, it has movements. That’s what I spent so long trying to finesse. For example, the whole film is shot fairly classically, but the beginning is especially conventional; the rhythm is conventional. But it’s a setup, I hope, for something else. You asked about potentially devastating feedback. The worst would have been, “We really love the beginning of the film but then it gets really slow!” Something, Anything isn’t Bela Tarr slow, but it moves into a slower pace before working through a couple modulations.

    HUGHES: Well, since you’re dropping names, I was interested to see in your press kit that you mention Leo McCarey, Frank Borzage, and Robert Bresson. I could draw some connections between those directors and Something, Anything, but I’m wondering how you see them guiding your work?

    Well, I mean, first, I didn’t write that. That’s other people involved with the film trying to summarize some ideas I’ve discussed. But I’m fairly conversant with film history and it’s impossible for me to not at least acknowledge a tradition I’m coming from.

    HARRILL: I fell in love with some of Bresson’s films when I started making films, but I haven’t watched any of them, probably, in 7 or 8 years. The word “Bresson,” I think, is a kind of critical shorthand and I want to be careful about that. It’s become a synonym for “transcendental style.” What Paul Schrader wrote about, though, were the unique expressions of a handful of highly original filmmakers. Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer are distinct—their stories are distinct, their styles are distinct. But all three made films where composition, sound and, most of all, rhythm can bring the viewer to a place of inner reflection, contemplation and, hopefully, insight and feeling. That intention, the very idea of it, I think, is profound.

    But as a style it’s only profound because some of the works are so profound. Once these sensibilities became identified as an approach, and once that approach could be seen as means to an end, well, it’s a bit like Clement Greenberg’s comment about Abstract Expressionism: first it turned into a kind of school, then into a manner, and finally into a set of mannerisms. I think that has happened a bit with the “transcendental style.”

    HUGHES: Borzage occasionally gets lumped into that style—or, at least, I certainly think he should be mentioned alongside Dreyer—but McCarey seems to be the odd bird here.

    HARRILL: Renoir claimed that McCarey understood people better than anyone in Hollywood. Maybe that speaks to your question about the human and the holy?

    Like I said earlier, I’m trying to create something for an audience where they have this place for reflection and contemplation, and to try still to offer them insight and feeling. But instead of taking the path that, say, Bresson takes stylistically, I realized—for myself—I have to get there through something more conventional, more classical. McCarey and Borzage are the two filmmakers whose work helped me understand that. In the same way maybe that Stromboli was Eric Rohmer’s “road to Damascus,” two or three films by Borzage and McCarey suggested the beginning of a path for me.

    It’s funny, though. To me, classicism seems so out of use these days I think sometimes it can, paradoxically, be strange. Especially if it’s used sincerely and infused with other ideas. Ultimately, though, I just want the story to be conveyed in a way that is confident, that feels intentional, and that helps people arrive at a place of contemplation and feeling.

  • Frederick Wiseman: Reasoned Arguments

    Frederick Wiseman: Reasoned Arguments

    This interview was originally posted at Senses of Cinema.

    * * *

    Frederick Wiseman’s second documentary, High School (1968), was at the time of its release an unprecedented glimpse into America’s public education system. Throughout his career, Wiseman has bristled at the terms used to describe his style—direct cinema, “fly on the wall,” cinema-verite—but his decision to observe teacher-student interactions from a position of apparent objectivity upended the traditional models of non-fiction filmmaking. Rather than a top-down statement of administrative priorities, High School is a kind of tangential conversation between Philadelphia teenagers and the adults who were charged with educating and enculturating them. As a result High School remains compelling today. The film is a time capsule of a tumultuous moment in American history, to be sure, but it’s too human and too deeply felt to ever become a dusty museum piece.

    Forty-five years later, Wiseman’s influence on documentary filmmaking is inescapable. Yet no one makes films quite like his, and certainly not as well or with as much intelligence and curiosity. In 2010, Wiseman arrived on the campus of The University of California, Berkeley, intent on adding another feature to his on-going series about institutions. He happened to start the project during the darkest days of America’s economic recession, when state legislatures across the country were divesting in public education. At Berkeley is a four-hour, wide-ranging portrait of that moment. He and his small crew spent time with university administrators, with student protesters, and in a variety of classrooms and research facilities. “The movie is what I felt about Berkeley,” he told me.

    I spoke with Frederick Wiseman at the Toronto International Film Festival, where At Berkeley received its North American premiere.

    * * *

    HUGHES: I should start by saying that I’m a cinephile and fan of your work, but like a lot of film writers today, I do this as a freelancer. In my day job, I’m communications director for the University of Tennessee Foundation, where I spend most of my time reminding the people of Tennessee, our alumni, and the state’s legislators about the importance of public higher education.

    WISEMAN: Oh, well, then you’re familiar with all of the issues!

    HUGHES: Yeah, this might be a bit of shoptalk for me.

    WISEMAN: That’s interesting. That’s fine. Get them to show the film in Tennessee.

    HUGHES: Is that an option? Your films typically show in the States on PBS. Do you have other distribution plans in mind?

    WISEMAN: Yeah, it’ll be shown on PBS in January, but it’s not the same thing. It’s much better to see it projected. It’s opening commercially in New York, and it’s being booked around the country. I’m hoping the film gets booked in state universities because the issues are the same everywhere.

    HUGHES: When you were here in Toronto a couple years ago with Boxing Gym (2010), you said during the Q&A that one reason you were drawn to the gym was because the guy who ran it was such a good teacher.

    WISEMAN: Richard Lord, yeah. I thought Richard was a great teacher and a great psychologist because he knew how to deal with the people in the gym.

    HUGHES: I would guess that 30-40% of the new film is teachers in the classroom, which is a rare sight in films—I mean, to really get to watch people do the hard work of teaching and mentoring.

    WISEMAN: I’m interested in teaching, and I’ve observed teaching in a variety of circumstances, not only the high school movies and Boxing Gym but Near Death (1989), where you see the senior physicians introducing the residents and the interns to a variety of ways of dealing with people—and the families of people—who are dying. I mean, it’s an obvious consequence of making movies in institutions where knowledge is being passed on.

    And Berkeley has great teachers, so that was certainly part of the attraction to this subject. I was making a film about a university, so I wanted to show teaching in action.

    HUGHES: Another perk of shooting at Berkeley is that you have very articulate subjects. I assume that was part of the attraction too?

    WISEMAN: Well, sure, because sometimes I’ve had very inarticulate subjects! A necessity for a good teacher is the ability to talk clearly and convincingly on a subject. The faculty at Berkeley is something like 3,500 people and there are 5,000 courses, so there was a lot to choose from, and I make no claims in the film that it is a representative sample, because I don’t know how to do that.

    HUGHES: One of the men in the film—maybe he was a vice chancellor?—says, “The coin of the realm is articulate argumentation.”

    WISEMAN: The provost. Yeah, a crucial statement. Reasoned argument.

    HUGHES: You arrived in Berkeley during the recession, when the California legislature was accelerating its divestment in public higher education. It all felt eerily familiar to me. In 2008, about 27% of University of Tennessee’s operating revenue came from state appropriations. By 2012, it had dropped to 18%.

    WISEMAN: Berkeley was at 16% when I made the film; it’s now 9%. Really, it’s becoming a type of privatization. It’s complicated because the states’ economies are in bad shape, but also I think there’s a . . . you know more about this than I do . . . but I have a sense that there’s, well, two things: One, there’s an effort to apply a cost-benefit analysis to courses, so if there’s only six people taking Portuguese, why offer Portuguese, or if there are ten people in a political science class and 500 people in an engineering class, why do we need political science?

    But there’s also a political . . . there may be, I don’t know if I’m right . . . but there may be a political agenda behind that. In a sense, dumbing down the nature of the education so people aren’t aware of the historical aspects and traditions of the United States, or the way the government is supposed to work, or what the founders had in mind with the Federalist Papers, blah, blah, blah. And that’s very dangerous.

    HUGHES: Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, recently said, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” In a single stroke, he dismissed the grand tradition of classic liberal arts education.

    WISEMAN: Yeah, it is dismissing it. That’s the point. But the question is whether that’s just for economic reasons or whether it’s a political agenda behind it, and I don’t want to answer that question.

    HUGHES: You’re implying you think there is.

    WISEMAN: I think for some people. I mean, the Koch brothers, for example, have an interest in that sort of thing. I’m not just implying it. I think for some people there is that agenda. How widespread it is, I don’t know.

    HUGHES: Fitting, then, that you would choose Berkeley as your subject. That campus, probably more than any other in America, has a tradition of inter-generational conflict and direct political action. The ghost of Mario Savio haunts your film in complicated ways.

    WISEMAN: See, but that’s interesting, because one of the things I discovered while I was there was that most students, I mean 85-90% of the students, don’t participate in those things. But because of what was going on in the ‘60s, there’s this myth about Berkeley. My guess is that even in the ‘60s most of the students weren’t participating. And certainly not now.

    HUGHES: It’s interesting, though, that the very thing that Savio was railing against nearly 50 years ago—the collaboration between public higher education and the military-industrial complex—is perhaps even more prominent today.

    WISEMAN: And part of that is a consequence of the lack of funding. The state funding has been replaced by research funding—sometimes by large corporations, sometimes by the military. But I must say, my impression was at Berkeley that when they took that kind of funding there were no strings attached. They went where the research led them, not where the funder wanted them to be. They weren’t producing results to support the point of view of the funder.

    HUGHES: Every time you cut away to a construction project on campus, I imagined a new building going up with a donor’s name on it. I was hoping the film would touch on the role of private gift support.

    WISEMAN: I couldn’t get access to it.

    HUGHES: Really?

    WISEMAN: Yeah.

    HUGHES: Interesting. So, what was your process for getting access to the university?

    WISEMAN: Generally speaking, I had access to everything that was going on except insofar as somebody didn’t want to be photographed. But the person in charge of fundraising thought that it would interfere.

    HUGHES: I’m sure it would.

    WISEMAN: So I didn’t have access to that. Despite the fact that the final film . . . they love the final film. There’s a reception this afternoon for Berkeley alumni in Toronto, who are going to be shown excerpts and be told about the film.

    HUGHES: That’s great. Doesn’t surprise me at all.

    WISEMAN: [Smiles] Well, because it came out alright, from their point of view.

    HUGHES: I know you’ve talked about this a lot over the years, but how do you find the shape of a film like this? What are your shooting and editing habits?

    WISEMAN: I just figure it out. I mean, there are no rules. For instance, within a sequence I have to feel that I understand what’s going on, and then I have to decide what I think is most important. Then I have to figure out a way of shaping the sequence, editing it down, summarizing it, synthesizing it in a way that is fair to the original even though it’s much shorter than the original.

    I mean, a sequence in real time might be an hour and a half. Some of those cabinet meetings were an hour and a half, two hours. In the film, it’s six, seven, eight minutes. I have to edit them so they appear as if they took place the way you’re watching it, even though it’s 30 seconds here, five seconds there, and then I jump twenty minutes ahead. But I have to edit in such a way that it looks like it all happened the way you’re watching it.

    So that’s within the sequence. Between the sequences I have to figure out the overarching themes and the dramatic moments. An abstract way of describing what I tried to do is I tried to cut it at right angles so you’re always surprised by what comes next. And at the same time, in terms of the rhythm of the movie, I have to think about quiet moments. I mean, after a dramatic scene I don’t want to go to another dramatic scene, so I may use cutaways of the campus or whatever.

    But when I use cutaways to the campus, I use them for a variety of purposes: sometimes to show movement from one place to another, other times because I need a quiet moment, or it might be that I want to show that everyone has a cell phone. Particularly for those transition shots, there are multiple purposes.

    HUGHES: In those shots, you’re also making very specific choices about how to depict the campus.

    WISEMAN: That’s true of everything.

    HUGHES: Sure. So, occasionally we see people working in corporate-style offices, for example, but you also return often to a large lobby or foyer . . . I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it has beautiful Spanish arches.

    WISEMAN: Right, right.

    HUGHES: And in those aesthetic choices of representation you’re also adding your voice to the film. Is that fair to say?

    WISEMAN: Sure, because I want to show the architecture. I want to show the students sitting on the floor. I like the shot of the light coming down through the arches. I need a transition between two classes. All of those things are elements in the choice of that shot or that group of shots.

    HUGHES: Okay, but a beautiful shot of light coming down through those arches also brings a point of view to the film. Yesterday I was discussing this with a friend who described At Berkeley as very fly-on-the-wall and free of advocacy . . .

    WISEMAN: There is no advocacy. “Fly on the wall” is a term I object to. There was no advocacy going on in the sense that I never asked anybody to do anything.

    HUGHES: Just from talking to you face-to-face, though, I get the sense that you’ve become invested in the subject. Would you describe yourself as an advocate for higher education?

    WISEMAN: I’d describe myself as a filmmaker. I mean, I think I’ve realized as a consequence of making this film—I don’t think I ever thought much about public education before I made the film—but as a consequence of the experience, and having the opportunity to listen to these administrators at Berkeley discuss these issues, I learned something about the issue.

    The project originated because I thought a university would be a good addition to the series I’ve been doing on institutions. It’s a natural consequence of doing High School, and universities are important in American society, in any society. So the impetus for doing the film had more to do with wanting to do a movie that fit into the institutional series. But I wanted to pick a public university because that raised more issues.

    HUGHES: One storyline in the film is Berkeley’s effort to reduce spending through operational excellence and process engineering. It’s probably my favourite aspect of the film—and I’ve never really thought about my own university in this context—because in that sense, the campus becomes a microcosm of post-recession America . .

    WISEMAN: Right.

    HUGHES: Where the lowest wage earners . . .

    WISEMAN: They’re the ones who get . . . yeah.

    HUGHES: There’s a scene where students are discussing the cost of attending Berkeley, and a middle-class girl breaks down . . .

    WISEMAN: She cries.

    HUGHES: She feels the same squeeze experienced by so many over the past five years. Were you surprised to find that connection?

    WISEMAN: I was surprised only in the sense that I was ignorant of the issues. But having had access to so much of what was going on at the university, I’m less ignorant.

    HUGHES: Chancellor Robert Birgeneau is a compelling character on screen. I imagine when you meet people like him, you must think, “This guy will help the film. We have something here.”

    WISEMAN: He’s the one who gave me permission to make it. He was the first person I met. He was the person I contacted in order to get permission.

    HUGHES: Was he aware of your work?

    WISEMAN: Yeah.

    HUGHES: So that helps.

    WISEMAN: Yeah, he was aware of the films, and he was very open. I wrote him a letter, basically saying, “Can I make a documentary of Berkeley?” and explaining the circumstances and the funding and all that, and he wrote me back, “Come and see me.” I went to see him, and I had lunch with him and the provost, and at the end of the lunch they said, “Okay.”

    HUGHES: That was a tremendous risk for them.

    WISEMAN: Oh, it was. We talked about that. But, you know, obviously he trusted me. He told me explicitly at the end, when it was over and he saw the movie, he was glad his trust was not misplaced. The movie is what I felt about Berkeley. If I’d felt something else about it, it would’ve been in the movie.

    HUGHES: He seems to have that rare talent to make very difficult decisions but to do so with tact and wisdom.

    WISEMAN: Well, he’d been a dean at MIT and president at the University of Toronto before he went to Berkeley. He’s a very smart man and had a lot of experience.

    HUGHES: I enjoyed watching his response to the student protestors because he’s sympathetic to them—just like I’m sympathetic to them—but his biggest frustration is that there’s so little at stake for them.

    WISEMAN: Right. And he compares it to his own experience in the ‘60s. I think he’s also concerned, basically, about their ignorance of the real situation.

    HUGHES: Part of my job is public relations, and nothing is more frustrating than when the other side gets the basic, underlying facts wrong.

    WISEMAN: It was amazing to me how badly wrong they got them at Berkeley, because to make a principled demand for free tuition at this point . . . it’s a fantasy. It wasn’t a question of the university withholding. Free tuition just wasn’t in the cards.

    HUGHES: In the film, at least, Chancellor Birgeneau’s heart seems to be in the right place.

    WISEMAN: Exactly! I’m glad to hear you say that. That’s exactly how I felt. One of the interesting things for me about making the film was that I was with a group of people who cared. I think that’s just as important a subject for a film as people who are callous and indifferent.

    HUGHES: Because of where I sit in my job, I’ve seen all sides of those debates . .

    WISEMAN: Right.

    HUGHES: . . . and I can say that it’s very rare to meet someone who has dedicated his or her life to higher education and not cared deeply about it. It was nice to see that on film.

    WISEMAN: I felt the same way. It was nice for me to get to experience it.

  • Looking at Women: William A. Wellman’s Style in Frisco Jenny and Midnight Mary

    Looking at Women: William A. Wellman’s Style in Frisco Jenny and Midnight Mary

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Film Forum’s 2012 William Wellman retrospective brought new and much-needed critical attention to a director best remembered today for a small handful of the 80 or so films he made between 1920 and 1958, including Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star is Born (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Despite the relatively strong reputations of those films, Wellman has often been overlooked in critical discussions of Hollywood auteurs. In fact, a collection of essays that grew out of the retrospective, William A. Wellman: A Dossier, edited by Gina Telaroli and David Phelps, is the closest thing to a book-length study of Wellman currently available. After reading through much of the Dossier, I was encouraged to give Wellman a serious look myself, and this formal analysis is a small effort to continue the momentum of Telaroli’s and Phelps’s work.

    Made just a few months apart and packaged conveniently on the same disc of TCM’s Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 3, Wellman’s Frisco Jenny (First National Pictures, 1932) and Midnight Mary (MGM, 1933) make for a useful case study of the director’s style. The former is a grand Greek tragedy dressed in gangster clothing; the latter is an interesting trifle, a mash-up of genres that occasionally transcends convention. On paper, the films’ scenarios are quite similar, and Wellman, who prided himself on making fast-paced films quickly (he’s credited as director on at least ten other productions in 1932 and 1933), lifts shots directly from Jenny and reuses them in Mary. The differences between the films’ formal strategies are revealing, though, and they go some way in explaining why Frisco Jenny is the much better film, both dramatically and aesthetically.

    Frisco Jenny stars Ruth Chatterton in the title role as a woman raised in her father’s saloon who leaps willingly into a life of crime rather than allow her young, fatherless child to go hungry. After giving up the boy for adoption, Jenny climbs her way to the top of the criminal world, where she reigns for two decades until being convicted of murder and sentenced to death by her unknowing son, now San Francisco’s district attorney. In Midnight Mary, Loretta Young likewise takes up with a criminal gang out of desperation. During a botched casino heist, Mary meets dapper playboy Tom (Franchot Tone), who offers her a glimpse of another possible future on the straight and narrow. Veering clumsily between romantic comedy and gangland proto-noir, Midnight Mary functions first and foremost as a star vehicle for Young and Tone. Their closing-shot kiss seems less inevitable than contractually obligated.

    Composing Power

    Jenny and Mary are pre-Code heroines who move with varying degrees of freedom through a world dominated by men, and the exact, moment-to-moment status of their power in any given relationship can be charted with a kind of geometric precision. Here, for example, we see Jenny and one of her most trusted allies in a traditional shot breakdown: two-shot / medium close-up / reverse.

    This more intimately staged conversation between Mary and her childhood friend Bunny (Una Merkel) takes the same basic shape.

    Women are allies in these films. There’s no cattiness, petty jealousies, or intrigues threatening to divide them, and Wellman reinforces that solidarity in his balanced compositions. Here, for example, are two typical conversations between women in Frisco Jenny. Note that they’re staged perpendicular to the camera and that, because they sit together or stand together, their eyelines all run more or less along a horizontal plane.

    Relationships between women and men are a different matter. At the most basic level, power can be measured in these compositions as a king-of-the-hill battle for the top of the frame, as in these confrontations between our heroines and the criminals in their lives, Steve (Louis Calhern) and Leo (Ricardo Cortez).

    The most interesting example of this occurs in the third act of Frisco Jenny, when she is at the peak of her powers. Steve enters from the back of the room, towers briefly over her (Calhern was more than a foot taller than Chatterton), and then sinks into an absurdly short chair. I can almost imagine Chatterton sitting on a phone book here.

    At times the calculus gets much more complicated. Of the two, Midnight Mary is the more conventional studio production, with on-the-nose musical cues, rapid-fire montages, and glamour. (I suspect this reflects the differences between First National’s and MGM’s production styles at the time.) Young is seldom king of the hill, yet she still dominates every frame thanks to her key light and those legendary eyes. While often challenged by men, Mary remains composed in a position of glamorous, seductive power.

    Despite the fact that Midnight Mary opens with a jury deliberating over her murder charge, Mary’s fate is never truly in the balance. Wellman’s style makes this much clear: Midnight Mary is not that kind of movie; Mary and Tom will find a way out of this jam.

    By comparison, Jenny is never allowed a moment’s rest. Although she has a child outside of marriage and begins her criminal career as a madam, Jenny is desexualized and denied the same powers that rescue Mary. These two shots are especially instructive.

    In both scenes, the heroine is receiving bad news from someone she loves, but Wellman shoots them as mirror images. The difference is crucial, as we tend to read images from left to right. Mary is acting against Tom; Jenny is being acted upon by her father. If you scroll up to the previous screen captures you’ll see that Mary is on the left side of each frame. Jenny is always on the right. With very few exceptions, this is true throughout both films.

    Looking and Listening

    Something even more interesting is happening in those mirror images, though. In the first example, we look at Loretta Young as she is told bad news. In the second, we watch Ruth Chatterton as she listens. It’s a small but significant difference that exemplifies the perspectives of both films. Midnight Mary is objective (we look at); Frisco Jenny is subjective (we experience through). At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s the difference between comedy and tragedy, as demonstrated in these two nearly identical compositions, below. In the first, we, along with everyone else in the court room, turn to look at Mary, who is casually reading an issue of Cosmopolitan. It’s a nice little gag. In the second, Jenny listens intently as her son attacks her character and seals her fate.

    Looking at beautiful women has, of course, been a defining characteristic of the movies—and of commercial cinema, in particular—since its earliest days. In Midnight Mary, it’s also a running theme. Again, the film is a star vehicle for then-20-year-old Loretta Young, so we should perhaps expect a few lingering shots of those knockout gams. It’s worth noting that in the following example, we participate in the old lawyer’s ogling, thanks to an eyeline match.

    Wellman very seldom shifts the perspective to Mary’s subjectivity, but the film’s most compelling scene is an interesting exception to this rule. Knowing that Leo plans to leave their apartment to murder Tom, Mary first tries to keep him there by seducing him. But when her standard tactics fail, she’s forced to shoot.

    Leo’s body convulses on the floor as the rest of his gang try to force open the door. It’s a grotesque image heightened by chaotic music coming from the other room, all of it filtered now through Mary’s traumatized subjectivity. Note how the camera has shifted to her left, forcing her to the right side of the frame. Her eyes stare in shocked disbelief and her head recoils with each loud knock at the door. The sequence is shockingly perverse, recalling the finale of Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), when James Cagney’s bound body hits the floor. Leo’s death, and Mary’s horrific experience of it, stain Midnight Mary‘s “happy” ending with an unsettling and lingering ambiguity.

    We seldom look at Jenny in quite the same way we look at Mary. Rather, Wellman co-opts Jenny’s perspective in the opening moments of the film and remains fixed there throughout. As a result, Frisco Jenny is as rich a film, both psychologically and emotionally, as any I can think of from the era. Eighty years later, Wellman’s style is strikingly au courant. His subjective camera reminds me less of Hitchcock’s experiments with suspense than a Claire Denis fantasia. The following two shots, for example, serve simple narrative functions, but the mise en scène transcends the script, granting the viewer special access to Jenny’s inner life. In both cases she steps silently to the foreground while everyone behind her dissolves into a tableau. The image on the right is an especially unnatural moment, as the social workers who have come to collect her son pause motionless and out of focus, allowing us to watch in silence for a few seconds as Jenny thinks.

    Eternal Gestures

    Jenny: Steve said the gods must be out to lunch.

    Amah: No, the gods see everything. Everything in this world is balance.

    That we experience the world of Frisco Jenny through the heroine’s subjectivity is more than some cinematic parlor trick. Wellman’s style turns Jenny’s world into a holy space—holy, rather than just moral—and the critical language necessary to describe it must be borrowed from discussions of transcendental filmmakers. (It’s an odd claim, I know, but after watching it several times now, I’m comfortable calling Frisco Jenny one of America’s mainstream contemplative masterpieces.) Both Jenny and Mary have run-ins with preachers and the Salvation Army along the way, but, as with the courtroom scene, Midnight Mary treats faith and spirituality as one more joke (and worse, a pat symbol) while Frisco Jenny builds a thick, knotted context in which the film’s central tragedy might find meaning and catharsis.

    Frisco Jenny is probably best remembered today for its depiction of the 1906 earthquake. It strikes just as Jenny confesses to her father that she plans to marry Dan, the saloon’s piano player, and is carrying his child. A beam falls and kills her father, but before she escapes to safety, Jenny reaches down and strokes his cheek.

    The image functions as an eyeline match and marks our point of entry into Jenny’s subjectivity, but the gesture itself is significant. This essay isn’t the place to rehash all that’s been written about Bresson’s hand fetish, but I would argue that Wellman’s systematic insertion of such shots, which is uncharacteristic of his other work from the era, moves beyond simple storytelling and symbolism (although it is also that) and approaches the radical style Francois Truffaut describes in his review of A Man Escaped:

    What this amounts to is that Bresson has pulverized classic cutting—where a shot of someone looking at something is valid only in relation to the next shot showing what he is looking at—a form of cutting that made cinema a dramatic art, a kind of photographed theater. Bresson explodes all that and, if in Un condamné the closeups of hands and objects nonetheless lead to closeups of the face, the succession is no longer ordered in terms of stage dramaturgy. It is in the service of a preestablished harmony of subtle relations among visual and aural elements. Each shot of hands or of a look is autonomous.

    Frisco Jenny is in many respects a typical Hollywood production of the early-1930s. Most of the cutting is classic dramaturgy, so I don’t wish to imply that Wellman influenced or even anticipated Bresson’s mature style. However, the film does work on that rare, unnerving plane where the most talented of Dostoevsky’s descendants play. I’d begun to think of Jenny as a compatriot of Fontaine (A Man Escaped) and Michel (Pickpocket), not to mention any number of Dardenne protagonists—one more condemned soul in need of redemption—even before I’d consciously noted all of the hands.

    I’d be hard pressed to make the case for each of these images achieving the kind of autonomy that Truffaut praises in Bresson’s montage. Frankly, two of these inserts are punchlines. However, the shots of hands and the string of subjective portraits of Jenny combine to gradually, imperceptibly, accumulate emotional freight until being unloaded in the final moments of the film. Regarding the finale of Frisco Jenny, I would borrow again from Truffaut’s review, this time without reservations: “What is important is that the emotion, even if it is to be felt by only one viewer out of twenty, is rarer and purer and, as a result, far from altering the work’s nobility, it confers a grandeur on it that was not hinted at at the outset.”

    Absence, loss, regret, love, and uncompromising sacrifice—ultimately, each small gesture and silent expression enacts Jenny’s tragedy, but it’s only after she’s chosen to face the gallows that the gestures are imbued, retroactively, with such grandeur. For example, much earlier in the film, Jenny goes into labor while holed up deep in post-quake Chinatown. The preacher fetches a doctor and leads him through a labyrinth of dark alleyways until they find the right door and knock. (The staging of the scene reminds me of Pedro Costa’s Ossos, another contemplative, Bressonian film involving a baby!) Wellman elides the birth completely and cuts, instead, to a medium close-up of the preacher blessing the child. It’s a sincere moment, with none of the irony that characterizes so much of Midnight Mary. The camera then pulls back through the rubble, watching from a distance as Jenny’s faithful servant Amah carries the baby to her. Jenny reaches for him, and his small hand finds her finger, their first touch.

    The sequence is a small marvel and features Wellman’s trademark tracking shots and two frisson-causing cuts (from the dark hallway to the praying preacher; from the long shot of the dark room to the relatively bright medium close-up of Jenny and the baby). On a first viewing, the sequence signals a shift in the film’s style and ambition. Frisco Jenny suddenly blossoms into something more melodramatic (in the best tradition of the word) and sublime. On a second viewing, it’s devastating, as it anticipates the film’s precise denouement, Jenny’s final contact with her son.

    In the closing moments of Frisco Jenny, Steve threatens to expose the connection between District Attorney Dan Reynolds and his real mother. Left with no other recourse and desperate to protect her son’s reputation, Jenny kills Steve and begs Amah to preserve their secret. As she awaits execution, Jenny is visited in prison first by Amah and then by Dan, who has been troubled by her case for reasons he can’t quite understand. The dialog is serviceable: he offers to stay Jenny’s punishment if she confesses her motives; she quietly refuses. However, Wellman’s mise en scène and Chatterton’s performance elevate the scene to a work of high art and transform Jenny into one more cinematic saint.

    These icon-like portraits from Wellman, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, and John Cassavetes are, I think, true objects of contemplation—staggering but glamourless images that invite sympathy, compassion, and deep curiosity while steadfastly resisting interpretation. To borrow a line from Nathaniel Dorsky, they are “manifestations of the ineffable.”

    When Jenny and Dan speak for the last time, she’s reclining on her prison bunk, leaning away from him. However, because she’s now staged on the left side of the frame (this is an especially good example of the precision of Wellman’s style paying emotional dividends), the momentum of the image pushes them toward each other, figuratively speaking, despite her best efforts.

    It’s a rare instance in the film when Jenny is allowed the position of sympathy and authority in a shot/reverse-shot breakdown, and because we have spent the previous hour experiencing this world through her, the chaos and discord of her emotional state are palpable. When Jenny quips about Dan working hard to undo a case he’d just won, he replies, “In court I was sure. Now I’m not. Help me,” and on “help me” Wellman cuts back to Jenny and dollies in to a close-up. However, because he waits to pull focus until the camera has stopped moving, she is left blurry in the interim.

    It’s subjective filmmaking taken to a logical and vivid extreme. The dolly-in last six seconds, the amount of time it might take Jenny to process her son’s cry for help, relive that first touch in Chinatown, indulge the fantasy of embracing him and confessing, choke back her tears, regain her composure, and claim her fate. “Never,” she whispers, as the camera snaps back into focus. Dan stands to say goodbye and places his hand on her shoulder, and she, impulsively and with much grace, presses it against her cheek and kisses it. Absence, loss, regret, love, and uncompromising sacrifice—Jenny’s tragedy climaxes with this, her final gesture.

  • To the Wonder (Malick, 2012)

    To the Wonder (Malick, 2012)

    This essay was originally published at Mubi.

    * * *

    Where’s all the shit?

    I scribbled this question on page three of my notes, which would put it near the midpoint of To the Wonder, soon after recent emigree and single mother Marina (Olga Kurylenko) returns to Paris with her young daughter, thereby freeing her commitment-phobic lover Neil (Ben Affleck) to pursue Jane (Rachel McAdams), a former flame who’s moved back home to manage the family ranch. It’s my favorite section of the film because it’s Malick at his most malicky. We’re treated to shot after shot of Affleck and McAdams posing poignantly in fields of tall grass, always at magic hour, always just a touch wind-blown. As the music swells, Jane glides toward Neil, her red dress a small explosion of dancing color. It’s as beautiful as anything Malick has ever shot. My next note reads, “Nice sequence. Like an MGM musical.” I’d never before thought of Vincente Minnelli or Gene Kelly while watching a Malick film, but the viewing pleasures are of the same basic stock. He makes movies, but increasingly I’ve come to think of Malick as a choreographer.

    So, really, where’s all the shit?

    I live on a small farm with two horses, which is a small fraction of the livestock on McAdams’s character’s ranch, and I can say with some authority that the shit-to-animal ratio is unnaturally low in To the Wonder. That the crew might have made an effort to minimize the amount of manure in a few shots is hardly worth noting except that this film, to my mind, is a kind of test case for Malick’s aesthetic, which worships beauty to such an extent that he seems increasingly phobic of the imperfect and the everyday.

    It’s an odd complaint to make of Malick, I know. At their best, his films do exactly the opposite, striving to reveal immanence in the natural world. Think of the tree-root cathedral accompanied by the low-frequency rumble of a church organ in The Thin Red Line or the endless rows of sunflowers in The Tree of Life. Make what you will of Malick’s recent evangelizing, but he is most definitely what we used to call in my church-going days a “Psalm 19 guy”–one who hears all of creation proclaiming the glory of the Creator. On a literal level, the voiceover ruminations on God in both The Tree of Life and To the Wonder strike me as doggerel (I try my best to ignore them) but the sound of the whispered lines—like the sound of Arseni Tarkosvky reciting poetry in Mirror—can be deeply human and holy.

    Page 4: For Malick, there is no sin more grievous than fucking an ugly Southerner.

    I’ve repeated this line a few times since the screening in Toronto, always careful to use the word “fucking.” It’s exactly the right word because Malick lives in a world divided by the sacred and the profane, and in To the Wonder sex is the most obvious site of conflict between the two. Near the end of the film, after Marina has returned to America and married Neil in both a civil ceremony and an unofficial Catholic wedding (she has murky divorce issues in her past that preclude her from an official blessing), she meets a local carpenter who is more attentive to her emotional needs (symbolized by a single shot of him bringing her a musical instrument). When they rendez-vous at a motel, Malick chops the sex scene into one of the film’s many wordless montages. The carpenter is played by Charles Baker (Breaking Bad‘s Skinny Pete), who isn’t so much a human being here as an embodiment of grotesque transgression (symbolized by his pockmarked face and the skull and spiderweb tattoo over his heart). Like most of the film, the sequence exists somewhere between an objective perspective and a figment of Marina’s fragile subjectivity. Is this an actual moment in the life of an actual unhappy woman or is it Marina’s nightmarish vision of sacrilege? I’m still not sure—both, probably—but to drive home the point, Malick cuts minutes later to a shot of Marina and Neil’s empty marriage bed.

    In case there were any doubts, To the Wonder confirms that Malick does indeed have a number of grievances with the modern world. He laments the rootlessness of our lives, symbolized by the string of unfurnished homes Neil and Marina inhabit throughout the film. He mourns the devastating effects of commerce and greed on the natural world, symbolized by Neil’s work as an environmental engineer. He regrets the middle class’s flight from small-town community, symbolized by the empty streets and cookie-cutter tract homes of suburbia. He’s saddened by the isolating effects of the Internet, symbolized by a few seconds of smartphone video footage and a too-short Skype conversation between a mother and her child. He weeps for our spiritual alienation and for our ineffectual churches, symbolized by Javier Bardem’s quiet priest who only occasionally musters the courage to visit the poor and has little real comfort to offer them. And most of all he grieves for the decaying, sacred bonds of family, symbolized in so many ways in his last two films but most unambiguously by that vacant marriage bed. The problem is that Malick’s aesthetic, which values beauty and symbols above all, just has no place for the abject and the literal, for the shit.

    I want Malick to make a film about ugly people.

    This note is at the very bottom of page three, after Neil has agreed to marry Marina but before her affair. I had hoped To the Wonder would be Malick’s marriage film or his sex film, but it’s neither, because Neil and Marina aren’t people. Not really. They’re beautiful avatars—models in an impressionistic fashion show far removed from the mundane realities of relationships. Like the “dance” between Neil and Jane in her pasture, Malick represents the most intimate moments between Neil and Marina in what are quickly becoming clichéd (if, admittedly, stunning) images: steadicam shots of them giggling, jumping on the bed, and play-wrestling in sun-washed, sheer-curtained bedrooms, and that ubiquitous shot of a beautiful woman moving away from the camera and then turning back toward it with a direct glance and a longing smile. The closest Malick comes to showing their sex life is a bit of chaste dryhumping with Affleck still in his jeans. We can only assume one or both of these characters have had an orgasm at some point in their relationship. That sort of thing is out of bounds for Malick. The messy mechanics of sex, like the manure, would soil the fragrance-commercial glamour of his images.

    I’m ambivalent about Malick, in general, but I quite like The Tree of Life, in part because it wears its nostalgia on its sleeve. The small town Texas scenes are romantic, sentimental, reaching, idealized, and fable-like, which is a perfect form of representation for childhood memories, and Malick’s shout out to Tarkovsky (the levitating mother) led me to assume this was by design, that he was working self-consciously in a particular tradition of cinematic memoir. To the Wonder actually amplifies that formal approach. For the sake of clarity I’ve been referring to the main characters by the names they’re given in the closing credits, but Neil, Marina, and Jane are representative to such an extent that they go unnamed in the film itself. To the Wonder, however, is also a contemporary story that is grounded, at least relative to Malick’s other films, in of-the-moment reality. Nearly every review I’ve read mentions Neil and Marina’s trips to the Sonic Drive-In (nostalgia as chain retail!), and Malick also recruits a number of locals for small speaking roles and takes his camera into poor communities. The film tries so hard to be about right now but Malick’s gauzy-nostalgia filter makes the place unrecognizable. We normal folk are all just poignant symbols, refracted through some mysterious subjectivity, awaiting illumination.

    Page 2: Seriously? A magical black man?

    Unless I missed something, there’s nothing in To the Wonder that identifies it as taking place in Oklahoma, specifically. When I referred to the carpenter as an ugly Southerner, it was shorthand for the people of red-state America, in general. Everyone in the film except Affleck, Kurylenko, and McAdams looks like my neighbors here in East Tennessee. Demographic data say we’re more likely to attend church, vote Republican, skip college, and be obese. I’m none of the above, but if I’m overly sensitive to how my part of the country is represented, it’s because locals can always sniff out inauthenticity. Malick is a Texas man, and I’m sure he has another good Texas film in him, but the clash of styles in To the Wonder—his crosscutting between ethereal, movie-star meditations on love and the realities of real Americans really struggling to be real—is condescending in ways that recall Forrest Gump and the recent critical dustup over Beasts of the Southern Wild.

    To the Wonder even has a magical negro. Bardem’s priest is suffering a crisis of faith (symbolized by an early shot of him standing outside a ramshackle house, unable to find the courage to knock). Like some Scrooge-by-way-of-Bresson, he’s visited in the film by “regular people” who reflect various aspects of his turmoil. An elderly black man presses his hand against the church’s stained glass and spouts homespun wisdom along the lines of, “Feel that heat? That’s not just the sun there—that’s the Spirit!” A young man with Down’s Syndrome, speaking with “the faith of a child,” offers simple words of encouragement. A prisoner kneels before the priest and recoils angrily at the sunlight in his eyes. A poor woman knocks on the door of his home, invades his private sanctuary, and aggressively pours out her bitter troubles on him. The scenes play out like a Flannery O’Connor story devoid of wit and irony. Juxtaposed against the Hollywood glamour of the central plotlines and starving for social context, the images are grotesque portraits that lack the decency to be self-critical.

    Page 3: Neil has a print of a renaissance painting on his wall?

    Neil isn’t the artistic type. Or, at least I assume he isn’t. Malick has edited Affleck’s performance down to little more than a hardened stare into the distance, so it’s hard to know for sure. But a later shot in the film confirms that it’s Marina who cuts the print out of a book and tacks it to Neil’s bedroom wall. There are generous ways to read this little detail. Perhaps Marina, a dancer, simply craves a touch of beauty in her life and wants to share that beauty with the man she loves. Given my general irritation with To the Wonder by that point, though, it came off to me, instead, as a smug attempt by Malick—again, à la Tarkovsky—to insert himself into a particular and particularly grand artistic tradition. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes at length about his use of Leonardo’s “Ginevra de’ Benci” in Mirror, praising the portrait for its timelessness and inscrutability. The woman in the painting is both “impossibly beautiful” and “repulsive, fiendish”:

    “It is impossible to find in her anything that we can definitely prefer, to single out any detail from the whole, to prefer any one, momentary impression to another, and make it our own, to achieve a balance in the way we look at the image presented to us. And so there opens up before us the possibility of interaction with infinity, for the great function of the artistic image is to be a kind of detector of infinity . . . towards which our reason and our feelings go soaring, with joyful, thrilling haste.

    And there, finally, is the rub. Tarkovsky’s discussion of “Ginevra de’ Benci” is part of his larger condemnation of symbolism. From three paragraphs later: “I am always sickened when an artist underpins his system of images with deliberate tendentiousness or ideology. I am against his allowing his methods to be discernable at all.” In the cinema, of course, an image is never just a symbol; it is always also the real thing(s) being photographed. Marina’s carpenter is also a particular man with a particular body and a particular face. The suburban tract houses are also particular objects with particular plastic qualities. Malick’s montage, however, actively negates this thing-ness, voiding images of their complexity. Tarkovsky’s “infinity” is nowhere to be found.

    I began daydreaming about a Malick film about ugly people during a high-angle shot of Kurylenko curled up topless on the bedroom floor. Critiquing a filmmaker for shooting beautiful images of beautiful women is a fool’s errand, as is critiquing any artist for failing to be Leonardo, but that shot made me hyperconscious of just how dependent Malick has become on the superficial appearance of his actors. Kurylenko, a former lingerie model and Bond girl, emotes shame and disappointment as best she can, I suppose, but it’s finally little more than another simple image of an impossibly beautiful woman. (For the sake of argument, imagine a topless, middle-aged, overweight local being posed in the same position, and imagine how that shot might affect the popular discussion of Malick’s “poetic imagery.”) In an era of directors like Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa, and Bruno Dumont who have thrown off the distinction between the transcendent and the everyday, the beautiful and the abject, To the Wonder is profane in ways Malick never could have intended.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    TIFF 2012 – Day 5

    The Master

    Dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson
    Because I’ve waited until September 21, the day of The Master‘s theatrical release, to write this capsule, and because hundreds of thousands of words have already been spilled on this film (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s review at MUBI nails my response almost exactly), I’ll just add two quick thoughts.

    First, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is truly a strange thing, and not just by Hollywood standards. The way he collapses his chest and distorts his face reminded me of Emmanuel Schotte in L’Humanite (Dumont, 1999) and also of Antonin Artaud’s disintegration from the striking beauty of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) to the toothless madman of his final years. Phoenix’s histrionic showdowns with Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t impress me nearly as much as his moment-to-moment embodiment of inarticulate panic. I’d like to see a Douglas Gordon-like version of this film built from nothing but long-distance shots of Phoenix walking.

    Second, like nearly everyone else I think the final hour or so of The Master is muddled and frustrating, but I love the final scene, when Freddie: a. finally gets laid, and b. uses the language of “The Cause” as a means of seduction. My main complaint with PT Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood (2007), is that the meticulous period detail is window dressing rather than anything like a real historical context, which is why I’ve never been convinced by readings of it as an analysis of a particular development in capitalism (or religion, for that matter).

    The Master, I’d argue, is about post-WWII America in a way that Blood is not about the early-20th century oil boom. Because it defeated a black-and-white evil in Hitler, we like to pretend the “greatest generation” wasn’t devastated — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, sexually — by the trauma of war. While hardly a perfect film, The Master is, I think, a curious study of the anxiety and desperation that characterized the lives of so many returning veterans and the loved ones they’d left behind. (I never would have guessed a PT Anderson movie would remind me of The Best Years of Our Lives [Wyler, 1946].) That final sex scene makes explicit what has been implied throughout the film. Cults, modern marketing and advertising, talk therapy, family, religion, sex, love — especially love — are all a kind of maddening seduction.

    Prediction: Someone is already writing an academic conference paper on The Master and jouissance.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

    Dir. by Marcelo Gomes
    First, a quick game of Six Degrees of Brazilian Cinema. Hermila Guedes, who plays Veronica here, also starred in Gomes’s first feature, Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (2005), which was co-written by Karim Ainouz. Guedes also starred in Ainouz’s breakthrough film, Love for Sale (2006). Ainouz was at TIFF last year with The Silver Cliff, a character study of an attractive, 30-something dentist who suffers an identity crisis after her husband, without warning, leaves her. Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is a character study of an attractive, 30-something doctor who suffers an identity crisis after her father is diagnosed with a vague critical condition. I mention all of that because Veronica is familiar in the worst ways. The Silver Cliff was one of my favorite undistributed films of 2011; Veronica, inevitably, suffers by comparison.

    Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is book-ended by what we eventually learn is Veronica’s vision of ecstasy (or something like that), a strangely prudish orgy on a sun-drenched beach. The opening image is interesting simply because it lacks any context: What’s not to like about beautiful, co-mingled naked bodies rolling in the sand and floating in shallow waters? When the vision returns at the end of the film, immediately after an unnecessarily long, faux-dramatic shot of Veronica being baptized by sea spray and a standard-issue “making a new start” montage, it’s reduced to a banality. Perhaps this is Gomes’s stab at transcendence? There’s just no magic in his mise-en-scene, and certainly nothing approaching the rapturous image of Alessandra Negrini dancing her ass off in The Silver Cliff. Even Gomes’s documentary-like footage of carnival is boring. Seeing this film 24 hours after Far from Vietnam made me wonder what Chris Marker could have made of those crowd scenes. Talk about paling in comparison.

    Birds

    Dir. by Gabriel Abrantes
    I saw the double bill of Birds and Viola because so many friends — really, everyone I spoke to who had seen any of Piñeiro’s work — told me to. So I went into the screening without having even read the program description, which in hindsight I regret. Birds is a lo-fi, 16mm mash-up of ideas, most of which flew by me (no pun intended) on a first viewing. Told in Greek and Creole, it adapts Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, turning it into an ironic commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Haiti. I hope to see Birds again before writing more about it. I suspect it will reward the effort.

    Viola

    Dir. by Matías Piñeiro
    The great discovery of TIFF 2012, Viola is a fantasia on love that dances between dreams, theatrical performances, and a kind of hyper-sensual reality. “When he was singing, I thought I truly loved him,” the title character says in the film’s closing line. It’s typical of Piñeiro’s fluid perspective — a wistful, past-tense comment on a joyful present. Had I not known Piñeiro is barely 30 years old, I might have guessed this was an “old man” movie. His acute attention to potential love (or infatuation) is almost nostalgic, as if that surplus of feeling is so profound because it was always so fleeting. There are three kisses in the entire film, each significant in its own way, but like the particular scenes from Shakespeare that he cuts and pastes into his dialog, all of Viola is charged with barely-suppressed desire. I don’t know how else to put it: this is a really horny movie.

    Except for a brief interlude in which we see Viola riding her bicycle through town, delivering packages for her and her boyfriend’s music and film bootlegging business, Piñeiro and cinematographer Fernando Lockett adhere to a unique visual strategy throughout the film. Each scene is built from only a handful of shots. Characters are typically framed in close-ups, usually from slightly above and with a very shallow, always-shifting depth of field. The camera moves often but in small and smooth gestures. And, most importantly, nearly all character movement happens along the z-axis.

    That’s all worth mentioning, I think, because the form of the film — or, more precisely, the video; Viola is the new standard by which I’ll judge other indie DV projects — is so integrated with its content. Piñeiro often builds scenes around three characters. In some cases all three participate in the conversation (my two favorites take place in a theater dressing room and in the back of a mini-van); at other times, two characters talk while a third remains just outside of the frame, either literally or metaphorically. Viola is a talky movie, and its eroticism (for lack of a better word) is in its language and in its shifting compositions of faces. Piñeiro seems to have found a new form to express the the classic love triangle. The best comparison I can think of is the cafe and tram scenes in Jose Luis Guerin‘s In the City of Sylvia (2007).

    According to Andrea Picard’s excellent program note, Viola is the second film (after 2010’s Rosalinda) in a proposed series “inspired by Gérard de Nerval’s Girls of Fire, an 1854 collection of short stories and sonnets each named for its eponymous heroine.” I can’t wait to see the rest.

    Wavelengths 4

    More to come in my full write-up for Senses of Cinema.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    Like Someone in Love

    Dir. by Abbas Kiarostami
    To begin: my favorite cut at TIFF. Soon after arriving at the home of a new client, a melancholic call girl makes small talk before strolling into his bedroom, undressing, crawling into bed, and falling asleep. Akiko (Rin Takanashi) appears finally to be at peace here, alone with Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly sociology professor who lives quietly with his old books, old photos, and old music. Takashi covers the young girl and lowers the lights, leaving her to her sleep. In a blinding cut, the softness of Akiko’s profile and the warm light of Takashi’s bedroom is wiped away by a trademark Kiarostami image: white clouds and blue skies in abstract motion, reflections against a car windshield. A subtle drone can be heard on the soundtrack. (Is this Kiarostami’s first-ever use of non-diegetic music?) It’s now the morning after, and Takashi is giving Akiko a ride to campus. Like magic, a whore and her John have been transformed in a blink into an anxious schoolgirl and her doting elder.

    Like Someone in Love shares with Kiarostami’s previous film, Certified Copy, a fascination with the fluidity of identity and the pleasures and dangers of role-playing, particularly within relationships. Akiko adapts as best she can to the pressures of her life, shifting moment to moment from prostitute to student to girlfriend to granddaughter (both real and imagined) as each new environment demands. Takashi, likewise, steps bravely (if foolishly) into the role of grandfather and protector when called upon to do so, and the film’s most dramatic turn comes when a real-life threat shatters, quite literally, the fantasy he’d written for himself. I’m hardly the first person to point out the fun irony of the film’s title: each character performs like someone in love, miming behaviors learned from sappy songs and movie melodramas, including God-knows-how-many Japanese “fallen woman” and geisha films.

    I’m beginning to think of Like Someone in Love as Kiarostami’s horror film. Blake Williams has compared it to Chantal Akerman’s Les rendez-vous d’Anna, and I think he’s right. There’s a sense in both films that deep  trauma — both historical and personal — has been papered over by convention and cultural artifice, but  threatens always to leak through. Akerman is more explicit about it: think of Anna’s late-night ride on a crowded train that is populated suddenly by ghosts of the Holocaust. Kiarostami works, instead, with suggestion, with vague allusions to “what happened” in the past. The final moments of the film are a shock but hardly a surprise.

    Far from Vietnam (1967)

    A collaborative effort between Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda, and Claude Lelouch, Far from Vietnam lays out its position in the opening minutes: America’s military involvement in Vietnam is another “war of the rich waged against revolutionary struggles intended to establish governments that do not benefit the rich.” The bulk of the film then supports that argument via montage, juxtaposing footage of American jets taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier with images of Vietnamese women building make-shift air raid shelters out of concrete. Crowds of World War II vets chant “Bomb Hanoi!” while a young man holds his child and chants “Naaaaa-palm! Naa! Naa! Naaaaa-palm!” before adding with a sigh, “Kids like this are being burned alive. Kids like this.” A television broadcast of General Westmoreland discussing the “accidents and mechanical failures” that have resulted in a few unfortunate civilian casualties is cut against footage of a mangled Vietnamese child receiving CPR.

    Far from Vietnam is agit-prop. It was made as agit-prop and still reads as agit-prop (still-relevant agit-prop, unfortunately). It’s also a masterpiece. If tens of thousands of YouTube activists have co-opted the techniques of films like this, none have matched Marker’s violent cutting. The final sequence is as frenzied, exhausting, and incisive as anything I’ve ever seen. The film is also smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge and address the most obvious counter-arguments. “It gets complicated,” Claude Ridder says during the long, scripted monologue that is Resnais’s contribution to the film. The Ridder character plays the role of the conflicted intellectual, echoing (and complicating) a later, more biting charge from the film — that American society enjoys “the luxury of having students who protest” while slaves and farmers fight. Godard plays the role of Godard, critiquing the problems of representation and the very form of Far from Vietnam. His segment opens with a closeup of a camera lens, which in the context of the film becomes one more violent machine in a mechanized war. It’s echoed nicely by Klein’s section, a moving profile of the widow of Norman Morrison, the American Quaker whose self-immolation outside the Pentagon became a media sensation.

    Far and away the best feature film I saw at TIFF. I just wish it were easier to see again. Kudos to the festival for programming this beautifully restored 35mm print.

    Tower

    Dir. by Kazik Radwanski
    Radwanski establishes the formal rules of Tower in the opening minutes of the film and then, to his credit, follows them to the letter until the closing shot. The first image is of Derek (Derek Bogart) digging a hole in the woods. The camera is inches away from his face, where it will remain throughout the film, only occasionally panning or cutting away to the people around him. Tower takes the trademark cinematographic style of the Dardennes’ The Son to its logical extreme, performing a disarmingly intimate study of a 34-year-old man who lives in the basement of his parents’ Toronto home.

    The key word there is “intimate.” Derek is an awkward, unmotivated, and self-defeating guy, but he’s socially competent. He dates someone throughout most of the film. He’s invited to parties. He has friendly, if superficial, relationships with his co-workers. The camera, in effect, gets closer to Derek than any of the people in his life do, and as a result the film emphasizes real physical proximity. Think for a minute about the number of people you touch meaningfully on any given day. A spouse or partner? A child? Films often make physical isolation a metaphor for emotional detachment; Tower is about the thing itself. Intimacy is felt profoundly in the film because it is so profoundly lacking.

    Tower is in many respects a classic “first film.” It has the whiff of autobiography — Derek toils away in his bedroom on a short animated film that he’s reluctant to share with the world — and I quickly realized the film would stop rather than end (although a friend’s reading of the final sequence gives it a neater ending than I’d first assumed). Also, because it’s a kind of gimmick film (the form of it, I mean), I’m not sure what to think of Radwanski or how to predict his next move. But I’m eager to see what he does next.

    Wavelengths 3

    Just a quick word on Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, which was my favorite film at TIFF. The word I keep using to describe it is “breathe.” It breathes, and in ways that seem to mark a significant evolution in Dorsky’s recent work. The camera is moving more, and it’s moving into open spaces, even capturing portraits and ending on a long shot of a ship out at sea. For the second year in a row Dorsky’s film literally blew a fuse in the Jackman Hall projection booth, and I couldn’t have been more happy about it because it gave me a second chance to look at what might be the most beautiful filmed image I’ve ever seen. It’s a shot of a flag billowing against a dark sky, which Dorsky filmed as a reflection in a window across the street. That image alone is staggering, but it becomes downright transcendent when, miraculously, a mannequin appears from shadows behind the window. And that’s when you notice the clouds passing in front of the sun. Shadows and light. Shadows and light. It’s like all of cinema reduced to a single instant.

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 1

    TIFF 2012 – Day 1

    I’m covering TIFF for Senses of Cinema again this year, so later this fall I’ll publish a much longer and more thoughtful report there, but I’m determined to capture initial thoughts on everything I see this week. I will, inevitably, fail in this effort.

    In Another Country

    Dir. by Hong Sang-soo
    There are two great pleasures in watching any film directed by Hong Sang-soo. The first, oddly enough, is suspense. I say “oddly” because he makes talky movies about love and jealousy and the pained confusions of life. Hong’s writing and his cinematographic style, however, drop us into a uniquely unpredictable world. “So these things really happen?” a young woman and wannabe screenwriter asks in the second shot of In Another Country, soon after being told some bad news about her family. Hong captures her and her mother in a medium shot for several seconds before a jump zoom reframes them. It’s the first of many long-duration, single-take scenes in which Hong’s camera pans, tilts, and zooms from a fixed position, constantly recontextualizing his characters. A Korean man flirts casually with a visiting French director (the first of three roles played by Isabelle Huppert) before the camera pulls back to reveal that his wife is also sitting with them. Huppert #2 sits on the beach, whispering “beautiful, beautiful” to the sea until the camera pulls back to reveal her lover, who enters, impossibly, from outside the frame in what we soon learn is a fantasy. Hong’s narrative path consists only of blind turns.

    The other pleasure is tied directly to the first. The long takes and narrative suspense allow room for spontaneous and surprising performances. This has always been the case with Hong but adding Huppert to the mix shakes up the now-familiar chemistry of his films. My favorite moment comes at the end of the second story, when Huppert alternately slaps her lover’s face and declares her love for him. Huppert has until that point played this character, this version of the visiting Frenchwoman, as a relatively meek and flighty suburbanite. But in her final confrontation, she becomes Isabelle Huppert — all unpredictable intensity — and momentarily breaks the film. It’s great fun to watch.

    Laurence Anyways

    Dir. by Xavier Dolan
    With another decade or two of life experience under his belt, I can only imagine what kind of filmmaker 23-year-old Xavier Dolan might become. By that I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise because Laurence Anyways is a very good film. Based on this and Heartbeats (2011) — I haven’t yet seen his debut, I Killed My Mother (2009) — Dolan already has a remarkable visual imagination and, more impressively, a mature-enough understanding of form to execute it on screen. Before watching Heartbeats for the first time last week I expected him to stumble occasionally into interesting images; I was surprised, instead, to find a very young director in control of the film.

    I have a weakness for movies like Laurence Anyways — melodramas that combine realistic performances with explosions of expressionism. At this point in his evolution, Dolan excels at the latter, particularly when he takes camp to ecstatic heights. He’s at his best when the soundtrack is thumping and when the images subsume, temporarily, the characters and become the drama. If the realistic portions of the film drag at times, there is at least a marked progress here from what I saw in Heartbeats. Dolan has a talent for using reaction shots — both in generating a range of emotions from his actors’ faces and cutting them effectively in sequence — so much so that it’s in danger of becoming a crutch. In this new film, though, he’s progressed beyond that and built some nice, complex moments.

    Argo

    Dir. by Ben Affleck
    I’m the wrong person to write about Argo. At this point I honestly can’t tell the difference between parodies of Hollywood dramas and the real deal. Argo is competently made and occasionally fun, and I’m still hopeful that Ben Affleck will prove himself to be an interesting director, but this film is an exercise in manufactured suspense weighed down by a humorless lead performance by Affleck. That it treats the Iranian revolution like the Star Wars bedsheets, rotary dial telephones, and thick mustaches that lend the film its period detail might be forgivable if the film weren’t so boring. But, again, I’m the wrong person for this film. It will be a critical hit, I’m sure.

    Tabu

    Dir. by Miguel Gomes
    I’ve been anticipating Tabu since last February when it premiered in Berlin, and that feeling of anticipation never quite left me throughout tonight’s screening. I’m not sure what I mean by that, exactly, except that I wanted this film to be more formally daring or more politically complex or more opaque than the relatively simple film Gomes made. Now this is damning with faint praise: I wish Tabu had been around in 1997 when I was taking a graduate seminar in post-colonial literature. Memory, history, guilt, privilege, religion, symbols of captivity, dreams of hairy monkeys (!), a black woman improving her literacy by reading Robinson Crusoe (!!) — it’s all here, rendered in beautiful shades of gray. The sound design alone makes the film fairly compelling from moment to moment (although I’ll own up to being bored by sections of part 1), but I wanted more.

  • 575 Castro St.

    575 Castro St.

    Dir. by Jenni Olson

    Rather than write about the “Voices Carry” shorts program, which was a jarring and poorly curated combination of Roy Andersson/Terry Gilliam wannabes and thoughtful documentaries, I want to focus, instead, on 575 Castro St., Jenni Olson’s cleverly conceived piece about Harvey Milk. The film is seven minutes long and consists of only four static shots, along with an opening title that contextualizes what we’re seeing:

    In February 1977, the San Francisco Gay Film Festival was born when a self-described “ragtag bunch of hippie fag” filmmakers got together and projected their Super 8 short films on a bed sheet. Many of these films explored gay themes, but (like many other experimental films of the era) many were simple light and motion studies. Most of these films passed through Harvey Milk’s Castro Camera Store at 575 Castro St. for processing.

    In 2008, the Castro Camera Store was recreated at that address for Gus Van Sant’s film MILK. This film was shot on that set.

    I’ve quoted the text in full because it’s as essential to Olson’s project as any of the shots are. It’s as essential as the soundtrack, which is an edited recording of the “In Case I’m Assassinated” tape that Milk made while seated alone at the desk in his store. The film works wonderfully on the most basic level — that is, as a haunted image. When I spoke to Olson after the screening, she told me how overwhelming it was to visit the set, to listen to Milk’s voice, and to know that it was here — right here — that he contemplated his imminent murder. She’s translated that experience well to her film, which is ghostly and deeply moving. But, of course, it wasn’t right here that Milk made his tape. This is a meticulously dressed set. That’s Sean Penn in the top-left corner (see the image above). It’s artifice. Make-believe. Harvey’s been gone for more than thirty years now.

    A few ways of looking at 575 Castro St.:

    As a history of film technology — I’d forgotten that Milk owned a camera shop, and didn’t realize he processed Super 8 there and played a role in the making (literally) of gay cinema. That made the experience of watching 575 Castro St. interesting in two ways: first, Olson’s film was projected not onto a bedsheet but onto a large screen in a stadium-seated multiplex; second, shot digitally, projected digitally, this “film” required no physical processing whatsoever. Olson didn’t need a shop like Harvey’s. Her medium is ones and zeroes rather than celluloid. You can even watch 575 Castro St. online.

    As a “simple light and motion” study — I wish I were familiar with the specific films Olson is alluding to in the text of the film’s opening title. A longtime collector, archivist, and critic of LGBT cinema, she is presumably offering her film as an homage to those who came before her and claiming her place in their line. Each of the four shots lasts a bit longer than the one that precedes it, and the final shot lasts for nearly three minutes, or just under half of the film’s total run time. It’s a beautiful image. Sunlight reflecting off of passing cars illuminates the wall and gives a curious movement to the static shot. I would have happily watched it for several minutes more.

    As tragedy tourism — One consequence of the extended shot lengths is that viewers are allowed the time to thoroughly and freely explore each image. As a result, we become consciously aware of the artificiality of it all. The opening shot could be from 1977, until we spot two late-model cars pass outside the storefront windows. The last shot could be vintage as well, until we recognize Mr. Penn. I have a theory that, because 21st-century Americans’ lives are marked by such comfort and politeness (generally speaking), we have a strange desire to associate ourselves, personally, with other people’s tragedy, as if doing so will grant us access to some hidden, distant experience and wisdom. Hence the Martin Luther King, Jr. museum at the Memphis hotel where he was gunned down and, more recently, our commitments to “never forget” the victims of 9/11, the Virigina Tech shootings, the Minnesota bridge collapse (remember that one?), and on and on. When the Harvey Milk museum is eventually built, somewhere in the Castro, Olson’s film will likely play on a constant loop there. Which isn’t to say it’s not genuinely moving. It is. But it’s also one step removed from the genuine. It’s a tourist destination.

    As a comment on the Hollywood biopic — I’ve bumped Milk to the top of my Netflix queue, although, truthfully, even as a great fan of Gus Van Sant, I don’t have high expectations for it. Traditional biopics — and especially Hollywood productions about recent historical figures — are hamstrung, I think, by a wealth of extratextual pressures. Large budgets demand large returns, and that economic pressure necessitates the transformation of a complex, messy life into a coherent and familiar narrative. (Steve McQueen’s Hunger is a recent and remarkable exception that proves the rule.) Hollywood biopics also tend to be marketed as acting showcases and “prestige” pictures, which forces audiences to view the film through a thin veil of celebrity. Plus, there’s always that nagging problem of verisimilitude. (I’ve always liked E. L. Doctorow’s response to critics of his “inaccurate” depiction of real historical figures in Ragtime: “I don’t know if these events actually happened, but I’m absolutely confident they’re true.”) Again, that photo of Sean Penn is key here. 575 Castro St. challenges every formal tendency of the Hollywood biopic — it’s short, slow, contemplative — but, in a way, it is a Hollywood biopic. On a practical level, an independent filmmaker like Olson would rarely have the resources to access and dress a location like this. And, presumably, those of us who are interested in a film like 575 Castro St. approach it with those same preconceptions about Penn’s performance and celebrity, even if we haven’t seen Milk. (Such is the nature of contemporary media saturation.) It’s a clever interrogation of the form, I think.

    As a document of progress — Finally, as uncanny and heartbreaking as it is to hear Harvey Milk confess his fears, there’s something celebratory (not quite the right word) about 575 Castro St., too. This is not a nostalgia piece or maudlin reveille. Even down to its digital form, it is very much a document of the present moment. When Milk mentions that, rather than rioting on news of his death, he would rather see “five, ten, a hundred, a thousand rise” and come out, we know that his dream is slowly but steadily becoming realized.

  • 2009 SFIFF Diary 2

    2009 SFIFF Diary 2

    Oblivion (Heddy Honigmann)

    Four years ago, on my first trip to the San Francisco International Film Festival, a couple friends and I had our liveliest debate after a screening of Ellen Perry’s The Fall of Fujimori, a documentary about Peru’s recent political history told mostly in the first person by Fujimori himself. On one side of the debate were those of us who felt the strength of the film was its subtle ironies, particularly its use of the contemporary context (the early days of Bush’s war on terror) to undermine the elected dictator’s self-aggrandizing justifications of his anti-democratic domestic policies. On the other side were those who argued that people in power are afforded ample opportunity to speak for themselves and that the filmmaker was morally obligated to condemn Fujimori outright. It was a fun — and heated — exchange. Heddy Honigmann’s latest film is a fascinating answer to that discussion. Oblivion is also told in the first person, though this time mostly by aging, blue-collar workers who, in several cases, literally served (whether food or drink or services) several past presidents and dictators, including Fujimori. I’ve only seen two Honigmann films, but in both I’ve been startled by the candor she elicits from her interview subjects. Here, her camera lingers awkwardly on a man who admits with some shame that after working for more than 30 years in one of Lima’s finest restaurants, he had never had an opportunity to take his wife there. A 60-year-old leather worker hides his face when he’s overcome by emotion while remembering all he lost during the days of runaway inflation. An adolescent shoeshine boy stares blankly into the camera and tells Honigmann, “No, I don’t have any dreams. No, I don’t have any happy memories.” She intercuts these stories with footage of young, self-taught jugglers and acrobats — homeless kids — who perform in busy intersections during red lights. They’re graceful and full of life, their performances have a startling and kinetic beauty. The juxtaposition is complex and loaded with ambiguities — a reflection, I suspect, of Honigmann’s personal relationship with her home country.

    Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

    Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

    To recycle a line I’ve used before, I’m often more interested in what a film does than what it’s about, and Bradshaw’s first narrative feature, Everything Strange and New, does quite a lot. The opening shot (pictured above) is a long, static take accompanied by an explosion of percussive, dissonant music — a self-conscious announcement that this is not another of those suburban stories about disaffected fathers and husbands. As it turns out, it is one of those films, but I’ll credit Bradshaw for his experiments with the genre, particularly his working-class lead character, Wayne, and for his often fascinating photography. One or two shots approach Bela Tarr territory (if Tarr shot a low-budget dv movie). Had the film ended 20 minutes sooner, I would have even applauded Bradshaw’s success at blending avant-garde techniques with more naturalistic storytelling. But a plot turn in the final act — and, more importantly, Bradshaw’s cynical handling of it — caused me to reevaluate everything that came before. Everything Strange and New is cruel to its characters in a way that comes off as smug rather than searching.

    35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2009)

    35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

    I’ve already written a bit about this film, but I want to quickly mention a scene that, to me, encapsulates all that distinguishes Denis’s take on the small, family drama from most other films in the genre. The morning after the “Nightshift,” Noé (Grégoire Colin) announces to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Joséphine (Mati Diop) that he’s leaving for a job in Gabon. Rather than dealing explicitly with the fallout from his decision, Denis cuts, instead, to a closeup of Lionel (Alex Descas), who’s walking home, presumably after a one-night-stand. She then cuts on an eyeline match to Joséphine climbing precariously out of their top-story window with a bottle of cleaner and towels in her hand. We are given, cinematically, the perspective of a father watching his child in danger. Or, at least that’s how I read the image the first time. On repeat viewings, there’s something much more interesting in Lionel’s expression: his intimate and hard-won understanding of his daughter’s behavior, his realization that she’s cleaning, which means that she’s upset, which means that it’s his job to go soothe and protect her. This plays out in the next few minutes in a wonderful scene in which their history is revealed through gestures. There’s text — Joséphine shaking out the bedsheets, looking through family photos, and arguing with her father — and there’s subtext — not only the loss of their mother/wife but also their deep familiarity with each other and with moments like this. (We can immediately imagine them having a hundred other similar confrontations — her cleaning, him stoic, with arms folded.) Characters in movies expertly express their feelings; real people, in my experience, typically don’t. Yet those of us in successful, long-term relationships manage to communicate anyway. 35 Shots of Rum is rare for managing to capture that peculiar kind of intimacy on screen. Ozu would approve.

    Zift (Javor Gardev)

    Zift (Javor Gardev)

    A Bulgarian film noir? Yes, please. Although a bit too stylized (in the Tarantino sense) for my tastes, Zift is a hell of a lot of fun and could probably find a decent audience in the States if a distributor packaged it properly. (First-time director Gardev must surely be taking studio offers for his next film as we speak.) The movie borrows liberally from classic Hollywood noirs, most notably a reenactment of Rita Hayworth’s iconic number in Gilda, and the black-and-white cinematography honors that legacy while updating the camera movements for contemporary audiences accustomed to a more frenetic pace. The two lead actors are fun discoveries, too, particularly Tanya Ilieva, who, frankly, is one of the sexiest women I’ve ever seen on screen. Zift was on my radar last September at TIFF, so I’m glad to have finally had a chance to catch up with it.

    Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

    Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

    Wild Field belongs to a class of films I’m drawn to at festivals. I rarely expect them to be great (and they rarely are), but I see them less for their stories or formal innovations than for the opportunity they provide to watch people in a part of the world I would never have a chance to see otherwise. (Tulpan is another recent example.) Wild Field is set in a remote region of the Kazakh steppes, where a young doctor lives Thoreau-like, tends to a handful of locals, and pines for his girlfriend back in civilization. Although I can’t find confirmation for this, I suspect this is an adaptation of a novel. I can imagine the protagonist’s inner life being a playhouse of ideas for a gifted writer, and the moments of magical realism that pockmark the film could flower beautifully in prose, but Kalatozishvili fails to find a cinematographic analogue, and the pacing of the film suffers for it. Still, I was perfectly content to study the landscape and faces for 90 minutes or so.

  • 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.

  • A Death in the Family (1957)

    I just found this intro to an essay I never wrote and thought the quotes were worth posting.

    Throughout A Death in the Family, Agee’s prose alternates between moments of simple and startlingly evocative description, as here, near the beginning of the novel . . .

    He took his shoes, a tie, a collar and collar buttons, and started from the room. He saw the rumpled bed. Well, he thought, I can do something for her. He put his things on the floor, smoothed the sheets, and punched the pillows. The sheets were still warm on her side. He drew the covers up to keep the warmth, then laid them open a few inches, so it would look inviting to get into. She’ll be glad of that, he thought, very well pleased with the looks of it. He gathered up his shoes, collar, tie and buttons, and made for the kitchen, taking special care as he passed the children’s door, which was slightly ajar.

    . . . and moments of unadorned psychology, as here, near the end:

    I am aware of what has happened, I am meeting it face to face, I am living through it. There had been, even, a kind of pride, a desolate kind of pleasure, in the feeling: I am carrying a heavier weight than I could have dreamed it possible for a human being to carry, yet I am living through it. It had of course occurred to her that this happens to many people, that it is very common, and she humbled and comforted herself in this thought. She thought: this is simply what living is; I never realized before what it is. She thought: now I am more nearly a grown member of the human race; bearing children, which had seemed so much, was just so much apprenticeship. She thought she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure; she loved and revered all those who had ever suffered, even those who had failed to endure. She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the might, grimness and tenderness of God.

    I suppose this would put Agee’s novel somewhere in that line from modernists like Stein, Hemingway, and W.C. Williams (“No ideas but in things”) to the mid-century The New Yorker school of Raymond Carver and his minimalist disciples. What distinguishes A Death in the Family from those others, though, is the directness of Agee’s analysis and the complexity of his renderings.

  • St. Nick (2009)

    St. Nick (2009)

    Dir. by David Lowery

    In the interest of full disclosure I should acknowledge first that, although we’ve never met face-to-face, David Lowery and I have been exchanging emails for about three years now. I’ve long admired David’s writing, and, at the risk of speaking for him, I think we both recognized in the other a shared sensibility. Even before seeing a single frame of David’s first feature, I was rooting for it, curious to see what his style would look like when stretched to 85 minutes, and hopeful for him as well, both personally and professionally. This perhaps leaves me unqualified to be a true critic of the film, though I’d like to think that if I didn’t care for St. Nick, I’d have the integrity to say so — if for no other reason than because I believe David would be genuinely curious to hear the unvarnished truth.

    I also want to mention up front that I hold an irrational bias against “child in peril” stories, so when I first read the plot synapsis — “The adventures of a brother and sister trying to survive, all on their own, out on the plains of Texas” — I worried that I’d be kept at some emotional or intellectual remove from the film. I’m happy to report that’s not the case.

    The opening shot of St. Nick lasts for just under 90 seconds, the first minute of which is from a fixed camera position. Along with occasional, diegetic noises, the soundtrack also includes manufactured sounds — an unnatural wind and a synthesized drone of some sort (you can hear it in the trailer above). In combination, the sound and image, especially after the camera begins unexpectedly to dolly back, announce that St. Nick, despite its “regional” setting and digital video aesthetic, is a self-consciously authored film in the formal sense — more “Euro art house” than “American indie” (to borrow two marketing cliches); more The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan, 1997) than Shotgun Stories (Nichols, 2007). Atom Egoyan is a surprising but useful point of comparison, I think. Lowery’s slow dollies over the wooden floorboards of the abandoned house where the brother and sister take refuge reads like a poignant homage to Ian Holm’s dream sequence in The Sweet Hereafter. There’s a sorrowful nostalgia in both shots.

    And there’s a sorrowful nostalgia in both films, too, which points to the most interesting aspect of St. Nick: it’s point of view, which, while attaching itself most closely to the brother’s perspective, always remains just outside of it, in the same way that great children’s books usually do. I have no complaints about the look of St. Nick — particularly in the interior shots, Lowery and cinematographer Clay Liford make images that belie their small budget — but I couldn’t help but wonder how it would all look in rich black-and-white film. In a recent blog post, Lowery acknowledges that Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955) is a source of inspiration, and I was also reminded of To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962), both in the basic plot setup and in its careful, childlike attention to things — crayons, rolls of string, discovered bones, makeshift tools, matchbooks, and other bits of miscellania that kids collect and transform imaginatively in play. I use the word “things” deliberately, because one reason St. Nick avoids being the typical “child in peril” film is by observing the thing-ness of the objects without reducing them to symbols. Symbols require a doubled perspective — that of the filmed world, where a cigar is just a cigar, and that of the author, who winks knowingly at the audience, thereby inviting us to feel superior. It’s a recipe for sentiment and pity, neither of which, thankfully, are of much interest to Lowery. (I’ll resist the urge to quote Tarkovsky yet again on this site, although I think he’s also a useful touchstone for discussing this film.)

    The best example is the way Lowery shoots the Texas plains. American “regional” cinema (again with the ironic scare quotes), especially that of the indie variety, has an unfortunate tendency to come off like tourism, in the sense that the camera is too often set up in front of objects that only reinforce our preexisting sense of the place. “The South,” for example, is often reduced to a now-vacant and picturesque block of what was once a small town’s main street before the interstate and Wal-Mart moved in. By comparison, I realized only a few minutes into St. Nick that I had no idea what the Texas plains looked like, especially not in winter (I assume), when the trees have dropped their leaves and taken on the aspect of a Tim Burton film or a Chris Van Allsburg book:

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    Lowery loves these trees, but there’s nothing explicitly symbolic in the way he shoots them. Rather, they’re true images of the particular place from which this particular story and its particular emotions sprung. And that, I think, is the source of the film’s lingering resonance. The nostalgia is Lowery’s, and because it’s true for him, it’s true for us as well.

    (Apologies if that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. The older I get, the less capable I am of articulating what it is I most admire about art.)

    In an effort to write something that sounds a bit more like a film review, let me add this. First, the performances Lowery gets out of Tucker and Savanna Sears are something special. There’s very little dialog in the film, but when they do speak, each listens intently and reacts naturally and without self-consciousness. Perhaps the best compliment I can give to the young actors and the crew is to say that I was often reminded of those great films Haskell Wexler shot in the late-’60s and ’70s, when he’d hold his camera at a distance and just observe the performers, always managing to catch them just as the mask dropped. I’m also grateful to St. Nick for sidestepping a couple potential pitfalls. When the boy attempts to make serious conversation (and does so in a way that sounds an awful lot like a character in a movie attempting to make serious conversation), the girl diffuses the moment like all little sisters would — with a smile and a fistfull of dirt. And when Barlow Jacobs (Kid from Shotgun Stories) shows up briefly as the reluctant authority figure, Lowery allows him to be a well-rounded and recognizably real character. I was dreading that scene from the moment it became inevitable, but each time I’ve watched St. Nick it’s been among my favorites.

  • The Unknown (1927)

    The Unknown (1927)

    Dir. Tod Browning

    The San Francisco Silent Film Festival‘s opening night screening of Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother (Wilde, 1927) was preceded by Broncho Billy’s Adventure (Anderson, 1911), a short Western about a gun-toting barkeep, his teenaged daughter, and the man she loves. Midway through the film, we see the young woman weeping over her lover, who is bedridden after being shot outside of the saloon. In the style typical of shorts from the 1910s, the actress’s performance is all wild-eyed, teeth-gnashing, and chest-thumping. It was too much for the San Francisco audience, who hooted and laughed throughout the scene. Behind me, I heard a confused four-year-old ask her mother the same question I was asking myself: “Why is this silly?”

    Twenty-four hours later, Guy Maddin introduced Tod Browning’s The Unknown with a succinct defense of melodrama:

    At night, when we sleep, in our dreams we are liberated. Our selves, our story selves, are liberated. Our ids are loosed upon our little dreamscapes and — if we’re lucky — we get to grab the person we lust after; we get to hit the person we hate; we get to wail and scream and moan all we want without anyone scolding us. And, also, we’re given access: little repressed fears and anxieties grow into monstrous terrors in our dreams and our true selves become so uninhibited. I use the word “uninhibited” pointedly because melodrama is always aligned as something sort of grotesque or a tasteless exaggeration of real life. If that’s all melodrama were, it would deserve that slag; but, I think a melodrama isn’t a true life exaggerated — that would be bogus — it’s true life uninhibited, just like our dreams.

    It was a perfect prologue to The Unknown, a collaboration between Browning and Lon Chaney that exists almost completely in uninhibited, symbolic space. Chaney plays Alonzo, an armless knife-thrower in a traveling carnival show, whose love for Nanon (a very young and incredibly sexy Joan Crawford) threatens to expose his carefully guarded secrets. Alonzo’s deformity is given a funhouse mirror reflection in the person of Malabar the Mighty (Norman Kerry), whose desire to hold Nanon in his arms repulses her. The specter of sexual abuse (at the hands of her father?) seeps into every corner of this film, which is overrun by tragedy, dread, heartache, and transgression.

    Or, at least, that was my experience of The Unknown on a second viewing — this time alone in my home with the soundtrack muted. (The film is available on disc 2 of TCM’s Lon Chaney Collection.) Despite his opening testament to the artistry of melodrama, Guy Maddin turned the San Francisco screening into a bit of a camp fest. The beautiful print we saw was on loan from the Cinematheque Francaise and had French intertitles, which Maddin then “untranslated” by reading aloud from the original American release. If you’re familiar with Maddin’s films or have heard him speak in other contexts, then you can surely imagine the effect of hearing him deliver lines like, “You are a riddle, Nanon. You shrink from me . . . yet you kiss my flowers when I am gone.” The sold out house never stopped laughing, it was so silly.

    Except the film isn’t silly at all. (And I’m sure Maddin would agree). Watching it alone, in silence, I was struck by images like this:

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    Melodrama is a matter of narrative and performance style, of course, but, particularly in silent cinema, the core of melodrama is mise-en-scene. The exaggerated emotion in this shot is not generated by plot intrigues but by the deep focus photography (that open balcony in the background), the clash of patterns in the set decoration and costumes (the checkered tablecloth, striped blouse, and ornate headscarf), and most importantly the staging of the two actors — Chaney’s intimate smile, Crawford’s stiff shoulders and the curve of her neck, and the unnatural light that illuminates Nanon’s body.

    Nanon’s Redemption

    The turning point of The Unknown comes when Alonzo flees the carnival to have a ghastly operation, which, unfortunately for him, allows time for Nanon and Malabar to become better acquainted. After Alonzo decides to leave, Browning cuts to the following shot of Nanon, with Malabar’s flowers in hand, descending a flight of stairs. The strange, textured camera effect Browning uses here heightens the unreality of the scene, as if we’ve entered Alonzo’s subjectivity. Notice, again, the curve of Crawford’s neck. Browning has a bit of a fetish, I think. Notice, also, the empty bed in the foreground.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The first three shots are a standard progression: extreme long, long, medium. Then Nanon slowly turns, and on an eyeline match we enter a perspective just outside of her point of view. Malabar the Mighty has returned. (Is it just me or does Norman Kerry look exactly like Kevin Kline here?)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    And then the close-up, with tears poised to drop. Just a ridiculously beautiful image.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    Finally, Nanon’s redemption. So much emotion packed into a single, simple movement.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    Nope. It’s not silly at all.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

  • Four Men and a Prayer (1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (1938)

    Dir. by John Ford

    The following are screen captures from two related sequences in John Ford’s Four Men and a Prayer, a remarkable (and remarkably strange) film about imperialism, globalization, and the military industrial complex that predates America’s involvement in World War II by three years. I could have just as easily ended that sentence with the phrases “that predates Eisenhower’s farewell address by more than two decades” or “that predates the Iran-Contra scandal by nearly fifty years.” The film is about four British sons who in their efforts to redeem the reputation of their murdered father uncover an elaborate plot by otherwise respectable businessmen to sell arms to anyone with the money to pay, even when that means supplying both sides of a revolutionary struggle in South America.

    Sequence 1

    Loretta Young plays Lynn Cherrington, the carefree American lover of one of the sons, who, over the course of the film, discovers that her father is president — in title, at least — of the arms manufacturer that profits from the war in “Marlanda, an island kingdom far off the beaten track, hurled into revolt by the machinations of a munitions sydicate,” or so the fictional country is described in an inter-title. Note the preposition there. War is induced by the profiteers.

    In sequence 1, Ford offers a montage of beautiful portraits of the revolutionaries, who all cling tightly to the weapons that might bring them freedom. The close-up of Young establishes the point of view here: naive, privileged, romantic. She’s a tourist. These are six consecutive shots, accompanied only by the voice of the revolution’s leader, who says of the weapons: “With these I shall liberate my unfortunate people. They shall be happy once more. Liberty!”

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Sequence 2

    Moments later the revolutionaries discover their weapons are faulty, and the entire group is gunned down — again with Loretta Young looking on. I’ve trimmed a few shots from this sequence but what I’ve included is representative of Ford’s montage.

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    Four Men and a Prayer (Ford, 1938)

    One of the few bits of writing about this film I could find online makes the fairly obvious point that Four Men and a Prayer reenacts imperialism both in its representation of other cultures — Ford’s vision of the Other is only slightly more nuanced than Spielberg’s in Temple of Doom — and in its basic plot construction: the story, after all, posits that the real moral issue of the film is whether four incredibly wealthy British men can restore their father’s honor.

    But, good god, these two sequences are like something from Godard’s Week End — a genuinely shocking and disorienting experience that short-circuits every plot contrivance. As the characters saunter their way through the remainder of their adventure over the next 30 minutes, every move is infected with cynicism and bile.

  • Lee Isaac Chung: The Storm of Progress

    Lee Isaac Chung: The Storm of Progress

    This interview was originally published at Sojourners.

    * * *

    In early 1940, just months before he would die while fleeing the Gestapo in Spain, the Jew­ish-German literary critic Walter Benjamin assembled his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a brief collection of observations that is equal parts theology and Marxist analysis. In Thesis IX, he studies Paul Klee’s modernist painting “Angelus Novus” and finds in it a usable metaphor for history. Klee’s work depicts a magnificent, expressionist angel whose face is turned toward the past. His mouth is agape and his wings are fully extended as he concentrates his gaze on the ever-growing catastrophe behind him. The angel wishes to pause so that he might revive and redeem human history, but “a storm is blowing from Paradise.” “This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” Benjamin concludes, “This storm is what we call progress.”

    Lee Isaac Chung alludes to “Angelus Novus” when describing his first feature-length film, Munyurangabo, a poetic and beautifully humane snapshot of Rwanda as it exists today, nearly a decade and a half after the genocide. The film, which premiered in May 2007 at the Cannes Film Festival and has since played at fests in Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, and elsewhere, adopts a view of “progress” similar to Benjamin’s. “One audience member in Berlin challenged us for ending the movie on a note of hopefulness,” Chung says. “But it’s not a naive or simple hope. Any progress made in Rwanda will come from the hard work of reconciliation combined with a wide-eyed acknowledgment of the past. That’s why we conceived of this simple story of two young boys. Munyurangabo is, in part, about how memory shapes the formation of identity—personal, cultural, and national—and how that identity shapes our behavior.”

    The heroes of Chung’s film are ‘Ngabo (short for Munyur­angabo, played by Jeff Ruta­gengwa) and Sangwa (Eric Ndo­r­un­kundiye), teen­age boys who became friends while working as porters in a market in Kigali. At the start of the film, they set off together on a journey, stopping first at the remote village that Sangwa had fled three years earlier. They intend to stay for only a few hours, but Sangwa’s reunion with his mother and father is promising, and the glimpse of domestic happiness it offers leaves him increasingly unnerved about the real purpose of their trip: to avenge the murder of ‘Ngabo’s father by finding and killing the man responsible. “I heard so many similar stories from children their age,” Chung says. “Eric’s father was killed in the genocide, and Jeff’s went missing as well. Like so many of the orphans who can be found in the ghettoes of Kigali, they’ve both really struggled. The film is a composite of their stories and others like them.”

    CHUNG GAINED access to the orphans of Kigali through his association with Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a relief organization that provides Christian discipleship training and ministers to children, widows, and people suffering the effects of HIV/AIDS. “Soon after we got married, my wife decided that she wanted to spend another summer in Rwanda. She’d volunteered with YWAM several times already and was eager to return. Rather than continue agonizing over the stalled plans for my first big film, I decided, instead, to just drop it completely and go with her.” Taking with him two friends from college and a camera he’d bought on eBay, Chung set out to teach filmmaking. “I’d taught some classes as a graduate assistant in film school and figured this was something unique I could offer.”

    Chung’s goal was to make a film there—in Rwanda, with a small budget and a small crew made up of orphans and others he’d met in Kigali. “After looking at the types of films that were coming out of Rwanda and finding no narrative films that Rwandans could claim as their own, it became clear to us that we should treat this project seriously with the goal that it could be a Rwandan film, primarily for their audience.” He and one of his partners, Samuel Anderson, composed a treatment for the film but never fully scripted it, choosing instead to improvise the dialog during rehearsals with their cast of first-time actors. As the project evolved, Chung, Anderson, and their other partner, Jenny Lund, also decided to shoot the movie on film, a relatively risky and expensive proposition in this age of cheap, high-quality digital video. “It just kept getting bigger,” Chung laughs. “Our ambition for the production, I mean. The more we talked, the more we wanted it to look a certain way. We needed film.”

    Presumably, Munyurangabo’s in­clusion in the lineups of so many prestigious festivals can be attributed in part to Chung’s photography. It is a strikingly beautiful film. And, particularly for a first-time director, Chung demonstrates a genuine talent for an essential aspect of his craft: He knows where to put the camera. When I ask about my favorite shot in the film, a simple image of Sangwa’s and ‘Ngabo’s faces in profile, he thanks me for the compliment but seems reticent to talk at length about the scene. “I knew what shots would come before it and what would come after it, and I knew I needed to break the rhythm with a quieter moment.” Chung’s humility can actually be felt in the image itself. Like the filmmakers to whom he owes the greatest debt—Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne—Chung has a sensitive curiosity about the human face, and the style of his film invites viewers to reflect upon their shared dignity rather than to simply pass judgment, as films so often do.

    With some embarrassment, Chung admits another reason his film has found an audience at international festivals: “Several programmers have told me the film isn’t what they expected it to be.”

    “Which is what, exactly?” I ask.

    “I guess they expected another film about white guilt.”

    We both laugh.

    CHUNG WAS BORN in rural Arkansas, where his Korean father had moved to raise his children and establish a farm. “I guess it isn’t the typical immigrant story,” he admits. “Most leave the land in order to find economic opportunity in the city, but my father had other ideas.” After getting his first glimpse of New York City as a teenager, Chung followed his older sister to Yale, where he pursued his interests in politics and studied biology. His long-term plans changed, however, after he and a group of friends began watching foreign and classic art films together. Instead of medical school, Chung moved to Salt Lake City to study film at the University of Utah.

    “Munyurangabo is a tricky movie for the festivals to categorize,” he continues. “It’s usually programmed as an African film, and I guess it is in many respects. In fact, it’s the first narrative feature film ever made in the Kinyarwanda language. But I’m an American, obviously, and so that complicates things.” Recently, several Hollywood productions have taken on the subject of African genocide, including the Oscar-nominated films Hotel Rwanda and The Last King of Scotland, the latter of which reimagines the murderous dictatorship of Idi Amin through the eyes of a young white European doctor. The film adopts that perspective to a fault, I think, turning the people of Uganda into incomprehensible and exotic curiosities. As a result, Scotland’s most affecting moments appeal to sentiments like pity and horror—and to our shared guilt—but at the expense of lasting understanding or empathy.

    What distinguishes Munyuran­gabo from the slew of “white guilt” films is best typified by a scene in which Sangwa, hoping to regain his father’s respect, joins his neighbors in the fields. Chung’s camera watches from a distance as they work together to till the hard, packed soil. Sangwa’s movements are labored and unnatural; his father raises and drops his hoe with a practiced grace. (“I joke that what Akira Kurosawa did for rain-soaked samurai battles, I want to do for farming scenes.”) Were it not for Chung’s tasteful use of traditional Rwandan music and several seconds of slow motion, the scene could be mistaken for documentary footage. Jean Marie Nkurikiyinka (the father) really is a farmer, Ndorunkundiye (Sangwa) really has raised himself on the streets of Kigali, and, regardless of the fact that Chung’s story is manufactured, all that real human history and experience is captured there in his images of bodies in motion. “Here,” the father says, “like this,” demonstrating for his son the proper technique. And with that unexpected moment of encouragement, the possibility of hope is suddenly made tangible.

    INSPIRED BY A Christian survivor of the genocide who once quoted the passage to him, Chung uses Isaiah 51:19-20 as an epigraph for the film: “These double calamities have come upon you; Who can comfort you? Ruin and destruction, famine and sword; Who can console you? Your sons have fainted. They lie at the head of every street, like antelope caught in a net. They are filled with the wrath of the Lord and the rebuke of your God.”

    “Is this an Old Testament film or a New Testament film?” I ask.

    After a slight pause, Chung answers: “I have great respect for people who put all of their hope in a future in which the world has been redeemed and made perfect. I have a faith in that future, too. But we’re here now, and the world is far from perfect, and we’re required to work. It’s complicated. It’s like that storm in ‘Angelus Novus.’ Are you familiar with it?”

  • The Iron Horse (1924)

    The Iron Horse (1924)

    Dir. by John Ford

    According to Tag Gallagher’s biography, John Ford: The Man and His Films, only five of the fifty or so films Ford made between 1918 and 1924 have survived; two of them, Just Pals (1920) and The Iron Horse (1924), are included in the Ford at Fox DVD collection. Just Pals is a fun little romp starring Buck Jones as a charming ne’er-do-well who falls in love with the local school teacher, befriends a young runaway, thwarts a crime, and generally makes trouble for himself and for others.

    The Iron Horse is a much more ambitious and fascinating picture. The story revolves around the laying of the first transcontinental railroad, complete with a final-reel reenactment of the driving of the Golden Rail at Promontory Summit, Utah, that features the actual locomotives that first met there in 1869. (We know they’re the actual locomotives thanks to a series of title cards that notify viewers of the filmmakers’ every effort to achieve historical authenticity.) At nearly 150 minutes, The Iron Horse was a massive production, employing thousands of extras, builders, cooks, rail layers, Indians, cavalrymen, cattle, and horses, and spawning countless legends. Gallagher quotes assistant Lefty Hough: “The Ford outfit was the roughest goddamdest outfit you ever saw, from the director on downward. Ford and his brother, Eddie O’Fearna, were fighting all the time.” Ford remembered the production as “births, deaths, marriages, and all in the icy cold.” The Iron Horse went on to gross more than $2 million and became the first Fox film to play on Broadway.

    Along with simply being a tremendous pleasure to watch, The Iron Horse offers a fascinating peek into the evolution of the Hollywood film style. By 1924 — and with four dozen films under his belt — Ford already understood the mechanics of what would eventually be called standard continuity editing, and so, for me, the most interesting moments in the early films are when something breaks, as in the following sequence.

    The Establishing Shots

    Shot 1 lasts for only a few seconds, giving us too little time to get our bearings or to pick out any recognizable faces (there aren’t any, actually). What are we looking at, exactly? And from where are we looking?

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    In the next four shots, none of the eyelines match. The two men in the first two shots are seated together, though you’d never know it from Ford’s montage, and he’s also made it impossible for us to situate them at any particular spot in the saloon.

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The bad guy enters, and a group of men turn to look at him. But where are they in the room? (Go back to shot 1 to find them.) And who are these guys? So far, the two men seated together are the only people in the room who appear elsewhere in the film.

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The Reestablishing Shots

    Now that most of the characters have made their appearance, Ford begins to map out the room. Bad guy mosies toward the bar . . .

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Bartenders remove the mirror . . .

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    And now we’re back to that odd position from shot 1. It turns out that we’re standing behind the bar. In this cut, Ford essentially gives us an eyeline match from the p.o.v. of the mirrorless wall! This time, however, we’re also allowed to figure out where everyone is standing.

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    And in case we’ve lost our bearings, Ford jumps 180 degress to the other side of the room and cuts together three medium shots from one end of the bar:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    . . . and then from the other end of the bar:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    . . . and then, finally, from the middle of the bar:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The Crosscut

    Ah, our beautiful young lovers, George O’Brien and Madge Bellamy. In most respects this is standard, silent-era, melodramatic cross-cutting. After introducing a mysterious batch of villains, Ford cuts to our hero, who relents to his love’s request that he lay down his guns. O’Brien even strikes his best Valentino pose, staring off meaningfully into the distance. (Between this film and Ford’s Three Bad Men (1926), George O’Brien is fast becoming one of my favorite leading men of the silent era.)

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    But what I love are the moments when life interrupts the theatrical staging, as when Bellamy bites her lower lip, an incredibly sexy and unexpected rupture of silent film convention:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Or the way she takes his hand in hers and brings it to rest, very slowly, on her . . . dress. Beautiful!

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The Showdown

    And finally our hero arrives at the saloon, walking straight into the trap:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Which springs all of the mysterious men into action:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Leaving only our hero, who is defenseless, and our central villains, the fop and the sadistic mastermind:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    All of the strange editing has served to focus the emotional energy of the sequence onto this one point: the showdown between the chaste Fordian hero, who is protected on all sides by an amorphous social structure, and the foppish villain. That the ensuing fist fight turns out as something of a draw is irrelevant. The hero wins the battle before the first fist is thrown.

  • There Will Be Blood (2007)

    There Will Be Blood (2007)

    Dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson

    Dan Sallitt and Zach Campbell have already done the lion’s share of the work on There Will Be Blood, so go read them first. I want to add a few rambling thoughts while they’re still fresh, though. Like nearly everyone else, apparently, I was overwhelmed by the sheer force of will in Anderson’s filmmaking but am still unsure of what to make of it, exactly.

    Dan’s most helpful insight is: “every time Anderson has a chance to situate Plainview in a social context, he seems not even to notice the opportunity.” I was reminded of that observation when a friend asked what the church congregation represents in the film. I’m tempted to say it doesn’t represent anything at all. And neither does the oil industry, really. Zach, you are being just Lukacsian enough, I think. History, for Anderson, is nothing more than Lukacs’s “collection of curiosities and oddities.” What does Jameson call it? “Pastiche”? “Blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs”? By deliberately erasing all social context from the film — where are the reaction shots? where are the transactions, organizations, and relationships? — Anderson has turned history into a fairy tale and has undermined every potential opportunity to investigate social institutions like capitalism and religion. As a result, most of the questions begged by the film are made irrelevant. Is Plainview’s acquisition of wealth amoral? Is Sunday a charlatan? Are preachers and tycoons the scourge of America or a mixed blessing? Anderson’s understanding of capital and faith are so anemic as to make words like “morality,” “greed,” and “belief” totally useless as a point of inquiry here.

    So what is Anderson interested in? I’m not sure if he knows, but near as I can tell he’s interested in Daniel Plainview. Dan seems to accept at face value Plainview’s confession at the end of the film that he never cared for his son, H.W., but I’m not so sure. Anderson intercuts a really strange flashback after their final argument in which Plainview remembers — fondly, by all appearances — a day when he happily (if awkwardly) played with H.W. and the young Mary. It’s the only time, as I recall, that we fully enter his subjectivity. I don’t doubt that Plainview recognized and exploited the advantage of having a child along with him when he met with landowners (maybe it occurred to him only after his competitor mentioned it in passing), but I actually think he cared for the boy, just as he genuinely cared for Henry before discovering him to be an imposter. (Why else to include the Henry subplot at all, other than to create a parallelism of sorts?) Plainview is the main focus of the film, and he’s what? A misanthrope who takes rejection particularly bad? A boogey man? A guy who didn’t get enough hugs as a child?

    If this film is a character piece — and I think it’s more that than anything else — then Anderson needs to give us a person to work with. I’m from the “contemplative” school of film criticism. I tend to think that any camera fixated wisely enough and patiently enough on any human face will eventually reveal, with a kind of Bazinian realism, a depth of character that’s impossible to achieve with even the best dramaturgy. (In Devotional Cinema, Nathaniel Dorsky writes: “The total genius of your hand is more profound than anything you could have calculated with your intellect. One’s hand is a devotional object.”) And, strangely enough, that’s where the greatest strengths of There Will Be Blood lie — the two hours of screen time enjoyed by Daniel Day-Lewis, whose acting is stagey and theatrical in an Elia Kazan-ish way but whose sunburned face, stooped shoulders, and bum knee give Plainview more life than he maybe deserves.

    But Anderson isn’t a contemplative filmmaker. He’s downright bombastic — never happier than when emotions are red-lined, music a-blaring, camera swinging at a frenzy. (He’s well on his way to becoming the Michael Bay of the art house, in fact. P.T.A.: “Okay, guys, we’re gonna dolly forward nice and steady on this one.” Grips: “No shit. Really? [sigh]”) Anderson is always anticipating the next big show — Sunday’s wondrous healing, Plainview’s slapfight, the great and cynical baptism scene, Sunday’s leap across the dining room table, and, of course, the murders. To keep us primed, the soundtrack feeds us a steady stream of dissonance, fear, and loathing. Anderson is so good at those scenes, so gifted as a manipulator of our emotions and allegiances, that we overlook the banality and senselessness of the drama. What a fascinating mess of a movie.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 8

    2007 TIFF Day 8

    I’ve liked, to varying degrees, each of the films in Gus Van Sant’s “post-Bela Tarr epiphany” trilogy. Following his brief stint in Hollywood in the mid- to late-’90s, Van Sant has taken a refreshingly reckless approach toward film form. Under the spell of the mad Hungarian but also those guys from Taiwan and Tehran (Hou and Kiarostami, in particular), his films are unlike anything else coming out of the States. And God bless him for it. When I watch these movies, I feel like a lucky volunteer in one of Van Sant’s mad experiments. “Yeah, Gus,” I think to myself, “let’s see what happens when, during a five-minute tracking shot, we shift suddenly into slow motion. Let’s meld unironically beautiful music with images of teenage life just to see what kind of frisson we can generate. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walking silently through a desert for minutes at a time? I’m with you. Let’s go.”

    Any ambivalence I’ve felt toward Van Sant has usually been a by-product of his subject matter. Paranoid Park picks up exactly where the trilogy left off: at a moment of sudden violence. This time it’s an accidental death resulting from a run-of-the-mill act of adolescent rebellion. As was the case with Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, I’m not sure why Van Sant is so fixated on violence, and I’m not totally convinced that he has anything particularly meaningful to teach us about it. When she introduced Une vieille maitresse, Catherine Breillat told us she was interested in “the kind of Romance that isn’t pink and flowery but deep red and black and always close to death” (I’m paraphrasing), and I see Van Sant operating in a similar realm. He’s become our Ann Radcliffe, trading out her castle in the Pyrenees for a skate park in Portland but with the same goal in mind: the Sublime. Paranoid Park is my new favorite of Van Sant’s films, but I remain ambivalent about his subject matter. One last thing: seeing Christopher Doyle’s 4:3 compositions projected on a three-story screen at the ScotiaBank Theatre was a real treat and confirmed my thoughts about Reygadas.

    Help Me Eros gave me everything I’d expected of it: an amusing and sympathetic, low-key performance from writer/director Lee Kang-sheng; long, mostly-silent, static takes; inspired design; out-of-left-field musical numbers; and some good old-fashioned transgression. Lee plays a Bible-quoting day trader who went bust during Taiwan’s economic downturn and now spends his time smoking home-grown marijuana, talking to a counselor at a suicide helpline, and flirting with the girls at the betel nut stall below his apartment. Lee told us after the screening that much of the film is autobiographical — that in order to keep himself occupied between films, he’d made and lost a great deal of wealth in the market, and that the one time he called a helpline he got a busy signal. “I wondered how many other people in Taiwan were suffering,” he said. With Tsai Ming-liang acting as producer and production designer, it’s impossible to not speculate about his influence on the development of the film. But I suspect their partnership is a generous one, and Help Me Eros makes me think that Lee should, perhaps, be considered more seriously as a co-auteur of Tsai’s recent films. Help Me Eros fits comfortably alongside their other treatments of contemporary alienation and is distinguished, mostly, by its final image, which is more symbol-heavy and explicitly religious than anything we’ve seen from Tsai. The film drags a bit in the final act, but, all in all, it’s a solid and interesting effort.

    A quick story: While waiting in line for Naissance des pieuvres, I met a 70-year-old woman from Toronto who was seeing 50 films at the festival. She used to see even more, apparently, but her children made her swear off Midnight Madness. When I asked her what film she’d really liked, she said, “Oh, I loved Mongol. Talk about violence. That guy makes Tarrantino look like a pussy!” I was sipping from a bottle of water at the time and nearly died. Anyway, she and I had a conversation I’ve had many times over the years. When I mentioned how much I’d liked Secret Sunshine and Flight of the Red Balloon, she told me, “I traded those tickets away. I heard they were depressing.” I think what she actually meant was that they were “slow, boring, and/or sad.” They’re not, but that’s beside the point.

    I blame Bergman. When he came to prominence in the States in the late-1950s his films contributed greatly to the creation of a certain stereotype in the popular imagination: the Important Art Film — a dour, high-minded, angst-ridden thing that must be consumed like bitter medicine. (I hate to think of all the people over the years who have rented The Seventh Seal because of its reputation and never made a second trip back to the Foreign Film aisle.) The influence of that stereotype can still be felt at today’s festivals, both in the lines, where even devoted film buffs dismiss movies that might fit the mold, and in the films themselves.

    This is all a long and unfair preamble to Nanouk Leopold’s finely-acted family drama, Wolfsbergen. It’s about an aged man who has decided that he is tired of life and eager to be reunited with his long-dead wife. He informs his family that he will soon die, and the film follows the ripples of his decision through the lives of his children and grandchildren. They are a dysfunctional lot, to say the least, but had Leopold given each character the same time and careful attention, all could have been interesting enough to carry a film on their own, I think. Instead, some are barely fleshed out at all, and I found myself becoming increasingly curious about the people who were too often left off screen. Wolfsbergen wears the old stereotype well, and even I was a tad depressed by it. The final scene is a good one, though — good enough that I was forced to reevaluate my response to the film as a whole. And one last note about film aspect ratios: I have no idea why this film was shot in Cinemascope. Leopold often divides her wide frame in half and pushes characters to one side. This, I guess, mimics their alienation from one another, but too often she seems unsure about how to fill the image, and so we end up looking at out-of-focus walls and doorways. I wonder if the aspect ratio was chosen to accommodate the last shot, which does put ‘Scope to great use?

    The less I say about L’Amour Cache, the better. I programmed it because Isabelle Hupert is one of the few actors I treat as an auteur, but she is wasted here. This film is a disaster. In fact, it might be the first film I’ve ever seen that gets demonstrably worse with each and every cut. Poorly written, poorly directed, and incompetently edited. I never thought I’d see a boom mike in a TIFF film from a First World country.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 7

    2007 TIFF Day 7

    By the midpoint of Une vieille maitresse I already knew that Catherine Breillat would be my next project. I’ve always been a bit intimidated by her reputation, I think, which is why I chose this film to be my introduction to her work. A period piece reputed to be relatively tame by Breillat’s standards, Une vieille maitresse proved to be one of my great surprises at the festival. The film is built around a classic love triangle. The rakish Ryno de Marigny is soon to wed Hermangarde, a precious young aristocrat, and, so, has agreed to abandon his ten-year affair with Vellini, a stereotypically hot-blooded, dark-haired Spaniard. In this battle between a Man, his Madonna, and his Whore (and the archetypes were surely part of the appeal for Breillat), there’s a kind of dialectic created between the public sphere of mannered, polite society and the private places where desire and emotion are freed. Much of the film’s action occurs in a flashback, as Marigny recounts his relationship with Vellini to Hermangarde’s grandmother, a disarmingly frank “18th century woman” (as she describes herself) who acts as his confessor. The posh parlor where Marigny tells his tale exists somewhere between the two spheres of conflict, and Breillat seems as interested in the seductions that occur there as she does with anything that happens in Marigny’s bedroom.

    Which isn’t to say that the goings-on between the rake and his women are anything less than fascinating. Une vieille maitresse features a show-stopper of a sex scene, a verbal and physical battle between Marigny and Vellini that leaves them both exhausted and satisfied — temporarily, at least. Mid-coitus, Vellini begins to tease Marigny about his most recent lover, a woman he admits is bumbling and cold in the bedroom. The power struggle between them is brilliant to watch, as each tests and transgresses the other’s limits. It probably goes without saying that Asia Argento steals every scene, but Breillat’s staging of their bodies, more than anything else, is what has provoked my curiosity about her work.

    Redacted. In March 2006, a small band of American soldiers raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl then murdered the child and her family in order to cover up their crime. If you’re imagination is so withered that, after reading that sentence, you’re unable to extrapolate from it the many and various tragedies it contains, maybe you should go see Redacted. Brian De Palma seems to think it will help. (If irony and righteous anger are good enough for De Palma, they’re good enough for me.)

    Dans la ville de Sylvie* opens with a long, static medium shot of the film’s nameless protagonist sitting alone on his bed, staring intently into the distance. By the end of the seventh day of TIFF, I’d become accustomed to shots like this. The long, static take has come to define an aesthetic that’s en vogue at international festivals these days. (I wonder if it isn’t becoming a new “Tradition of Quality,” in fact.) But there was something slightly different about this particular image, because the character was clearly thinking intently as well. Rather than being a purely formal experience, another moment of cinematic contemplation, this was also narrative. And, sure enough, after several minutes of staring silently, the protagonist (director Jose Luis Guerin calls him “the dreamer”) completes his thought, takes up his pencil, and scribbles into his notebook. He’s a poet and artist, we learn, and he’s recently arrived in Strasbourg, the French town where, six years earlier, he’d met a young student named Sylvie.

    I knew I’d found my favorite film of the festival when, two or three minutes into an early sequence at a streetside cafe, it became apparent that we wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. Guerin was having too much fun with that old cinematic war horse, the Kuleshov Effect, forcing his audience into the perspective of “the dreamer” and, in the process, making one of those films sure to pique the curiosity (and possibly the outrage) of the Mulveyites: a film about men looking at women. It sounds so simple (and simple-minded, even) now that I’ve described Sylvie, but the film is so perfectly executed that, even on a second viewing, I found myself completely seduced by it. And I use the word “seduced” quite deliberately. There’s no denying the male, heteronormative gaze adopted by Guerin’s camera, and I worry that I’m too quick to defend a film that has given me only what the cinema always gives me: free license to oggle women. But something curious happens over the course of Sylvie. By the final sequence, which echoes the earlier cafe scene, we’ve been retrained in a new way of looking. Perhaps I should only speak for myself here, but I felt my gaze become desexualized. The women who walk into and out of “the dreamer’s” frame are no longer just obscure objects of desire. Instead, each takes on that same strange character we find in Tarkovsky’s heroines. I usually name the shot of Margarita Terekhova sitting on the fence in Mirror as my all-time favorite movie image, and the last ten minutes of Sylvie plays like an avant-garde remix of it.

    * a.k.a. En la Ciudad de Sylvia or In the City of Sylvia. Why her name changes from Sylvie to Sylvia I don’t know, because it’s definitely Sylvie in the film.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 5

    2007 TIFF Day 5

    I’m the wrong person to write about No Country for Old Men. It’s exactly the film I was expecting, so I’m not sure why I came away from it so disappointed. The crowd had something to do with my reaction, I’m sure. As with Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I saw here two years ago, also at the massive Ryerson auditorium, I was surrounded again by viewers who laughed at and applauded the bone breaking and blood splattering. I don’t blame them, really. The Coens give Javier Bardim many of the best lines. His ruthless murderer, Anton Chigurh, has an irresistible charisma, which I’m sure will be interpreted as the seductive power of Evil or something. But I just don’t really care. It’ll win a million Oscars.

    I deliberately scheduled several films this year from South America, and also films by young female directors. I think I’m in search of another Lucretia Martel. Encarnacion is Anahi Berneri’s second narrative feature, following 2005’s A Year Without Love, which I’m now curious to see. I enjoy finding films like Encarnacion at TIFF — small character pieces that get the details right. Erni, the film’s protagonist, fits somewhere in that long line of movie heroines who, having reached a certain age, find their beauty fading and their place in the world less secure. I couldn’t help but think of All About Eve, Opening Night, and All About My Mother. Twenty years past her heydays as a calendar pin-up and B-movie queen, Erni now lives alone in Buenos Aires, where she continues to hustle for work on television and in commercials. The dramatic line of the film takes her back to her home town, where she reunites with her disapproving sister and helps to initiate her beloved niece into adolescence. The strength of the film, though, is Silvia Perez’s performance as Erni. A character who could very easily be made maudlin or pathetic has, instead, a curious grace and independence. I love the scenes between her and her occasional lover. A kind of Third Wave hero, she visits and leaves him at her own will.

    Last summer, Nick Rhombes offered a couple fun posts about the “radical beauty” of contemporary CGI spectacles. Watching Superman Returns while listening to his randomly shuffling iPod proved an interesting experience, he writes. “My theory is that we don’t see the beauty and artistry of these CGI films because we have never really learned how to appreciate them. Watching them with random music frees us from the prison-house of narrative compulsion; we see them with new eyes. With open eyes.” When I wasn’t laughing at the ridiculous trainwreck of a film that is Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I was thinking of Nick’s posts. There comes a point when these Hollywood picture shows become so incoherent, when the camera movements become so unmotivated, and when the performances become so irrelevant that there’s nothing left on screen but pure Surrealist spectacle. And people say avant-garde cinema can’t find an audience.

    Wavelengths concluded this year with a performance of Bruce McClure’s Everytwo Circumflicksrent…Page 298. Before the screening, McClure passed out ear plugs, telling us that he had come to accept that loud noise was an essential component of his process but that he recognized others might not be so disposed. He also expressed an interest in the ways that audiences choose to modify their experience of art — wearing ear plugs to rock shows, for example. His performance featured two modified projectors, each displaying a small circle of light that flickered and shifted focus. The soundtracks of each film had been altered by hand, and the rhythmic loops generated by them were then processed through two guitar pedals, which McClure “played” live. The result was overwhelming — loud, disorienting, hypnotic. At the risk of slipping into cliche, I would call it a performance of elemental cinema: sound and light projected in time. It was a great way to cap the Wavelengths programs.

  • 2007 TIFF Day 3

    2007 TIFF Day 3

    Naomi Kawase’s Mourning Forest could be used as a template for the kind of film I love. A slow, moving camera that captures images of nature, with an almost fetishistic fascination with wind blowing through trees and tall grass. Nearly wordless characters, whose desires and pain are expressed instead by their faces, which we’re allowed to watch closely and intimately. A curiosity about essential things like faith and love and loss. Oh, and the desire for transcendence, of course. It’s a ready-made Long Pauses kind of film. Except that it isn’t. Girish and I have been trying to understand why we’re the only people among our group of like-minded friends here who were disappointed by Mourning Forest. (And, for the record, to say that I was disappointed is not to say it isn’t an interesting film.) The story concerns a young woman and elderly man, both of whom have suffered a great loss. For the first half of the film, we watch them going about the routines of daily life at the retirement home where she works and he lives. I was quite liking the film until they began their journey through the forest, at which point I was instantly reminded of other similar, more compelling movies. I think Kawase’s handheld photography was part of the problem for me. It seemed at odds with the tone of the film. But mostly I was frustratingly unmoved by the two leads, and the last image of the film — that inevitable grasp at transcendence — was too calculated and a little clumsy. But don’t listen to me. Everyone else loves it.

    The general consensus at the festival is that The Man from London is minor Tarr. I’ve been ambivalent about the other two films of his that I’ve seen, Damnation and Satantango. As the latter film proved, I will gladly sit for hours and hours and hours in front of his films. (Question of the day: Has any director in the history of cinema had a more distinct style?) The camera moves slowly, the actors speak slowly, the music churns slowly, and as a result “real” time is compressed. I couldn’t believe, when The Man from London ended, that 135 minutes had passed. My qualms with Tarr have always concerned his view of the world, which is too misanthropic for my tastes. Which is probably why his latest film is my favorite of the three. I keep calling it a film noir that was left to simmer over low heat, reducing the genre to its fundamentals: man is trapped, man finds money, man attempts to escape fate. Friends look at me funny when I tell them how much I liked the protagonist, who in typical Tarr fashion has little to say. But in his own way, he’s actually quite tender at times. (That I managed to use the word “tender” here is probably another reason for disappointment from the Tarr loyalists.) As usual, The Man from London is a joy to look at. His camera is still tracking for minutes at a time, and he’s thrown in a couple new tricks. The 12-minute opener is a doozy. Also, Tarr stuck around for a Q&A and didn’t bite off a single head. He was charming, actually, and really funny.

    Jia Zhang-ke’s latest, Useless, is an odd one. Like last year’s documentary, Dong, Useless is a portrait of an artist, though in this case Jia is less concerned with fashion designer Ma Ke, specifically, than with what she represents to China’s leap into consumerism. In a recent interview, Wang Bing (see yesterday’s post on Wang’s latest) mentions that one reason he is not making narrative films right now is because “in China, social changes have come so fast and been so massive, that the opportunities for documentaries are considerable.” I suspect that Jia feels the same way. Useless, the title, comes from the name of Ma Ke’s haute couture line fashioned from traditionally hand-made fabrics. The middle third of Jia’s film documents the line’s impressive debut at Paris’s Fashion Week and includes interviews with Ma in which she waxes nostalgic about the human touch and artistry that is missing from mass-produced clothing. As we’ve learned in the first act of the film, though, Ma is only able to concentrate her efforts on Useless because of the fortune she made with Exception, which seems to be the Chinese equivalent of Banana Republic. Jia opens the film with a tour of the facility where hundreds of workers hunch over sewing machines, manufacturing garments for the chain of Exception store fronts. The shots are mirrored in the second act, when Jia shows two Chinese women hunching over weaving machines to produce the “hand-made” fabrics for Useless. The film ends in a rural mining town, where Jia follows several locals, including two tailors and a former tailor who was forced by the low cost of manufactured clothes to take a job at the mine. This quick summary lays out the macro-structure of Useless, but its the finer points — the visual echoes that reverberate throughout the film, the ironies and ambivalences — that make the film so fascinating. I like it better the more I think about it.

    John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind recovers the lost history of class struggle in America by filming, in simple, static shots, the monuments left behind: commemorative plaques, statues, and, most often, cemetery headstones. Gianvito structures the film chronologically and breaks the sequence of shots only on occasion to show images of wind blowing through leaves and grass (shades of Whitman and the Transcendentalists) and to interject jarring hand-drawn animations that represent the impersonal, amoral transactions of capitalism. The relative simplicity of the form allows the film to function pedagogically (I came away with a list of names and events I want to explore), but it also leaves room for the viewer to create connections and find new contexts. We can chart, for example, the movement of civil rights from New England to the South, and, likewise, the movement of manufacturing from the South to the Midwest. Or, in my favorite cut of the film, we learn that the founder of America’s first labor organization lays in an unmarked grave, while, at the same time, Sojourner Truth was being buried under an oversized headstone. In 1883, apparently, an African-American woman could be commemorated with greater honor than a white male labor organizer. Fascinating.

    Ute Aurand and Maria Lang’s The Butterfly in Winter is a 30-minute silent portrait of Lang’s life at home, where she tends to her 96-year-old mother. Each day begins with the opening of her mother’s bedroom window, a glass of water, breakfast, a wash and massage, and ends with a whisper in her hear and the closing of the window. Aurand assembles their life in jump cuts and closeups, revealing the slight variations amid the routine. I like Andrea Picard’s description: “Every day is the same and every day is different.” There’s such beauty and sweetness in the film.

  • A Few Words About Zodiac

    A Few Words About Zodiac

    David Fincher’s Zodiac is absolutely haunted by the specter of technology and by the present-day confidence we have in its objectivity. Throughout the film, Fincher inserts strange little moments that foreground communication and investigation technologies: a cop in San Francisco is disappointed when he learns that an officer in another precinct can’t “telefax” some evidence to him, the same SF cop pulls over to the side of the road to use a Police Emergency telephone, the obsessed writer fills his apartment with boxes and boxes of mimeographed documents, a suspect is let go because a handwriting authority (whose “authority” is later questioned) claims he can’t be the killer. Aside from the requisite, grisly recreations of three Zodiac murders in the first act, this film, which is easily my favorite Hollywood production of the year, has little in common with serial killer movies. Rather, it’s a fascinating and deliberate (I assume) commentary on our current cultural obsession with techno-forensic porn.

  • Early Lynch

    Early Lynch

    After watching The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, and David Lynch’s short films, all for the first time and in short succession, what’s most striking is the seamlessness of Lynch’s evolution from art school animator to studio hire. It’s almost impossible to imagine a more ideal scenario for the young filmmaker. After laboring for the better part of a decade on The Grandmother and Eraserhead, two highly original, intimate, and still-shockingly strange films, Lynch had the remarkable good fortune of being championed by Jonathan Sanger and Mel Brooks (of all people), who invited him to direct The Elephant Man, a relatively traditional script that suited perfectly his already fully-formed aesthetic and thematic concerns.

    At the risk of psychoanalyzing the young Lynch, it seems safe to say that his early work is steeped in anxiety. Like so many fables before it, The Grandmother is a fantastical tale of a child’s struggle to escape corruption and cruelty by restoring the foundations of his lost and mythical “traditional family.” Love and death are ethical and metaphysical issues for Lynch, but they’re bound up in biology, too. Human flesh and organic processes are mysterious, unreliable, and frightening in these films. You can practically smell the decay. In Eraserhead, the anxiety is more specifically sexual: given the film’s grim cast of seductresses, spermazoid parasites, and foetal nightmares — not to mention one terrified young man — it should come as no surprise that a quick Google of “David Lynch” and “Freud” returned more than a hundred thousand hits.

    Having seen various clips from The Elephant Man over the years — “I am not an animal” and all that — I was caught unprepared by the film’s opening sequence, which is almost identical in style and tone to Eraserhead. Like John Merrick in his coat and tie, Lynch’s first Hollywood production is more refined and respectable, perhaps, but it’s a wonderful oddity, nonetheless. Intercutting Freddie Francis’s black-and-white portrait of slow-moving elephants with fever-dream images of Merrick’s desperate mother, Lynch immediately reestablishes his old preoccupations — myth and archetype (“Leda and the Swan” for starters), sexual anxiety, nostalgic longing for family, and the loss of innocence — all of them refracted through the particular prism of Lynch’s imagination. He’s an odd guy, let’s face it, with a keen ability to transform even the most benign of objects (a pile of dirt, a baked hen, an oval portrait) into something genuinely Uncanny, in the Freudian sense. The Elephant Man, like the two films that preceded it, is so laden with harbingers of loss and ruination, Merrick’s actual death at the end of the film seems redundant.

  • Counsellor at Law (1933)

    Counsellor at Law (1933)

    Dir. by William Wyler

    In the foreground sits Harry Becker (Vincent Sherman), a young radical who only the night before was beaten and arrested by the police for, as his mother explains it, “making Communist speeches.” He sits here with George Simon (John Barrymore), a high-powered attorney whose office overlooks Manhattan from atop the Empire State Building. Harry is in Mr. Simon’s office begrudgingly, having only come at the behest of his mother, a stereotypically diffident immigrant who had once lived down the street from George’s family. That was back in “the old days,” back before George had worked his way through school and made his name and fortune as a ruthless defender of promiscuous divorcees, corrupt politicians, and rapacious business leaders. “Keep your charity for your parasites!” barks Harry, shaking with rage. Simon, both wounded and piqued by the comment, turns to look at the angry young man. And then the fun begins.

    Adapted from a successful stage play by Elmer Rice, Counsellor at Law was a production of Universal Pictures, then still under the control of founder Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Jr. In 1925, the elder Laemmle had allowed a cousin’s young son to direct his first film, a two-reel western called Crook Buster, and in the eight years since, William Wyler had made forty or fifty pictures for Universal. Except for The Love Trap (1929), a charming romantic comedy and Wyler’s first talkie, none of these early films are, as far as I know, readily available on DVD. While I enjoyed The Love Trap — and enjoyed the natural and nuanced lead performances, especially — I wasn’t quite prepared for Counsellor at Law, which, unlike so many other studio dramas of the ’20s and ’30s, is shockingly contemporary in tone, characterization, and mise-en-scene. It is also the perfect introduction to the films of William Wyler.

    Rice’s play premiered at the Plymouth Theatre on November 6, 1931, some six months after the Empire State first opened its doors. It was the second of two new plays written and produced by Rice that year, joining The Left Bank as a great critical and commercial success. Rice sold both scripts to Universal, but only Counsellor at Law made it into production. Carl Jr.’s growing confidence in Wyler was evident in his handing over of such a valuable property to the young director. Laemmle had paid Rice $150,000 for the play, an impressive sum during the Depression, and as a kind of insurance on his investment had also contracted Rice to adapt the play himself. After a quick first meeting between the writer and director in Mexico City, Rice flew home to New York to begin revisions and Wyler returned to Los Angeles to begin casting. Principal photography began three weeks later, and exactly three months after that the film opened at Radio City Music Hall to rave reviews.

    Pauline Kael later described Wyler’s film as “energetic, naïve, melodramatic, goodhearted, and full of gold-diggers, social climbers, and dedicated radicals.” That is to say, it is a product of those peculiar days of the early-1930s, when the collapse of world markets revealed for all to see the diseases that plague capitalism and when “being Left” in America was still uncomplicated by Stalin and Mao. Counsellor at Law is no Waiting for Lefty (1935) — Rice was a generation older than Clifford Odets and the other founding members of the Group Theatre, and didn’t share their idealism or fervor — but the play/film is still very much of the era in its ambivalence about (if not quite antagonism toward) economies founded on greed and exploitation. Waiting for Lefty ends, famously, with a chorus of actors chanting “Strike!” as they make their way off stage and past the seated audience. If Counsellor at Law can be criticized for surrendering to a “happy ending” convention that mucks up any would-be “sound-as-brickwork-logic” Marxist reading of the text (to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer), then it should also be commended for sparing audiences Odett’s brand of didacticism. As would be the case again and again throughout his long career, Wyler mines the source material for its humanity and, in doing so, gives us a compelling critique of specific historical conditions that rises above sloganeering.

    Note: I hope to return to this post someday and give Counsellor at Law the formal reading it deserves. It’s really a fantastic film.

  • Half Nelson (2006)

    Half Nelson (2006)

    Dir. by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

    It’s rare these days when I find myself identifying with a character in the same way that, say, the 7-year-old version of me identified with Charlie Bucket or the 15-year-old version of me identified with Holden Caulfield. But Dan Dunne, the crack-addicted, idealistic History teacher played by Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, is more like me than any other character I’ve met in quite some time. I don’t share his drug problems, fortunately, but I identify with what they represent in his life — the hypocrisy and disillusionment and isolation. (We all have our fatal flaws, right?)

    What rescues Half Nelson from the trappings of Movie of the Week melodrama — and what makes it one of my favorite new films of 2006 — is the care with which Fleck and partner Anna Boden ground Dunne’s struggles in a specific historical and political context. He’s not some Everyman Teacher fighting a universal battle for the hearts and minds of Today’s Youth; he’s the child, both literally and philosophically, of the ’60s generation that fought bravely and successfully for Civil Rights and Free Speech before watching their idealism shattered by personal excess, in-fighting, the horrors of Vietnam (or their inability to stop it), creeping apathy, and, eventually, the dawning of a new “Morning in America.”

    In the classroom, Dunne throws out the approved curriculum and, instead, teaches his students dialectics, forcing them to recognize the complexity — the counter-arguments, the push and pull — of every issue. As a simple echo of Dunne’s own swings between good and bad, light and dark, all the talk of dialectics is, perhaps, too easy a metaphor. But Fleck and Boden, I think, are interested in larger issues as well: the essential nature of debate for the health of a Democracy, for example, and, more specifically, the difficult but necessary intersection between idealism (even naive idealism) and pragmatism that every movement must maneuver in search of a progressive politics.

    I continued writing my dissertation long after I’d lost my enthusiasm for academia and the specific texts with which I was working because I was (and still am) personally invested in the central questions of the project: How do I take this “theory” — specifically, the ideas about democracy that animated the best aspects of the American New Left — and transfer them into “action”? How do I find “praxis” at the historical moment when capitalism won? How do I fight off the cynicism of my generation and participate, in a practical and meaningful way, in a progressive movement toward goodness and justice? How do I hold onto hope when I see so little cause for it?

    There’s a moment two-thirds of the way through Half Nelson when Dunne drives across town to confront Frank, a drug dealer who is angling to pull one of Dunne’s favorite students out of school and into the business. Dunne is high. He’s bought drugs from Frank (and other dealers just like him) many, many times. The right/wrong dialectic here has exploded into a dizzying miasma, and Gosling’s performance nails it. “What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to do something, right?” he finally gasps. I didn’t know whether to cry or cheer.