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Out of the Mush [The Best Movies of 1990]

From the Chicago Reader (January 4, 1991). — J.R.

Looking over a list of all the new movies I saw in 1990, I was shocked to discover how forgettable many of them were — so much so that it took considerable effort in many cases for me to remember much more than their titles. Crazy People, Bad Influence, Opportunity Knocks, I Love You to Death, Short Time, Cadillac Man, Die Hard 2, Another 48 Hrs., Funny About Love, and Sibling Rivalry all started turning into mush as soon as I saw them. Summoning them up weeks or months later is a bit like trying to remember what I had for lunch on the days I saw them.

Maybe it’s my middle-age talking, but I think something else is involved as well. We’ve been told repeatedly over the past couple of years that the most serious problem affecting this country is not poverty, not AIDS, not violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not a warmongering president or racism or misogyny, and not corporate and governmental skulduggery and deception — but the sale of harmful drugs. Yet during this same period Hollywood movies that will cause comparable amounts of brain damage have commanded almost as much space and attention in the media as all these problems combined. These movies are by and large designed to function much like drugs — they provide instant escapist kicks, extended fantasies of strength and fulfillment, temporary or ongoing memory loss, and an appetite for more of the same (as a side benefit, they also manage to increase the sale and consumption of junk food). They’re also meant to create enormous profits, and there’s no denying that money tends to buy respectability and validation in this culture, regardless of where it comes from.

Obviously one can push this parallel too far. Ghost and Pretty Woman, the two biggest money-makers of 1990, can’t be considered as addictive as crack or heroin, and the sort of brain damage they promote is cultural, ideological, and aesthetic (rather than a simple derangement of the senses, for which one has to turn to, say, Flatliners). Indeed, apart from the pro-prostitution underpinnings of Pretty Woman, the sexual-racial cop-out of Ghost, and the high consumerist gloss (as well as the box-office performance) of both pictures — a gloss that sold products and life-styles along with romantic stories — these movies were almost as forgettable as the also-ran titles above. (Even the hero’s patriarchal obsession in Pretty Woman and the denial of death in Ghost struck me as routine Hollywood silliness.)

While it’s possible to speculate how much hipper Ghost would have been if director Jerry Zucker had the guts to show Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg getting it on (an outcome virtually promised by the plot), the fact remains that with or without this minor audacity, the film is still a pretty dopey yuppie fantasy whose charms are fleeting, as they were clearly meant to be. Similarly, even if Pretty Woman had stuck with its original “tragic” ending, I doubt that audiences a century or two from now would rank the film higher, as Gene Siskel suggested to director Garry Marshall on TV a few weeks back. (It would be nice to think that people in the year 2090 or 2190 might have other things on their minds.)

So let’s consider instead which movies it might be fruitful to think about a year or so from now. I can easily think of more than five dozen movies superior to Ghost or Pretty Woman, all of which are listed below.

Just as we sometimes grudgingly admit that some illegal drugs in some circumstances can be beneficial, we have to admit that some questionable movies in some circumstances can be beneficial. From this point of view, my favorite movie highs in 1990 all gave me some lasting insights into the world I inhabit — and by “lasting” I mean that I haven’t fully consumed them yet. One major reason is that they aren’t “consumable” in the ordinary sense — that is, our culture hasn’t yet succeeded in turning them into mush.

It’s widely believed that style counts for more than content, but while making up my ten-best list for 1990 I found that the movies that made the most lasting impression on me generally did so more because of what they said than because of how they said it. This clearly isn’t the case with my first three selections — masterpieces whose content is indistinguishable from their style — but it explains why a virtuoso exercise de style with relatively familiar content, GoodFellas, didn’t make it onto my list, while the more conventionally (though adeptly) directed Pump Up the Volume, which gave me much more to think about, did.

1. Sweetie. Jane Campion’s first theatrical feature has just about everything a great film should have. Above all it boasts the creation of a world peculiarly its own, including ways of seeing, hearing, and understanding that world that illuminate the world we already know. On a primary level it deals with a life-and-death struggle between two odd sisters, rivals whose estranged parents provide both the theater and the psychological backdrop for their daughters’ personalities and conflicts.

Precisely how those parents function in this poetic tragicomedy has been a matter of considerable dispute. No less than three letters from women were published in the Reader that strenuously objected to my failure to write about child abuse and incest as essential ingredients in the title heroine’s makeup — a charge that struck me as peculiar inasmuch as I am unaware of any other reviewers having been criticized for not discussing them. Clearly one part of Campion’s brilliance is her capacity to open up enough cans of worms to stock a bait-and-tackle shop — multiple questions concerning narrative as well as family, and truth as well as fantasy. And it’s entirely to the film’s credit that it’s capable of stirring up passions about all of these matters without necessarily resolving any of them.

Perhaps I was in error in not assigning more importance to the roots and implications of Sweetie’s promiscuity — factors the film hints at without conclusively spelling them out. But because the film is fiction rather than autobiography — and because Campion has stated in interviews that the principal real-life model of Sweetie was male, and she hasn’t alluded to incest or child abuse in any of those interviews — it seems to me that issues of this kind, while they’re certainly worth exploring, can be singled out as definitive explanations only if one has particular axes to grind. I wouldn’t presume to claim that I don’t have my own idées fixes as well. (One good friend has pointed out that I have a taste for films about troubled families.) But it’s part of my critical credo that my Sweetie — or my Pretty Woman, for that matter — isn’t necessarily supposed to coincide in every particular with everybody else’s. Responses differ — and if they didn’t, I can’t see what point there would be in any of us reviewing anything. In any case, whatever my partial disagreements, I learned something from the letter writers’ remarks, and I hope they learned something from mine.

2. City of Sadness. I’ve only seen Hou Hsiao-hsien’s epic Taiwanese family saga once, at the 1989 Toronto film festival. But I have few doubts that this multilingual meditation on communication — intricately framed, consummately acted, powerfully felt — will endure for many decades, in spite of the fact that it received only two Chicago screenings (both at the Film Center in June). The only new Asian film I saw this year that was even remotely comparable in achievement was Zhang Yi-mou’s ravishing and provocative Chinese film (shot with the help of the Japanese) Ju Dou, shown as Secret Love, Hidden Faces at the Chicago International Film Festival, which had the good sense to accord it first prize but failed to show it a second time as announced. I’m told it has a distributor, so if it returns to Chicago in 1991, it’ll be a strong contender for my list next year.

3. To Sleep With Anger. Seeing Charles Burnett’s fascinating feature for the third time with a largely Asian audience at the Hawaii international film festival last month, I discovered that they seemed to be enjoying it every bit as much as the mainly white audience I saw it with in Toronto and the largely black audience I saw it with in Chicago — even if all three audiences tended to laugh in different places. This deceptively simple folktale about the encounter of a black family in Watts and an old friend from the south (Danny Glover), who winds up disrupting and threatening the entire household, is surely the densest narrative film in English I’ve seen this year after Sweetie — the richest in character and behavioral observation, with some of the finest performances I’ve seen anywhere (Glover, Mary Alice, and Paul Butler all deserve special mention).

To Sleep With Anger is the third of writer-director Burnett’s features, but the first to be distributed. (Facets Multimedia Center will screen the first two, Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, this month, and they shouldn’t be missed.) Burnett, a recent recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, is one of the indisputable masters of narrative filmmaking in this country, with an eye and ear resembling no one else’s. Yet it seems typical of the scrambled priorities in our film culture that he probably has less than a thousandth of the public profile of Spike Lee, simply because his uncommon talents don’t include the sort of salesmanship and self-promotion that Lee is so adept at. I’m not trying to suggest that Lee doesn’t deserve his reputation. I am suggesting, though, that confusion between talent and the benefits of a well-oiled publicity machine has kept an uncommon number of gifted filmmakers out of the public eye, and that Burnett is one of the best examples of this scandalous neglect.

4. White Hunter, Black Heart. The year’s most masterful and suggestive Hollywood movie takes on artistic and political egotism, macho bluster, U.S. imperialism, and Hollywood itself — mostly in conjunction with one another and always in a way that precludes the satisfactions of a simple yarn that one is supposed to get lost in without thinking about. The fact that it’s Clint Eastwood making these demands and offering such dividends — both as lead actor and director — is apparently more than some simple souls know what to do with. But this film is the logical climax of a career that has become increasingly exploratory and daring.

Lawrence of Arabia, successfully revived last year, is just about everybody’s favorite “thinking man’s epic,” but even that movie falls back on certain received notions about Arab history and heroism. This skillful and intuitive adaptation of Peter Viertel’s 1953 roman à clef about the European and African preproduction work on The African Queen, written by Viertel with James Bridges and Burt Kennedy, may have fewer intellectual credentials, but it arguably offers every bit as much of an intellectual challenge. Proceeding dialectically throughout, it gives us not John Huston (the director of The African Queen) but “John Huston,” and not Clint Eastwood but “Clint Eastwood.” In the course of one actor-director looking at another, a stylized approximation of the first director is presented as an actor in his own existential drama, while a stylistic alteration of Eastwood’s usual persona as an actor is given a lethal cutting edge by his own resourcefulness as a director. What makes this both dangerous and exciting is Eastwood’s flouting the idea that stars are supposed to both contain and resolve certain contradictions — the very idea that made such mythic constructions as the Man With No Name and Dirty Harry “believable” as well as possible. This time, however, Eastwood insists on bringing all of his character’s contradictions up front for us to mull over and critique, a performance that some spectators find “unconvincing” simply because it obliges them to think.

5. The Icicle Thief. The fact that this movie works so well with ordinary audiences seems to make some intellectual viewers a mite suspicious. But populist or not, Maurizio Nichetti’s fourth feature — his first to open commercially in this country — has more to say about contemporary TV culture than any other movie of the 80s that comes to mind. Inattentiveness, a basic ingredient in the comic vision of Jacques Tati, is equally important here in depicting how an Italian middle-class family slides over the discontinuity of an ordinary evening of TV by unconsciously superimposing a continuity that makes each viewer regard the screen as the purveyor of her or his own desire. This constitutes only one of the many levels in Nichetti’s madcap farce, which also works out an arresting encounter between Italian neorealism and contemporary Eurotrash consumer culture.

6. Pump Up the Volume. An energizing Hollywood protest-exploitation film that had the courage to be hopeful (and the good fortune to have Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis as its leads), writer-director Allan Moyle’s youth movie divided audiences more than any other commercial movie on this list. Indeed, the fact that it was hopeful — in contrast to such relatively defeatist youth protest films as Over the Edge, River’s Edge, and Heathers — was the principal objection lodged against the film by many younger viewers, a curious response that points to a currently pervasive taboo against genuine politics of any kind in pop movies.

If all political action is hopeless, then it becomes a lot easier to live with the notion of doing nothing. So it seems to me that Moyle’s scenario remains challenging precisely because it refuses to buy into this self-serving prophecy. Ironically, David Lynch — the filmmaker who is widely felt to be the most “daring” creative figure around — is someone whose total lack of interest in politics and uncritical support of the status quo (kinkiness and all) makes him as emblematic of the current zeitgeist as anyone one could hope to find. (Lynch also happens to be very talented. But I had much more fun reading the scripts for his still-unrealized Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble and watching the episodes he directed on Twin Peaks than sitting through Wild at Heart.)

7. The Plot Against Harry. Michael Roemer’s lovely black-and-white comedy about a reformed New York Jewish gangster was made between 1966 and 1968 but was not released for more than two decades — yet another sign of how much the arbitrary whims of the marketplace obscure our sense of what the good movies are in any given period. The absence of stars may have had something to do with this movie’s lack of commercial cachet, but it gives this beautiful, bittersweet movie a handle on ordinary life that most star vehicles don’t even come close to. (A case in point would be the other best Jewish-American movie of the year, Enemies, A Love Story, which may actually be the best movie Paul Mazursky has ever made, though it’s still limited in certain respects by its talented stars, Lena Olin, Anjelica Huston, and Ron Silver — who even at their best don’t reside in my memory with the kind of complex resonance that Martin Priest and Ben Lang in Roemer’s film do.)

8. Texasville. It isn’t widely known that Peter Bogdanovich was a close friend of the late John Cassavetes, and that the two had a somewhat reciprocal creative relationship: Bogdanovich directed a day or two of the shooting on Love Streams, and Cassavetes advised Bogdanovich on the script of Texasville. I bring this up because the priority of people over plot has a lot to do with what makes Texasville as “uncommercial” — and as beautifully acted and mysterious, in many ways — as much of Cassavetes’s work, despite the considerable difference in directorial styles. Like all of my preceding favorites (with the arguable exception of White Hunter, Black Heart), Texasville is concerned with families — makeshift and otherwise, lost and found, biological and spiritual — and much of its strength comes from the richness, ambiguities, interplay, and regroupings of the characters in this bittersweet comedy, all of which has a great deal to do with redefining what constitutes a family unit. (Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, and Annie Potts were standouts in a striking and able cast.)

Set in the mid-80s, the film is an unexpected sequel to The Last Picture Show (1971) because while the earlier film owed much of its appeal to nostalgia, Texasville is largely built around the hard facts of historical amnesia. The strange relationship between these movies goes further. The earlier film is set in the early 50s, but it needs to be seen in part as a film about the early 70s; Texasville may well be remembered as one of the few movies that told us something substantial about the early 90s. When both films eventually become available on tape, they should be seen back-to-back so that their dialectical relationship can register with optimal force. After only a single viewing of Texasville, I’m reluctant to say more, but something tells me that this is a movie to be savored, not gulped — which surely had something to do with its commercial failure in a period when the fortunes of films are calculated over single weekends, not over weeks, months, or years.

9. Mr. Hoover and I. The last film of the late Emile de Antonio proved to be something resembling his last will and testament — a spiky, crotchety, straight-from-the-shoulder essay about himself and J. Edgar Hoover, a “declaration of independence” in every sense. Making room for John Cage’s notions of indeterminacy as well as autobiography and political protest, the film elegantly leaps between diverse materials in a manner that recalls the shape and drift of de Antonio’s own career, forging a memorable self-portrait of an artist whose “found” material consisted of himself and the 20th century in perpetual dialectical encounter.

10. The Freshman and Miami Blues. A photo-finish tie between two adroit revivals of older Hollywood traditions. The first offers a warm and luminous critique by Marlon Brando of his earlier showboating as The Godfather’s Don Corleone, snugly integrated into a daffy and inspired comedy that represented the welcome comeback of writer-director Andrew Bergman. The second teamed another neglected writer-director (George Armitage) with three charismatic and talented actors (Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Alec Baldwin) to give us a tart New Wave thriller, craftily adapted from the first of the four Hoke Moseley novels written by the late, great Charles Willeford (a remarkable noir quartet about the way we live now; for my money, his Sideswipe is as impressive a performance as Rabbit at Rest, for related reasons). Both movies are reminders that Hollywood isn’t really dead; it’s merely suffering from the sort of elephantiasis that Bergman and Armitage know exactly how to cure.

I have ruled out of competition three restored movies that finally received their U.S. premieres in their original forms — Jacques Rivette’s The Nun (1966), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1974) — the first two of which would surely have made my list had they been full premieres. I have similarly eliminated from the running Leslie Thornton’s still-unfinished but already mind-boggling and monumental Peggy and Fred in Hell, which finally got a screening in Chicago thanks to the School of the Art Institute after having been either rejected or ignored by every other independent and experimental venue in town. And I still haven’t had enough time to reflect on the virtues and flaws of The Godfather Part III to determine whether this conclusion to Francis Coppola’s trilogy should have made it into my list; but even if further reflection makes it seem less impressive, I would still probably place it near the top of my selection of runner-ups.

Some of the year’s best movies came and went so fast that hardly anyone had a proper chance to evaluate them — or even see them. Among the contenders I managed to see, the most conspicuous instances of films getting the bum’s rush from their distributors — opening without any press screenings and closing before I could review them — are, in roughly descending order of preference, Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound, Abel Ferrara’s The King of New York, Karel Reisz and Arthur Miller’s Everybody Wins, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III, and James Scott’s Strike It Rich. Only slightly less neglected, but no more deserving of their hasty demises, were John Boorman’s Where the Heart Is, Sandra Seacat’s In the Spirit, and Howard Franklin and Bill Murray’s Quick Change.

My other favorite independent and foreign films that were shown here in limited runs at the Film Center, Facets Multimedia, the Music Box, Chicago Filmmakers, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Chicago Latino Film Festival were Jacques Rivette’s The Gang of Four, Bela Tarr’s Almanac of Fall, Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal, Istvan Darday and Gyorgyi Szalai’s The Documentator, Bob Hoskins’s The Raggedy Rawney, Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Yaaba, Ferid Boughedir’s Child of the Terraces, Raul Ruiz’s 20-minute Snakes and Ladders, Wayne Wang’s Life Is Cheap . . . But Toilet Paper Is Expensive, Michael Almereyda’s Twister, Norman Rene’s Longtime Companion, Christian Blackwood’s Signed, Lino Brocka, James Klein’s Letter to the Next Generation: Kent State Twenty Years After, Paul Joyce’s Motion and Emotion: The Films of Wim Wenders, Kay Armatage’s Artist on Fire, Aki Kaurismaki’s Ariel, Nina Rosenblum’s Through the Wire, Stephanie Black’s H-2 Worker, Eliseo Subiela’s Last Images of the Shipwreck, and Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts.

Among also-rans that had open commercial runs, let me cite in addition John Boskovich and Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing, James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet (an improvement on Jim Thompson’s novel and a model of how to use locations and ambiguous offscreen narration), Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, Paul Brickman’s Men Don’t Leave, Mike Nichols’s Postcards From the Edge, Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Mel Smith’s The Tall Guy, Alan Rudolph’s Love at Large, the first half of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, the second half of Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, selected sequences from Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams and Jacob’s Ladder, the script of Night of the Living Dead (the remake), the scenery in Quigley Down Under, the set decoration in Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, the period ambience in Waiting for the Light, some of the dialogue in The Unbelievable Truth and Metropolitan, the editing in Mo’ Better Blues, Jeremy Irons’s performance in Reversal of Fortune (a skillful film without a soul), and Kathy Bates’s performance in Misery (ditto).

When it comes to bestowing my annual F.W. Murnau award — given each year to “a new or old film that provokes a radical revision of our sense of film history” — Manoel de Oliveira’s No, or the Vainglory of Command, shown at the Chicago International Film Festival, seems the obvious recipient. Made by a master filmmaker from Portugal who is still full of beans in his 80s — an unpredictable visionary artist whose impressive career stretches all the way back to the silent era — this lucid, luscious, and imaginative meditation on colonial wars is such a wise and beautiful work that George Bush and all TV reviewers should be required to watch it at gunpoint. Those who were lucky enough to catch its only Chicago screening should savor its memory and hope for its speedy return.

The Color of Paradise

From the Chicago Reader (January 16, 1998). It’s too bad that, thanks (apparently) to Miramax’s continuing indifference, this version of Jour de fête remains unavailable on Blu-Ray or DVD in the U.S., although it’s easily obtainable at a modest cost in the U.K. — J.R.

Jour de fête

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Jacques Tati

Written by Tati, Henri Marquet, and Rene Wheeler

With Jacques Tati, Paul Frankeur, Guy Decomble, Santa Relli, and Maine Vallee.

Every Tati film marks simultaneously (a) a moment in the work of Jacques Tati; (b) a moment in the history of French society and French cinema; (c) a moment in film history. Since 1948, the six films that he has realized are those that have scanned our history the best. Tati isn’t just a rare filmmaker, the author of few films (all of them good), he’s a living point of reference. We all belong to a period of Tati’s cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that stretches from Mon oncle (1958: the year before the New Wave) to Playtime (1967: the year before the events of May ‘68). There is hardly anyone else but Chaplin who, since the sound period, has had this privilege, this supreme authority: to be present even when he isn’t filming, and, when he’s filming, to be precisely up to the moment — that is, just a little bit in advance. Tati: a witness first and last. — Serge Daney, La rampe (my translation)

The justification for [a] pretense to disengagement derives from our Victorian habit of marginalizing the experience of art, of treating it as if it were somehow “special” — and, lately, as if it were somehow curable. This is a preposterous assumption to make in a culture that is irrevocably saturated with pictures and music, in which every elevator serves as a combination picture gallery and concert hall. The question of whether we can enjoy, or even decipher, the world we see without the experience of images, or the world we hear without the experience of music, seems to me pretty much a no-brainer. In fact, I cannot imagine a reason for categorizing any part of our involuntary, ordinary experience as “unaesthetic,” or for imagining that this quotidian aesthetic experience occludes any “real” or “natural” relationship between ourselves and the world that surrounds us. All we do by ignoring the live effects of art is suppress the fact that these experiences, in one way or another, inform our every waking hour. — Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

The cinema does not show, it previsions… when it is artisanal, it is ten or twenty years in advance; when it is factory-made, it is two or three years. — Jean-Luc Godard

In 1942 Jacques Tati was living in occupied France. The grandson of a Dutch picture framer whose clients included Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, the 34-year-old Tati had played rugby, performed in music halls, and acted in a few short comic films. That year he left Paris with a screenwriter friend named Henri Marquet in search of the remotest part of the country they could find, hoping to escape recruitment as workers in Germany. They finally settled on a farm near Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, located in the dead center of France — not far from where George Sand had entertained such houseguests as Chopin, Liszt, Flaubert, and Turgenev — and spent a year or so getting acquainted with the village and its inhabitants.

Three years after Germany’s surrender, Tati and Marquet returned to the village to make a short film, L’école des facteurs (”The School for Postmen”), in which Tati played François, the village postman, who delivers the mail on a bicycle. (François was based loosely on a bit character played by someone else in a comic short Tati had acted in ten years earlier.) L’école des facteurs was Tati’s first directing project, and the following year he and Marquet returned with different cinematographers but the same basic crew to rework and expand the short into a feature, Jour de fête, whose brand-new color process, Thomson-Color, would make it the first French feature in color.

Thomson-Color was a complex experimental process, conceived as an artisanal invention, a homemade alternative to big-studio technology, that could become France’s answer to Technicolor. Aware that he was taking a calculated risk, Tati employed two cameras — one using color and the other, for safety, using black and white — but meanwhile he designed the film’s settings with color in mind, painting many of the house doors in the village a dark gray and dressing most of the villagers in dark coats. The basic idea — part of which he carried over to Playtime almost 20 years later — was to show a colorless village springing to life once holiday caravans arrive with carnival trappings such as painted merry-go-round horses and shiny banners, then returning to drabness once all the festive regalia is carted away.

But Thomson-Color didn’t work, and after Tati found himself unable to print the film in color he resigned himself to releasing it in black and white. He was unable to find a distributor for well over a year, until a successful preview in a Paris suburb inspired him to make a few more revisions, but when the film finally opened in 1949 it grossed ten times its cost and won major prizes in Venice and Cannes, launching Tati’s international reputation. (His next two features, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon oncle, were even bigger hits — the latter won him an Oscar — and only after Tati sank all his fortune into Playtime, one of the most expensive French films ever made, did he become commercially problematic again. He never fully recovered from the stigma professionally, even after his final two features, Traffic and Parade.)

By the 50s Tati was riding high, critically as well as commercially. Shortly before the release of Mon oncle Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “With him, French neorealism was born. Jour de fête resembled Open City in inspiration.” But Tati’s original conception of Jour de fête never fully left him. In 1964 he re-edited the film, remixed the sound track, and colored a few stray visual details with stencils. He even went back to Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre to shoot new material involving an added character, a young painter who could be seen sketching some of the Bastille Day activities, and Tati was so adept at integrating this new material that the result was seamless. For the next 30-odd years, this was the Jour de fête that everyone saw. Tati extended this talent for revision to some of his other features: over 20 years after Mr. Hulot’s Holiday was first released in 1953 he deftly inserted a brief gag alluding to Jaws, and long after Traffic opened in 1971 he casually slipped in a comic afterthought involving filling-station giveaways.

How an additional character could compensate for the absence of a full-color image is an intriguing puzzle. But Tati’s compositional strategy was an intrinsic part of his genius, making him a worthy grandson of van Gogh’s framer; he was an instinctive artist with an uncanny sense of how seemingly unconnected aspects of a film could connect with one another. (Interestingly enough, this sense corresponds to Carl Dreyer’s stated reason for using four rhyming intertitles in his last feature, Gertrud, intertitles that were later removed. Dreyer had hoped to shoot that film in color and told an interviewer that had he succeeded, those four intertitles — none of which made any reference to color — would have been unnecessary.)

Part of Tati’s legacy is his radical rethinking of how sound relates to image — an idea his peer and contemporary Robert Bresson formulated in different terms. But Tati’s view of color was more than a means of fine-tuning his images; it was part of a wider and more interactive scheme. Because he shot all his films silently and constructed his sound tracks afterward, Tati was able to create an interplay between image and sound that was never a matter of one simply reinforcing the other, and he used color more to accent the image than to enhance it. The Hollywood factory notion of applying sheets or slabs of color — which reaches a kind of apotheosis in colorizing black-and-white features — lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from Tati’s artisanal methods, in which little dabs and touches are applied as discreet counterbalances in the overall composition.

Sophie Tatischeff, Tati’s second child and only daughter and a professional film editor who was born during the shooting of Jour de fête, must have shared this view of her father’s approach when she returned to the color negative of Jour de fête five years after his death, hoping with the help of cameraman François Ede to reconstruct a color print. Her understanding of her father’s conception of color also helps to explain why, once she and Ede finally overcame the technical problems seven years later, she decided to delete the character of the painter and aim instead for a restoration of her father’s original vision.

The full story of this restoration is recounted in a book Ede published in France three years ago, a week before the successful French release of the film in color. I haven’t been able to read the book, but judging from various other accounts of the patience and technical wizardry involved, it’s a story of artisanal pride and determination triumphing over impossible odds. In some ways it recalls Jour de fête itself, which chronicles the bumbling efforts of a village postman to approximate the streamlined technology and speed of the American postal service after glimpsing a hyperbolic French newsreel on the subject. (A bent old lady with a goat who serves as the village’s spokesperson and guides us through some of its inner workings — a bit like the stage manager in Our Town — eventually concludes that François is better off doing what he’s always done than trying to top the Americans, cautionary words that reflect ironically on Tati’s misadventures with Thomson-Color.)

One might argue that Tatischeff and Ede’s work isn’t a “pure” restoration insofar as Tati himself was never able to edit his own color footage. But Tatischeff, who worked with her father on the editing of half of his features, was probably more qualified to carry out this task than anyone else alive, and she had two previous versions of Jour de fête edited by her father to guide her decisions. What emerges is not so much a “new” Tati film as an old one seen properly for the first time, in the full flavor of its own period.

None of this would matter quite as much, of course, if Jour de fête weren’t already a masterpiece by one of the key figures in the history of cinema. The film has always been a charming populist favorite — at least when people could discover films on their own, without expensive ad campaigns to limit their choices. But its restored color version is doubly precious: this is color that truly looks like 1947 — not films of that period so much as 1947 itself — and its bucolic postwar euphoria, not to mention its affection for interactive village life, has all the fragrant perfume of a time capsule. (For comparably paradisiacal views of village life mixed with dollops of wry social criticism, I can only think of a few John Ford items, like Judge Priest, The Sun Shines Bright, and The Quiet Man.) Thomson-Color looks distinctly different from every other color process, and the fact that we have virtually no other color record of French life during the 40s gives Jour de fête the force of a revelation.

Formally, Jour de fête offers a rough sketch of most of the ideas Tati would flesh out in his later features (reaching their climaxes in the black-and-white Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and the color Playtime). There’s the comic interplay between foreground and background details, such as our first introduction to François the postman on his bike, dodging an invisible bee in the background while a hay mower in the foreground tries to decode his curious zigzagging movements — until the same bee menaces the mower a moment later. There’s the clean detachment of the images from the sound track — the latter a beautiful and highly selective blend of sound effects, ambient noises, and dialogue, comprising a kind of musique concrète (though there’s more dialogue than Tati would ever use again). This separation of sound from image allows for a certain counterpoint between the two, most apparent in the hilarious pantomime of flirtation between carnival worker Roger (Guy Decomble) and villager Jeannette (Maine Vallée) to the accompaniment of dialogue from an American western playing inside an adjacent tent. (This flirtation recurs in various forms throughout the picture, and the fact that Roger is married gives the romantic longings a certain naughtiness that Tati would omit from his later movies; in more ways than one, this is his most typically French film.)

Jour de fête amounts to a kind of stylistic manifesto as well. Most of Tati’s work derives from observation rather than pure invention, inflected by the aesthetic and poetic properties of music, painting, and dance (which is where the invention comes in); everyday details are the basic unit of this enterprise rather than incidents designed to advance a plot. This is why Tati’s films are generally better appreciated by ordinary viewers than by critics and specialists, who tend to be more rigid about what films should be, storywise and otherwise. (Twenty years ago, my film class students were far more responsive to Playtime than were critics like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, who declared themselves bored and alienated.) Tati’s observation is tempered and structured by an aesthetic-poetic imagination and by the perception that all of us, as critic Dave Hickey suggests, are living continuously inside a complex work of art that we call the world, and that perhaps only another work of art can teach us to appreciate what’s right in front of us.

Thematically as well, Jour de fête offers a kind of blueprint to Tati’s subsequent oeuvre, despite the fact that it offers the only rural setting in his work apart from the middle section of Traffic. The enormous impact of the French newsreel about American postal delivery — not only on François but also on the other villagers, who mercilessly mock François’ relative inefficiency — initiates a complex and ambivalent critique of technology in general and Americanization in particular that informs the remainder of Tati’s work, apparent even in the bilingual titles of his last three films. (Ironically, the implied critique of French versus American mail delivery — however applicable to a sleepy village in the late 40s — was directly contradicted by my own experience living in Paris in the early 70s, when I could practically set my watch by the three prompt deliveries made to my building every weekday and the two made every Saturday.) The combined threat and promise of the “new,” inextricably tied up with an internal debate about America, is discernible in the tacky suburban architecture (complete with Japanese garden) in Mon oncle, the invading American tourists in Playtime, and the all-purpose camper-trailer in Traffic. And Jour de fête remains not just “a little bit” ahead of its time (according to Serge Daney) or “10 or 20 years” (according to Godard’s formula) but a full half century in its perception of what mass culture and technology mean to the quiet life of a remote village. As American and Japanese investors circle mainland China, Jour de fête might serve as a relevant commentary on the day after tomorrow.

To appreciate Tati’s ambivalence about this matter in all its complexity, one has to see Jour de fête in a specifically postwar context, where genuine gratitude toward Americans for helping to liberate France weighed against the cultural and economic bullying imposed by the Marshall Plan — which included a quota of Hollywood pictures, some of them in Technicolor. (Late in the film, a cycling François manages to run two American MPs off a country road by pretending to bark orders over a telephone, in a parody of American-style efficiency.)

Most of the preceding fails to do justice to the physical comedy in Jour de fête, which harks back to the purity of silent comedy in its grace and the beauty of its natural surroundings. (There’s even a cross-eyed carnival worker who seems inspired by Ben Turpin, and the bucolic splendor of the countryside offsets Francois’ frantic pedaling as he makes his rounds.) It’s a perfect movie for children — some of whom catch certain details that adults are prone to miss — and seeing it on a big screen can be as enveloping and as transporting an experience as many of the better Disney animated features.

Yet judging by the total indifference of the American mainstream toward the restored Jour de fête — a lack of interest dictated by the film’s U.S. distributor, Miramax, which has brought the film to America only reluctantly, without ads, and for no longer than a week at only a handful of locations — it is much more culturally serious these days to spit on the grave of Henry James with a slimy soft-core travelogue like The Wings of the Dove. Because of the money and muscle Miramax has expended on this cheesy factory product, it hasn’t had any trouble gaining the recognition and (in most cases) reverence of Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, New York, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the TV reviewers, and numerous other media players, none of which has shown a flicker of interest in the color Jour de fête.

It’s an axiom of our Reaganite culture that businesses can do whatever they want with movies and that the press should rubber-stamp these decisions on the basis of ad budgets. Miramax is of course perfectly entitled to deem this crowd pleaser unmarketable and unworthy of anybody’s attention — though luckily this also means that they haven’t bothered to recut it, which they generally do only with films that they “believe in.” What I object to, rather, is the mass media’s implied insult to the audience at large by kowtowing to Miramax and refusing to acknowledge any alternatives that could possibly merit anyone’s attention, even when they’re as irreplaceable as the restored Jour de fête. In a society where price tags have become the only cultural credentials, Tati’s film couldn’t even pass muster at a garage sale. But for this week only, at the Music Box, you can still inhabit a world where artisans shine.

No Joke [MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE MOVIE]

From the Chicago Reader (April 19, 1996). — J.R.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie 0 (no stars)

Directed by Jim Mallon

Written by Michael J. Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Mary Jo Pehl, Paul Chaplin, and Bridget Jones

With Beaulieu, Nelson, Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Faith Domergue, and the voices of Mallon and Murphy.

The premise of the recently discontinued cable-TV series on which this film is based is more or less as follows: a blustering mad scientist named Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) plots to take over the world. His plan? According to the Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie press book: “Find the worst movies ever made, show them to the entire population and bring the planet to its knees.” He kidnaps Mike Nelson (Michael J. Nelson) to serve as a guinea pig, takes him to the Satellite of Love, and makes him and his three robot pals — Tom Servo, Gypsy, and Crow — watch the Worst Movies Ever Made. But Mike and his friends confound the experiment by talking back to the screen and making wisecracks. We watch the movies too — or parts of them, since the lower portion of the screen is partially blocked by the silhouettes of Mike and two of the robots.

If the film were more imaginative, it might be taken as a spin-off of the last half hour of Joe Dante’s 1985 Explorers [see above] — our culture reconfigured through the sensibility of an extraterrestrial in a satellite, then dished out to us. But the reality is something closer to the reverse — an outmoded version of an alien sensibility reconfigured through contemporary disbelief to yield just plain dishing. And as in the current Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, no adjustment is made in performance style: the broad gestures needed to make a mark on the tube are simply carried over to the big screen without alteration, so that the nerd characters become inflated like balloons.

The kind of humor that characterizes the Mystery Science Theater series has existed almost as long as the teenager has existed as a marketing concept — that is, since the early 50s, when television started becoming widespread. Talking back to the screen has probably been around much longer — especially in the cheap second- and third-run houses that proliferate in cities — though there’s something about the snugness of a car at a drive-in or the privacy of a den or living room that encourages this behavior.

Of course making up your own wisecracks and passively listening to the wisecracks of ersatz spectators aren’t precisely the same activity. The potential creativity of the audience has been usurped, which reminds me of United Artists’ recent efforts to remarket Showgirls to gay audiences after failing to attract many heterosexuals. In New York, and perhaps elsewhere, publicists have manufactured a supposedly spontaneous cult by encouraging drag queens to turn up for midnight screenings and call out rejoinders to the screen dialogue, as audiences do with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though in this case the studio has thoughtfully provided some of the one-liners. The flacks seem to be saying, you too can climb on the bandwagon of a hip subculture, and leave the driving to us. (According to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 press book, the original series “spawned a MST3K fan club that numbers more than 50,000 strong” — though whether it too was created or helped along by publicists isn’t clear.)

One reason I never watched the cable-TV show for more than a few minutes at a time was that the range of movies Mike and the robots could watch was very narrow: they had to be science fiction or horror, most were in black and white, and almost all were made in the 50s. If copyright laws were looser and the writers of this show more enterprising, we might have seen Mike and his pals sharpening their wits on Woody Allen’s ponderous Bergman imitations, such as Interiors and September; on the New Age soul-searching in Henry Jaglom pictures; and maybe even on sacred cows like Schindler’s List. The results might have made more people angry, but at least things would have been livelier, and the writers might have been forced to think up better jokes. Instead the writers opted for the most cliched, simpleminded, and unreflecting idea of what a bad movie is, then adhered to that as if it were gospel.

In Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie the filmmakers have expanded their range enough to allow the feature to be in color — undoubtedly because they don’t want TV networks paying less to show it. But they’ve hit a fatal snag. The feature they selected happens to be a pretty good one — certainly much better than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie by just about any criterion one could think of (story, pacing, dialogue, visual design, characterization, even acting). The filmmakers were clearly counting on audiences believing that any science fiction movie made in the 50s is idiotic by definition, because back then they didn’t know all the cool stuff we know today. (A typical exegesis: “Oh yeah, that’s when science didn’t have any specific purpose.”) It’s true that we know more about science than people in the 50s did. What we clearly know less about is how to make movies.

I hasten to add that the “stinkburger” the filmmakers selected, This Island Earth (1955), isn’t even shown complete. It’s shown throughout at the wrong screen ratio, with large sections of the bottom of each frame cut off and another section obscured by the silhouettes of Gypsy, Mike, and Tom (who always occupy seats 7 through 9 in a row of 11 seats — the theater’s capacity, apparently). Its running time is also cut: MST3000 runs 73 minutes, but This Island Earth runs 86. Yet more than 13 minutes are deleted, because plenty goes on before and after the screening of This Island Earth, and on two occasions the projector breaks down, leaving our furry friends to crack more jokes until it’s fixed. Needless to say, these are the worst passages, worst of all when the movie halfheartedly tries to imitate This Island Earth in a few of its visual conceits. But despite all the mauling and all the lousy wisecracks, many of the virtues of This Island Earth shine through — enough to make one regret that Gramercy Pictures didn’t simply rerelease the older movie.

I’m far from being alone in this estimation of This Island Earth. Leonard Maltin’s reasonable, middle-of-the-road Movie and Video Guide gives the film three stars, calling it “suspenseful,” “intelligent,” “thoughtful,” and “exciting,” “with excellent visuals”; I can’t imagine anyone using those words to describe Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. And the adventurous English critic Raymond Durgnat devotes most of the final chapter of his first book, the 1967 Films and Feelings, to the film, finding its story a reflection of American attitudes during the cold war and appreciating, with some critical reservations, its “moral suspense” as well as its poetic imagery.

I’m not trying to argue that This Island Earth is any sort of masterpiece or that it doesn’t have a silly side; I recall being aware of its risible aspects at age 11 — even without the relentless prodding of writer-director Jim Mallon and his half dozen cowriters. (Were they required to come up with, say, 20 wisecracks each? How much did they get paid for each one?)

What This Island Earth has that MST3000 and most other contemporary movies lack is an attractive (if clean and simple) visual design and a somewhat nuanced moral sense, two qualities it shares with The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Like The Day the Earth Stood Still, it postulates a patriarchal, peace-loving extraterrestrial who’s trying to end war on earth (albeit an extraterrestrial who’s in conflict with the beings on his own and another planet); and like Forbidden Planet, it creates an attractive, if much more modest, stretch of otherworldly landscape and architecture. The film was directed by Joseph M. Newman, a fairly routine but competent action director; adapted by George Callaghan from three short stories by Raymond F. Jones that were later reworked into a novel; produced by William Alland, who played the semiinvisible reporter Thompson in Citizen Kane; and released by Universal Pictures. (The lovely 50s Universal logo occasions the first and in some ways the best of all MST3000’s wisecracks: “This is the nicest weather earth ever had.”)

What does it tell us that close to half of the one-liners in MST3000 are homophobic? Is this supposed to reflect what teenagers in the mid-1990s find funny? I don’t know, but whenever two men are seen in any kind of physical proximity, sexual desire tends to be part of the punch line: “I’m gonna curl up in his sock drawer and sleep for days,” “I just know they’re going to probe my anus,” “Ooooh — Brock has visible panty line.” Just as surely, when a German character turns up the inevitable wisecrack is “Heil Hitler.”

I admit that the Woody Allen movie that made me laugh the loudest when it first came out — the one he usually omits from his filmographies, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), which redubs a Japanese James Bond spin-off with snide one-liners — offers variations on the same jokes (”Could this be the body of a killer?”). But if memory serves, these jokes were fewer and wittier. Here they seem motored by sheer desperation, as are such zingers as “No tickee, no shirtee,” “Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Airfield,” “Contact Aunt Jemima — start warming the syrup,” “This planet should comb its hair over its bald spot,” “That’s one butt-ugly planet you got there,” and “He’s flown into a Flemish painting” — though the simple, hilly country landscape looks nothing like a Flemish painting. But I guess if you see a country landscape you’ve got to say something to prove how smart you are.

Stage, Screen and Television [PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS: ON THE SET OF DEATH OF A SALESMAN]

From the Chicago Reader (February 15, 1991). — J.R.

PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS: ON THE SET OF DEATH OF A SALESMAN

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Christian Blackwood.

I’ve never seen Volker Schlondorff’s 150-minute made-for-TV film of Death of a Salesman (1985), which Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies awards high marks: “Stunning though stylistic remounting of [Dustin] Hoffman’s Broadway revival of the classic Arthur Miller play with most of the cast from that 1984 production. A landmark of its type. Executive-produced by Hoffman and Miller. Hoffman and [John] Malkovich both won acting Emmys. Above average.” But a friend who has seen it, and who loves the play, tells me that she disliked the film: all the actors seemed to be off on their own tangents, she said, and there was little interplay between them.

Whether the Schlondorff film is good or bad, Private Conversations: On the Set of Death of a Salesman, the 82-minute documentary that Christian Blackwood made about the making of it, is endlessly fascinating, for reasons largely irrelevant to the worth of the Miller play or this particular production of it. Part of the open-endedness of Blackwood’s film comes from the fact that if Schlondorff’s film works the reasons are here, and if it doesn’t work the reasons are here — perhaps in the same circumstances. Some documentaries give the impression of having too little information to impart; this one often seems to have too much. Blackwood structures the material lucidly — it’s easy to follow — but there are many different and even antithetical ways to interpret it.

This film — which incidentally I’ve seen only on video — about the making of a film of a play raises a good many questions about theater, film, and (more peripherally) television, about their divergences as well as their meeting points. These often become, in turn, questions about documentary, and about the real.

Quite early in Private Conversations (which is showing at the Film Center tonight) Schlondorff delivers the following speech to his cast and crew, in his imperfect but expressive and even eloquent English: “How all this will translate on film I don’t know. This is an experiment. These walls” — he indicates the studio set — “don’t quite fit. It is not so much that we wanted to make an economy but to make clear from the beginning and all the way through [that] this is not a real house. Because if you have that much reality, you don’t need that many words anymore. This being a play, a reality should be created through the words. If the reality is there anyhow in front of the camera, they don’t need to talk that much, and it doesn’t fit together then.

“You will contribute greatly by creating reality through your performance. Everything should be fake except the emotions — they will be true and they’ll be what we’ll be moved by. The main thing will be that [with] the camera, being that present, and the mike with it, being that present, you will automatically perform differently, whether you want it or not.

“In the beginning, you may still look for, where is the audience? Now of course there is no audience; ultimately your audience is Willy Loman [the title salesman, played by Hoffman], because you’re all performing for him. So what we have to do here is not reproduce what you’ve done already [in the Broadway production]. We really have to re-create it. And that’s why I’m at least as nervous as all of you together.”

Until he gets to Willy Loman, Schlondorff could just as easily be describing Blackwood’s film. The reality of Blackwood’s documentary is also dependent mainly on words, and its performances are also profoundly affected by the presence of cameras and microphones — and not only by the cameras that we see, but by the one that Blackwood (the cinematographer as well as the producer and director) is holding, the one that allows us to see the other cameras.

What is Schlondorff’s opening speech, after all, but a highly theatrical performance? While he’s delivering it, Blackwood cuts from him to the cast and crew to various details on the set — the canvas chairs bearing the names of Hoffman, Schlondorff, Miller, and Malkovich, for instance. Much of what he cuts to is probably material shot on other occasions, but the words are what carry both the “narrative” and our sense of reality. One wonders, moreover, whether he’s offering his performance not only for the cast and crew of Death of a Salesman but for Blackwood’s camera and microphone. (Ironically, he seems more in command when he’s delivering this speech than when we see him directing.) Is Blackwood’s film merely recording this event, creating it, or somehow altering it?

The film offers more than one precis of its own contents. After an introductory stretch, we get some skeletal credits introducing us to a cast of characters, each character accompanied by a photograph: “Arthur Miller/playwright; Dustin Hoffman/Willy Loman; John Malkovich/Biff; Volker Schlondorff/director; Kate Reid/Linda Loman; Stephen Lang/Happy; Michael Ballhaus/director of photography.” Then we get Schlondorff’s speech, another summary of the film’s contents. Next we cut to Schlondorff explaining Hoffman’s daily work routine to someone, an account that offers an equally relevant inventory: he wakes up at 4 AM, spends three hours on makeup, starts to shoot at 8, works for 12 hours, then devotes 2 hours to screening the daily rushes (or “dailies,” as they’re called). He goes home at 10. (The remainder of the film focuses on the various stages of this schedule — apart from Hoffman waking up.)

Blackwood then cuts to Hoffman, who’s seated in a rocking chair and explaining, “I’ve finished my second shift. . . . We don’t want to complain on camera,” he adds, laughing self-consciously. Then he adds, equally self-consciously, “I love my work.” His fatigue and his awareness of Blackwood’s camera seem equally operative here.

On the one hand, Private Conversations often seems to “truly” document the tensions, creative decisions, deliberations, and interactions involved in filming Death of a Salesman, all of which exist independently of Blackwood and his crew. On the other hand, we often seem to be watching a spectacle staged especially for the benefit of Blackwood and his crew. And for much of the time, likely as not, no two spectators would agree on which is which.

Let’s listen to Blackwood now, speaking not in Private Conversations but about it: “On the set of John Huston’s Under the Volcano I had been very much a voyeur, observing without interfering. Hence my calling the film Observations Under the Volcano.” (This film, which I haven’t seen, will be showing tonight immediately before Private Conversations.) “In this instance, with words being essential to the play, and the objective that of translating the play into a film, there was an intense collaboration between Arthur, Volker, and Dustin. I decided to become an “eavesdropper,’ listening in on conversations between director and actors, between director and playwright. Hence the title Private Conversations.” The film’s central ambiguity can be located in the quotation marks that Blackwood places around “eavesdropping,” and what they imply.

But there are many other ambiguities. Who, for instance, is really directing Salesman? For a good bit of the time Schlondorff seems like the junior partner in a trio of directors headed by Hoffman and Miller; as executive producers, they often appear to be running the show. Between takes we sometimes see Hoffman as well as Miller indicating to other actors and one another — as well as to Schlondorff — how they think certain speeches and scenes should be performed. “You guys must decide why she comes into this room,” Hoffman instructs the other actors at one point, “even if you have to add a line.” Miller on occasion suggests alternate line readings.

The tightest bond in this trio seems to be between Miller and Hoffman. At one point, Schlondorff is literally seated at their feet while they’re sitting in chairs; and significantly, Hoffman’s urban Jewish accent as Loman often seems modeled on Miller’s. At various points during the film, Hoffman appears in silhouette speaking about the personal importance of Miller’s play to him — the fact that his father was a salesman, that the play was the first one he ever read, and that it was the first he performed in his first acting class. Such declarations intensify our sense that Schlondorff is an outsider, removed by nationality and language as well as by cultural background from the experience that links Miller and Hoffman.

One of the tensest sequences in the film occurs when Schlondorff asserts his power as director; the occasion is a confrontational scene between Biff and his father in a hotel room when Biff discovers Willy in the arms of a floozy. Schlondorff objects to the way that Hoffman and Malkovich embrace one another, which he seems to find false, or at least forced: “I’m not so sure about this mutual embracing.” Hoffman counters that the gesture is “in the play,” but then reluctantly agrees to drop it. (Malkovich isn’t heard from on the subject.) A bit later, when the scene is being replayed without the gesture, Hoffman’s voice drops, and Miller remarks, “I can’t hear what he’s saying.” Schlondorff says, “I can’t either.” Later Miller criticizes Hoffman’s performance, and Hoffman counters that he lost control over it when he was told to speak louder. Then Hoffman suggests to Miller — dropping his voice to a whisper — that cutting out the embrace, which was part of the stage production for a year and a half, is what threw him off, and that he’s still “searching for an equivalent.” Still later, Hoffman tells Schlondorff, in response to criticism, “I don’t disagree with you — I’m sure you’re right,” whether about the embrace or something else is not fully clear; he also remarks that he’s too tired at this point to be moved by Malkovich’s tears in the scene they’ve just played together.

The film abounds in little conspiracies of this kind, with the voices often dropping into confidential registers. The fact that Hoffman seems to be whispering so that Schlondorff won’t hear him, even though we do, creates a rather divided and contradictory sense of intimacy; at this moment we’re being invited into a club that excludes Schlondorff but includes anyone (including Schlondorff) who might happen to be watching Private Conversations. Later, when Hoffman is speaking to Schlondorff, it’s a club that apparently excludes Malkovich.

If my friend is right about Schlondorff’s film lacking interaction, could this be because so many interactions are taking place offstage and in between takes? Is Blackwood part of these interactions or merely a witness to them? How, in fact, is Blackwood’s film affecting Schlondorff’s?

Blackwood’s film chronicles visits to the set by Tony Randall and Werner Herzog and lots of goofing around between takes — Hoffman and Charles Durning dancing a polka together, for example. But the bulk of what we see and hear is the theory as well as the practice of translating theater into film — what the presence of cameras and microphones and the absence of an audience do to actors. Malkovich, dissatisfied with the second take of one scene, remarks, “It’s written well for a play, but for a film it’s different.” (I haven’t seen Malkovich onstage, but if the comments of friends are reliable, there’s a qualitative difference between his theater and film work, which suggests that theater may be his only real medium.) At another point Hoffman observes that film permits actors a freedom of movement they don’t have in the theater, where they always have to address the audience; but he also notes the sheer economic pressures that rule Hollywood production and tend to make multiple takes prohibitive.

In a recent TV interview, Joe Mantegna characterized acting on the stage as energizing and acting for films as draining. Certainly the cameras and microphones here, which Blackwood sometimes interposes between us and the actors, seem to have a vampiristic effect — not only on the actors but at times even on the viewer, as if the recording equipment were sucking life out of the bond that links actors and audience. Whether this process is diminished or intensified by television and video is an issue that’s never raised in Private Conversations; but considering the fact that Schlondorff’s film was made for television, it’s a question worth considering.

Introduction to the Chinese edition of ACTING IN THE CINEMA

Written in mid-February 2013 for the publication of the Chinese edition of James Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema, which is scheduled for publication in China in summer 2013. This is the second Introduction I’ve written for a Chinese translation of a Naremore book; my previous one was for More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. — J.R.

In film criticism, acting tends to be the most neglected single aspect of cinema — one that’s especially difficult to describe and also easy to confuse with other skills and effects in filmmaking, to cite only two of the reasons for its neglect. Often not knowing whose creativity and whose creative decisions are the most relevant, we easily become confounded over issues of intentionality, agency, credit, and defining precisely what it is that we’re responding to, which becomes all the more difficult due to the mythological auras that surround famous actors. The few times that I’ve tried to write about actors myself in any detail, such as Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe, Eric von Stroheim, and Charlie Chaplin, I’ve concentrated mainly on those auras, and in the case of the latter two, I’ve even found it hard to separate their acting from their writing and directing. (According to Jean-Marie Straub, one can’t even separate Chaplin’s editing from his acting, because what made him a great editor, in his opinion, was knowing precisely when a gesture began and when it ended.) Similarly, when we describe a film as “perfectly cast,” we may be praising the producer or director more than any particular actor.

The neglect of acting is equally striking in both journalistic and academic writing about film. But our expectations are somewhat different with journalistic reviewers, who are generally allowed to be impressionistic and reach for showy poetic effects without having to worry as much about specific details. This is especially true of Manny Farber and Pauline Kael, perhaps the two American film critics best known for their writing about movie actors, because what they’re usually telling us isn’t so much what such actors as James Cagney and Robert De Niro are doing as how they’re making us feel when they’re doing it, and how certain contexts determine our responses. Furthermore, Farber’s punchy, fancy, almost untranslatable prose is usually more of a performance in itself than any actor’s performance he’s writing about: “A Cagney performance under the hands of a [William] Keighley is ingrained in a tight, malignant story. One remembers it as a sinewy, life-marred exactness…” And here is Kael describing the title hero of Taxi Driver: “This man is burning in misery, and his inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. Robert De Niro is in almost every frame: thin-faced, as handsome as Robert Taylor one moment and cagey, ferrety, like Cagney, the next—and not just looking at the people he’s talking to but spying on them.”

Arguably, only in her final phrase does one find Kael describing what De Niro is actually doing, as opposed to the overall impression he gives. Both critics are trying to place performance within other expressive frameworks — stories, memories, compositions, frames — in order to make it legible, and Farber is also pretending (unnecessarily, I think) to restrict his description of Cagney to films directed by William Keighley. But consider how much concrete detail James Naremore manages to pack into his own description of Cagney over a different set of movies, made later in his career: “Middle age gave him a slight paunch, and his dancing movements were always pushed toward the grotesque; he became a mixture of urban leprechaun, stevedore, and tiny gorilla, evoking litheness and strength rather than the apish dullness of [Paul] Muni’s Scarface. He often stood with his feet in a dancer’s turnout, his torso slightly forward, his thick arms bowed in front of his body, his stubby hands curled as if ready to make a fist.”

One of the reasons why Naremore is my favorite academic film critic is that one doesn’t have to be an academic in order to read and appreciate him — even though he gives us a far more solid grounding to his observations than we can expect to find in critics such as Farber or Kael. It’s characteristic of the author’s modesty and caution that he’s already warning the reader about what his book won’t be doing in his opening sentence (“…it won’t teach anyone how to become a successful performer”), after declaring that his subject is “the art of film acting”. But even here, he’s reluctant to fully acknowledge how much of human behavior and human perception in general impinges on his topic, with the result that he has to address those matters as well.

Maybe this is because, in his own quiet way, Naremore is a bit of an actor himself, as all the best writers are. As Orson Welles, one of his favorite filmmakers, once noted of the great 19^th century novelist Charles Dickens, “Dickens was an actor — and he was not a writer who acted, he was an actor who wrote. I believe it was his real vocation.” And significantly, one of Welles’s key arguments in This is Orson Welles, his book-length conversation with Peter Bogdanovich, is that the most neglected aspect of the art of film is acting, not directing, And like his idol Welles, Naremore is also something of a magician — focusing on what he’s doing with his right hand so that we won’t always notice what his left hand is doing at the same time.

Indeed, part of what makes Acting in the Cinema such a singular achievement isn’t only that it moves from theory (in Part One) to practice (in Parts Two and Three), meanwhile offering a fairly comprehensive history of acting techniques and acting styles in relation to film. It also uses theory to give us philosophical reflections about such diverse matters as how we behave socially in the world outside films, and what we’re implicitly accepting when we watch a television news broadcast as well as a fiction feature. And when, turning to practice, Naremore analyzes seven specific film performances — starting off with Lillian Gish and Chaplin and then taking on the very wide affective and stylistic range offered by Marlene Dietrich, Cagney, Katherine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, and Cary Grant — he is also proposing how we can better understand films in their entirety rather than isolating the acting in them from other aesthetic factors. This culminates in his fascinating studies of two films, one of them a key work about spectatorship (Rear Window), the other a key work about performance (The King of Comedy), to conclude his multifaceted discussion.

But it doesn’t do justice to these two concluding chapters to characterize either of these films quite so simply. Naremore’s discussion of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s finest thrillers — immediately following his analysis of Cary Grant’s performance in another one of Hitchcock’s very best thrillers, North by Northwest -– may be the most convincing and detailed close analysis of any film to be found in Naremore’s work as a critic, and part of what’s so impressive about it is the way it draws on so many of the elements that he’s been discussing over the previous dozen chapters. He’s especially insightful, I think, about Rear Window’s “subtle commentary on the rhetoric of movie acting,” which he explores in numerous ways, drawing in some of the earlier thematic strands of his book in the process (such as the discussion of Katherine Hepburn’s “boyishness” in relation to similar traits in Grace Kelly’s character). And his following chapter about The King of Comedy, made almost three decades later, largely focuses on the film’s power and thoughtfulness as a cultural critique about media and celebrity in which the diverse performative roles and styles of De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard, and several others in the cast are prominent elements in this critique.

In short, Naremore is showing us how acting in films is merely one form of presenting one’s self in the world, so that his subject, ultimately, is about the way we live, even though, as I’ve already suggested, his tone is far too modest to admit that he’s exploring such a wide canvas. At most, he offhandedly alludes to the philosophical depth of his discussion without rubbing our noses in it, as in his introductory note to his fifth chapter, on “accessories,” subsequently subdivided into “expressive objects,” “costume,” and “makeup”: “My remarks on this theme are grouped under the vague rubric of ‘accessories,’ but my real concern is with the ways persons and inanimate materials interact, so that we cannot tell where a face or body leaves off and a mask begins.”

Consider also Naremore’s account of how incoherence can be allowed for within the coherence of “intimate social behavior” that begins his previous chapter, followed about a page later by the startling yet apt observation that children start their lives as “Brechtian actors,” performing what they don’t feel, and then become “professional” actors in the very process of doing so.

To put it even more simply, writing about acting in the cinema ultimately means writing about everything, including the very shape of our lives, both inside and outside the category of the art of cinema. It’s no wonder, then, that Naremore can describe his own work here as “one of the more difficult projects I’ve undertaken”. It’s also an exciting and fruitful starting point for many diverse investigations and explorations that his readers can take on their own.

Jonathan Rosenbaum