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Le Trio Infernal, Un Homme Qui Dort, Steppenwolf

From Oui (December 1974). – J.R.

Le Trio lnfernal. It’s the Christmas season and Michel Piccoli shoots a man in

the eye — straight through a newspaper he’s reading — while downstairs, Romy

Schneider is finishing off Andrea Ferreol with similar dispatch. The bodies are

stripped clean and plunked into adjacent bathtubs, which Piccoli promptly

fills with sulfuric acid. Mascha Gomska, Schneider’s sister — who completes the

infernal trio of murderers who slaughter people for their life insurance — barfs on

the living-room carpet, while offscreen, excited by all these gay and yummy

events, Schneider is giving Piccoli an impromptu blowjob in the bathroom. Later

on, after the bodies have decomposed, Piccoli dons a gas mask, ladles the slop

into pails, then empties the heady stew outdoors while one of the girls is shown

eating spaghetti. Excessive? This Grand Guignol comedy is nothing but, as it

chronicles the exploits of three glamorous monsters butchering their way to

wealth, with lots of kinky sex on the way. Francis Girod, a producer-turned-

director, exhibits an unusual amount of expertise in his first film. But most of

the show belongs to Piccoli, who dances through all of the Thirties décor

performing a veritable concerto of comic invention. And for sound-effects freaks,

the bathtub glop is recorded so lovingly as it gurgles into a pit that you can

almost taste it. -– JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

***

Un Homme Qui Dort. “A man who sleeps,” the title calls him. For Georges

Perec and Bernard Queysanne, the writer and director who have co-authored

this curious film, it’s a man alone — in Wordsworth’s phrase, A mind forever/

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. Word and image conspire

to create the stream-of-consciousness of a French student (Jacques Spiesser)

who, after taking his final exams, shuts himself up in his one-room flat and

freaks on himself. What we see are mainly images of Paris outside, and what

we hear — apart from electronic music with voices — is the voice of a woman

rhythmically chanting the thoughts that pass through his mind. In the

beautifully composed black-and-white photography of Bernard Zitsermann,

the whole thing looks a lot like what the French cinema was offering us ten

or fifteen years ago in films like Hiroshima, Mon Amour and [Alain Jessua’s]

Life Upside Down – long walks down deserted streets that look like lunar

landscapes, sudden surrealistic flashes (a flaming sink in a junkyard), and stray

objects turned into luminous and unsettling presences. It’s no surprise that this

film copped France’s Jean Vigo Prize this year, or that director Georges Franju

has called it “a triumph of dreamlike cinema.” The only wonder is how Perec and

Queysanne were able to squeeze so much hypnotic mileage out of so damn little.

-– J.R.

***

Steppenwolf. We’re in a decadent-looking German night club in the 1920s

where Pierre Clementi, the bandleader, plays saxophone and sings bouncy tunes

to the guests. Seated at one of the tables are Max von Sydow and Dominique

Sanda. “I don’t know how to dance,” Von Sydow remarks ruefully. “How

triste!” says Sanda sympathetically. Believe it or not, we’re back in the world

of Hermann Hesse’s famous novel. Fred Haines, who copped an Oscar nomination

for the adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses that he co-authored and helped

to produce, has been trying to get this one together for a long time. He shot

most of it in Basel with a cast and crew drawn from a dozen countries, then got

down to perfecting all the complicated trick photography involved in the Magic

Theater sequence — a central part of the Hesse novel — which utilizes paintings by

Mati Klarwein and a video-electronic-mixing contraption known as a Blue Box.

What comes out of all this heavy labor? Lots of flash, anyway. If you liked the pious

Classics Illustrated job done on Ulysses, you just might dig this one. It has the same

kind of reverence for the original source and the same sort of crazy-quilt mixture of

mainstream styles. Sanda and Clementi both seem to have a bit of trouble with their

English, but Von Sydow has his down pat and with his usual mastery gives the movie

whatever continuity it has. But if you want to understand the story, check out Hesse. — J. R.

PENTHESILEA: QUEEN OF THE AMAZON (1974 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1974 (Vol. 41, No. 491).

I must admit that the hyperbole of the last couple of sentences

here embarrasses me now. –- J.R.

Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazon

Great Britain, 1974 Directors: Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen

The film is composed of five sequences, each preceded by a

quotation. 1: “Ghost white like a not yet written page” (Mallarmé,

“Mimique” ): A mime of Kleist’s Penthesilea, filmed in long shot

from a fixed camera position. 2: “The shadows sprinkled in black

characters” (Mallarmé, “Quant au livre”): A lecture on Kleist’s

play, the myth of Penthesilea and the theoretical basis of the film,

delivered by Peter Wollen while moving about a terrace and

adjoining living room, the camera tracing an independent

trajectory within the same confined space and occasionally

approaching the index cards of notes left behind by Wollen

at various stages in his route. 3: “Blazons of phobia, seals of

self-punishment” (Lacan, after Vico): A succession of images

relating to Penthesilea and the Amazons — paintings, sculptures,

artifacts, tapestries, etc., including frames from a Wonder Woman

comic book — separated by animated wipes and maskings,

and accompanied on the soundtrack by Berio’s “Visage”.

4: “Net of light on overlight” (H.D., “Projector”): A silent film,

What 80 Million Women Want (1913), on which a woman’s

face in color is superimposed, speaking the words of feminist

Jesse Ashley. 5: “Notes on the magic writing pad” (Freud):

Four black-and-white television screens simultaneously present

The preceding sections of the film; the camera occasionally

isolates an individual screen, and similarly the soundtrack

occasionally highIights one of the preceding soundtracks;

gradually the material on the screens is replaced by new

footage of the mime actress portraying Penthesilea returning

to her dressing room, taking off her make-up, and addressing

the camera.

Fascinating overall for its investigation into alternative didactic

methods and the relationship between independently expressive

surfaces and texts, Penthesilea is far from simple going when one

confronts the opening sequence: too remote from both the mime

itself and one’s subsequent perception of the film’s general design,

it simply demands more (or less) than one can comfortably bring

to it. Once past this obstacle — an interesting and legitimate sequence

that acquires interest only after the fact — one is swiftly rewarded by

the words and camera movements of sequence #2, which beautifully

juggle sound and image, theory and practice, Wollen’s trajectory

and the camera’s in something resembling a two-part invention.

Wittiest of all are the cue cards strewn in Wollen’s path, which the

camera ‘picks up’ after him like a dutiful servant: sometimes the

words on the card duplicate an earlier part of the lecture, sometimes

the reflection of light on the cards makes the words paradoxically

illegible, and at one strange juncture — properly speaking, the only

‘fictional’ moment in the entire film — the words appear just as they

are being spoken in another room. Sequence #3 registers as a

systematic exploration into how one can arrive at an order of things

(the succession of Wonder Woman frames providing an inventory

of ways one image can follow another), while the Berio piece offsets

this with what is described.in the Autumn 1974 Screen (an interview

with Mulvey and Wollen that usefully supplements the film) as

“the ‘birth’ of a new form of language”. #4 juxtaposes two ‘texts’

in the form of superimposed images, with a historical artifact set

against a contemporary recitation of a historical document; and #5

exploits some of the Wavelength-like paradoxes of relative illusionist

surfaces (as when the camera moves into a TV screen showing

sequence #2,where the camera is also moving) while drawing all of

the previous juxtapositions and new material into fresh mixtures and

relationships. Each sequence, it must be noted, consists of two reels

‘invisibly’ joined (in the manner of Rope), and the justifications for

this non-editing are stated succinctly in Wollen’s lecture, which also

alludes to “The space between a story that is never told and a

history that has never yet been made” — that array of lecture

material around an unarticulated story that the film occupies, with

speculative past myth and speculative utopian myth developing

concurrently from the empty spaces. Curiously but perhaps

inevitably, the film’s conceptual framework somewhat overrides

the feminist theme it pursues, and the question of how one perceives

Penthesilea becomes somewhat more of a subject than the figure

herself. One recalls the structure of Godard’s One Plus One, with its

similar notion of grappling with diverse phenomena by placing them

side by side (albeit in an edited context), with the Anne Wiazemsky

question-and-answer sequence performing an expositional function

somewhat analogous to Wollen’s lecture. But One Plus One arguably

represented the end of something, while Penthesilea suggests a

beginning — a step forward in the European avant-garde that

cross-fertilizes more active currents (from the American structural

film to Tel Quel) than this review could hope to enumerate. An object

for reflection and inquiry more than a ‘finished’ statement, it is a

theoretical do-it-yourself kit –- or stated differently, an exploratory

tool –- of the first importance.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1974 (Vol. 41, No. 491).

It’s really a pity that the version of California Split that eventually came out

on DVD, due to musical clearances, had to eliminate some of the play with

Phyllis Shotwell’s songs alluded to here. (For a much later consideration of

this film, including these changes, go here.) — J.R.

CALIFORNIA SPLIT

U.S.A., 1974 Director: Robert Altman

In a poker game at a gambling casino near Los Angeles, Charlie

Waters, a winner, is accused by Lew, a sore loser, of playing in

cahoots with the dealer, Bill Denny. Bill and Charlie become

acquainted afterwards in a nearby bar and get cheerfully drunk

together; outside, they are beaten up by Lew (with the help of

friends), who makes off with their winnings. Charlie invites

Bill to stay over at his house, which he shares with two

prostitutes, Barbara and Susan. In the morning, Bill returns to

his job on a glossy magazine but is persuaded to take off that

afternoon and join Charlie at the racetrack, where they make

a small fortune on one of Charlie’s hunches. Wanting to celebrate

with Barbara and Susan, they pretend to be policemen in order to

intimidate the girls’ transvestite client “Helen” and persuade

him to leave, then go to a prizefight. Held up on their way out,

Charlie insists on giving the robber only half of his $1460. Later,

encountering Lew at the racetrack, Charlie beats him up and

recovers the money initially taken from him. Hounded by his

bookie Sparkie to pay back a debt, Bill sells a large number of

possessions and prepares to drive to Reno; Charlie, back from

a Mexican trip, persuades Bill to let him come along and

supplies some of the betting money. Remaining sober and

methodical, Bill wins a total of $82,000 at poker, blackjack

and roulette, which he splits with Charlie; then he explains

that he’s through with gambling – no longer feeling or believing

in the mystical sensation associated with a winning streak –-

and leaves for home.

Even before the title sequence starts, over the familiar Columbia

Pictures logo, California Split has already begun to chatter. A

steady rush of talk — telegraphed, overheard, sometimes barely

audible –- spills into the opening scenes like a scatter of loose change

from a slot machine, meeting and eluding our grasp in imitation of a

strictly chance operation. Admittedly the overall odds of the game

are somewhat fixed: the movie has a script, two box office favorites

and hard Hollywood money behind it. But the improvisatory spirit

is unmistakable, if only because an alert audience is obliged to ad-lib

in order to keep up, feeling its way through a conjunction of background

and foreground elements, and compelled to shift its attention as often

as the characters. At first glance a throwback to the rambling antics

of M*A*S*H; the new film in fact offers a substantially different

experience. While the former film affected to play on the audibility

range of its dialogue, it never really let the spectator miss a significant

line. McCabe and Mrs. Miller on the other hand, actually broached the

idea of a spectator mingling with a plot–discovering it in his own way, in

his own time–rather than simply following it. Altman’s conception of character

was altered in the process; the notion of collective effort in M*A*S*H became

overlaid with irony in McCabe (where the successful building of a town was

offset by the two lost figures who ran it), and virtually atomized in the

broken encounters of isolated cranks in The Long Goodbye. Much of this

fragmentation and discontinuity persists in California Split: even if the

sense of a common bond between the gambler heroes is practically all that

keeps its putative narrative going, it is ostensibly determined and then

severed by the arbitrary whims of chance, and continually interwoven

with the jabbering world of compulsive night people around them.

For the first time in Altman, there is no moral judgment of the

behavior occurring within this absurdist framework: the respective

introverted and extroverted styles of Segal and Gould are presented

in their own terms, as they play against one another, and interpretations

are left to the viewer’s discretion. The interest of these styles is based

on a kind of existential suspense common to jazz and bullfighting,

where identity/authenticity is prodded, tested and revealed by outside

pressures requiring some sort of accommodation — whether it’s winning,

losing, betting, being robbed, seduced (an extraordinary scene between

Gwen Welles and Segal), interrupted (as, in the same scene by Ann

Prentiss), or otherwise challenged. Altman’s establishment of this climate

largely derives from the chance encounters staged by his soundtracks

through the intervention of an ‘independent’ text, achieving some of its

jazziest effects here through Phyllis Shotwell’s raunchy delivery of (mainly)

of-screen tunes. In the second scene at the local casino, a song begins

loudly over the poker players in long shot, recedes to a murmur overtaken

by these players in medium shot, then regains volume with a close-up of

Segal –- playing with an audience’s diverse routes into the scene. The

lyrics usually have only the broadest relation to the action, but sometimes

they draw closer in witty surprises: “I’m goin’ to Kansas City’, is heard

over the trip to Reno, and after the heroes arrive, Shotwell’s and Gould’s

wholly independent raps suddenly converge on the word ”nobody”.

Gould’s verbal cadenzas embody this spirit throughout, for Charlie is an

aggressive loudmouth forced to justify his vulgarity with inventiveness and

virtuosity, while Segal plays, as it were, a sort of inner-fire Miles Davis to

Gould’s Charlie Parker. A similar contrast is afforded by the respective ‘hard’

and ’soft’ styles of Prentiss and Welles, each as remarkable as the other. After

the more simplistic formal conjunctions of Thieves Like Us, Altman’s

touching demonstration that he can pursue a linear plot as such when he

wants to — the life of the latest film is motored by a series of gambles taken

for their own sake. Perhaps the most notable carry-over is the scenes of

awkward domesticity: the polyphonic dinners of Thieves are matched by

Charlie and Bill’s wonderful breakfast of Froot Loops, Lucky Charms and

beer. The mottled lighting schemes of bars and gambling dens exploit the

Notion of competing centers of attention, and what might first appear as a

loose construction of gags is in fact a packed surface composed of many

constantly shifting parts. In short, the charges already brought against

California Split for formlessness suggest a grammatical problem more than

a real one: its triumphant achievement –- and Altman’s — is to change form

from a noun into a verb.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM