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Declarations of Independents: Tenant Filmgoing

From The Soho News (May 20-26, 1981). I’m sorry that I still haven’t managed to see Vermont in 3 1/2 Minutes, a 1963 film made by a childhood friend of mine — and that I haven’t been able to find any more illustrations for the small-gauge films that I wrote about here….My expressed feeling of solidarity with Squeeze Play was no doubt inflected by the fact that I was living in Hoboken at the time. — J.R.

May 8: At Anthology Film Archives, to see a program in “Home Made Movies: 20 Years of American 8mm and Super-8 Films” — an intriguing and varied series selected by Jim Hoberman that runs through the end of next month, warmly recommended to everyone without money who nurtures fantasies about taking over the media. I learn straight away that Linda Talbot’s Vermont in 3 1/2 Minutes is being replaced by Bear and Jane Brakhage’s Peter’s Dream, a title glossed by Jonas Mekas as referring to Peter Kubelka.

This reminds me of a somewhat troubled notion that first reared its inglorious head when I had the occasion to view all the films in the Whitney’s previous Biennial. The idea is simply that a surprising number of North American avant-garde films seem to center on the same general obsession as The Deer Hunter or Manhattan — namely, a boastful inventory of male possessions: This is my hometown, my house, my rifle, my dog, my Bolex, my woman, my art.

In the case of Peter’s Dream, all I actually see (which is plenty for me) is a dog and a deer playing together -– very agreeable color footage about what appear to be no one’s possessions, which leads me to regard the title as a not-very-useful encumbrance between me and the movie, however useful it might be for certain others. And when it comes to the main attraction, Paula Gladstone’s mainly black-and-white, hour-long The Dancing Soul of the Walking People, possession and dispossession both happily become very much beside the point.

Shot over a two-year period, 1974-76, in super-8, each time the filmmaker went home to Coney Island (“I’d take my camera out and walk from one end of the land to the other,” she reports in Camera Obscura No. 6; “I’d talk to people on the streets and film them.”) The Dancing Soul of the Walking People is basically concerned with the space underneath a boardwalk, a little but like the insides of a translucent zebra on a sunny day – an interesting kind of space, at once public and private, that is traversed by receding stripes of light, camera pans, and people, in fairly continuous processions and/or rhythmic patterns.

Playing against these traversals is the repeated sound of galloping hoofs, some lyrical jazz arrangements (Duke Ellington with a scat singer, George Russell, Anthony Braxton, Stravinsky’s Firebird rearranged by Alice Coltrane), “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters, conversation about Coney Island, and some funky black and male-oriented poetry, written a d read by Gladstone – more material, in short, that’s merely passing through.

Unfortunately, due the film’s being wound on a single reel, the music seems to undergo a kind of slow-motion distortion that seems comparable to the slightly dreamlike, underwater crawl of the images –- a funny effect when, say, harp glissandos on the soundtrack seem to go with the mottled stripes. But the kind of visual taffy-pull drift that characterizes most of the film can turn into a kind of ecstatic contemplation when it focuses on two little boys tossing up clouds of sand – magical emanations that are partially separated by jump cuts. It’s nice to see how Gladstone, like those kids, can be structural and nonpossessive at the same time.

May 10: At Loew’s Astor Plaza, I go to see Squeeze Play, a low-key, likable, dumb softcore farce that places its economic cards and cultural alliances right on the table in the opening shot. We start off with a broad view of the Manhattan skyline. “There are 10,000 stories in the big city,” intone the brooding announcer. “This isn’t one of them,” he adds –and the camera pans abruptly across the Hudson to where it’s actually stationed, in New Jersey.

Usually offering about one good-natured, witless gag per shot (“Djever hear about the rabbi who went to a monastery and became a shmonk?”) while concerning itself with a group of women forming a softball team of their own To Get Back at the Guys, Squeeze Play isn’t so very far from an entry in the English Carry On series. It’s the kind of sub-Animal-House romp where a detective has a steel-plated jockstrap (to protect him from pugnacious females), a little girl advises her big sister, “Let your tits do the talkin’, Sis,” and there’s a cut from some offscreen fellatio to an onscreen dairy custard dispenser at work.

The relaxing thing about the friendly, unassuming anonymity of a movie like Squeeze Play is that you don’t really care two beans about whether it’s “good” or not. It’s a vacation from the world of winners and losers, and the energetic cast of nobodies seems to know that, too. Nobody has to be anything “special”. “Our movies are not the sort of things critics can go out and discover,” coproducer and director of photography Lloyd Kaufman said to a New York Times business reporter last month, after showing this Jersey-made Troma production all around the U.S. for a year and a half. (New York is the last stop these days for a lot more than European art movies.) “They’re not about people discussing Vietnam,” he added. So saying that I enjoyed Squeeze Play might sound like a breach of profession, but there it is.

***

I head downtown for another program in Hoberman’s Home Movie show at Anthology. Here the question of possession gets posed again, a bit differently, by Manuel De Landa’s super-8, eight-minute color and silent Ismism (1977-79), which – as De Landa explained when I saw this film last, at the Collective – documents part of his graffiti-making activity in Manhattan. Most of this is the assembly via montage of verbal messages spread out cryptically and sequentially across the city, a word or phrase at a time, e.g., “USE/ILLEGAL/SURFACES/FOR/YOUR/ART’ and “LET THE SLANG/OF YOUR DRIVES/DRIVE LANGUAGE CRAZY.” The rest links the surreal disfigurements of diverse street posters advertising cigarettes (e.g., fleshy lips drawn over the eyes of the models). In both cases, the linkages of the film itself create a certain knowledge that’s the exclusive possession of people watching the film -– a hidden unity denied to mere pedestrians.

This brings me to the nub of a contradiction about the avant-garde: that the experience it offers is commonly one of dispossession – what the Russian formalists call “making strange,” and Jacques Rivette describes as a plunge into horror, like discovering the death of someone one has loved – while the situation most often affording this experience is one of inside knowledge, which suggests precisely the reverse in social terms (i.e., the possession of art that comes from being initiated).

This is the problem that ultimately grounds me when it comes to other filmmakers in this program –- Ericka Beckman’s very Landowish super-8 White Man Has Clean Hands (1977) and a set of 8mm Landow shorts made between 1962 and 1965. Films that are as contextual in their own terms as most of network television – and consumable, unlike De Landa’s films, only after one has absorbed their titles and/or catalogue descriptions – they can’t belong to the casual viewer (me, in this case), even when they achieve the relatively direct address of Landow’s Not a Case of Lateral Displacement (1964), which focuses on an open skin infection. (“This is my wound.”)

***

May 11: A press show of Outland – a serviceable English sci-fi spectacular, written and directed by Peter Hyams, which pits good cop Sean Connery against mercenary racketeer Peter Boyle in an ore-mining station on Jupiter. The handsomely designed Panavision look of this movie — from planet and satellites to surface landings to sexy machines to a milky-white disco bar lit from below – derives mainly from Kubrick, and helps to compensate for the even more derivative plot and dialogue, which stems basically from hunger (and a few action warhorses like High Noon by way of Dirty Harry).

The basic idea of Outland -– if you can call it an idea –- is that a cop on assignment at the stinko Con-Am compound on Jupiter learns, with the aid of a cranky female doctor named Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), that a lot of workers have been going crazy because they’ve been given lethal amphetamines that make them work more before they flip out. Actually, this qualifies mainly as framework; the real meat of the movie is industrial design –- like the workers’ meshed-in dorm berths, which resemble the set of the Living Theater’s production of Frankenstein –- and fancy technology, both of which stake a bigger claim on one’s attention and interest than any of the people.

“Such a lot of smart equipment here, and a wreck like me to run it,” Sternhagen notes apologetically and ruefully at one point; and one wonders, indeed, who got paid more, the actress or the set designer. There’s also a virtual cameo by Kika Markham –- a plucky, beautiful actress who might be recalled from Truffaut’s Two English Girls and Rivette’s Noroît –- as Connery’s wife, who decides to split from Jupiter with their son in the first reel, and appears thereafter only in televised messages – thereby assigning more romantic interest to the spiffy message transmitter and receiver, which lands a juicier part.

***

May 12: A press show for “Filmworks ’81,” six programs of independent films selected by Regina Cornwall for presentation at The Kitchen on May 21, 22, and 23. Tom Brener’s Pilotone Study I (1976) – to be shown at 8 on the 21^st with Tim Burns’ Australian underground feature Against the Grain, which I already reviewed (unfavorably) in these pages three months ago — is a lovely 12-minute study of a rural autumn landscape, no heavy ideas but some great russet tones.

Spaced out in quasi-structural terms between stationary and moving medium and long shots within each segment, with a beep sounding over each splice, the film proceeds from leaves (raking, burning) to highway (with passing cars) to the dance of a friendly dog behind a fence in relation to the unseen photographer — eventually winding up with some more raking and burning of leaves, at night, the sky modulating between lavender and orange behind silhouetted trees. So far as I can see, no possessions anywhere.

Lisa Gottlieb’s Murder in a Mist (May 22 at 8, with films by Amy Taubin and Karyn Kay) is a half-hour of well-crafted low-budget fun — a black-and-white film noir shot last year, with every last lurid detail and period effect of the genre lovingly spelled out. (The setting is 1952, Chicago.) Its only real twist is that its Chandleresque detective is a tough blonde, Meg Hammer (Joyce Hazzard), who relishes hardboiled quips like, “Relax, Sylvia, you can’t eat the Venetian blinds” and, addressing all the bad guys she’s holding up, “All of you take out your peckers and hold them tight.”

The plot of Murder in a Mist (script by Gottlieb from a Henry Beard story) is about a heroin ring that gets novices hooked via a female hygiene spray — a much better idea than anything dreamed up for Outland. Fabulous 16mm photography by Jeff Juir, in dingy places that are gorgeously lit. In contrast with the Brener movie, this is about nothing but possessions, done in the manner of a resume, with an eye clearly aimed straight at Hollywood — but, paradoxically, I like it, too. It’s make a perfect short to go with Gloria.

Tim Bruce’s 26-minute Corrigan, Having Recovered (1979) (May 21 at 8, with Adam Brooks’ Ghost Sisters) reminds me of various 16mm English art school student films I’ve seen – neat, programmatic, intelligent, interesting, a little dull. More structural ideas, based here on intersecting narratives (including a modernist music rehearsal) and adjacent spaces.

Regarding two punky (as opposed to punk) super-8 features – Betty Sussler’s Menage (to be shown at 10:15 on the 21^st) and Adam Brooks’ Ghost Sisters (see above) – I can only note with fairness that they came at the end of an afternoon devoted to enjoying the previous films, which tended to reduce my tolerance for anything else. The camera work on the latter film (some of it by none other than Jonathan Demme) is very graceful, the choice of T-shirts extremely unwitty, the soundtrack sufficiently muffled to suggest a ghost of a movie – say, a very low-energy Celine and Julie Go Boating, which is really a contradiction in terms.

Due to projection problems and fatigue, I see only the first half of Menage — a creepy film about a real-life English couple who went on a torture and killing spree with random victims in the 60s, armed with proto-Nazi visions. Most blood-curdling of all is the disturbing effect created by keeping all the violence and gore off-screen, although the sounds of people being tortured (or imitations of such) on tape are dwelt upon at length. The dialogue – much of it off-screen or out of sync – is deliberately stagy, in the manner of Straub and Huillet. Proceed at your own risk; personally, I felt evicted.

The “Presents” of Michael Snow

I conducted two interviews with Michael Snow in the early 1980s. The first of these, commissioned by Film Comment’s Richard Corliss (who sent me to Toronto in order to do it), was about Snow’s film Presents and ran in the magazine’s May-June 1981 issue. The second, which will be posted on this site at a later date, was commissioned by Simon Field’s excellent English magazine Afterimage. Both of these interviews were delightful experiences for me, and I feel privileged to have been treated by Snow during this period as a friend. (For a short while, I used to visit him once a year, whenever I came to the Toronto International Film Festival, and loved getting stoned with him — and then, most often, going to Chinatown for dinner.) —J.R.

The “Presents” of Michael Snow

A Breathless Intro

Lower Manhattan, 1981, the opening of a Canadian gallery, the onset of spring. Michael Snow’s photography/sculpture show at The 49th Parallel commences with Plus Tard (1977) – twenty-five lovely photographs, blurred and/or in focus, composing a critical/narrative tour of landscape paintings by the Group of Seven in Canada’s National Gallery. I speak to Snow for the first time since last June, when we met at a publication party for Regina Cornwell’s Snow Seen: The Films and Photographs of Michael Snow (PMA Books, $19.95); the second time since accidentally encountering him in Toronto in fall ‘78, when he invited me to attend one of his regular sessions with his free jazz group, CCMC; the third and fourth times since the Edinburgh Festival in late summer ’75 and ’76, when he premiered his last two films.

Toronto, Snow’s birthplace (1929) and home, two days later, same spring. En route from the airport to the Funnel – an experimental hangout where I’m meeting Snow again to look at his brand new movie – I stop off at the Eaton Centre, a gigantic enclosed mall downtown, to look at Flight Stop (1979), a photographic sculpture by Snow that I’ve just learned about in Cornwell’s book. Extended over about six stories, this arresting narrative cluster of sixty fiberglass geese landing (each one suspended from three wires, a few swaying in the mall’s quiet currents) prepares me for the multiple studies in motion that compose Presents.

It’s hard to know what to expect at this stage of Snow’s career. Initially, an epic trilofy devoted to inexorable camera movement redefines the shape and terrain of certain genres. The zoom in Wavelength (1967) poses and “solves” a philosophical mystery in a loft. The accelerating swivel-pans in Back and Forth (1969) teach a phenomenological lesson in a classroom. And the 360º, computer-directed, peopleless landscape pans of La Région Centrale (1971) – a film that, as Annette Michelson points out (in “About Snow,” October #8, Spring 1979), “gives new meaning to the notion of science fiction” – pursues and delineates a grand adventure.

Then a 260-minute, encyclopedic investigation of sound called “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) seemingly leads Snow’s film work to an impasse of exhaustion, in more ways than one. (Previously this work has also included such varied experimental forays as New York Eye and Ear Control in 1964, One Second in Montreal in 1969, and the two-screen, recto-verso Two Sides to Every Story in 1974.)

Seven years of filmic silence follow, broken only by the completion in 1976 of Breakfast (Table Top Dolly), started in ’72 –- a fifteen-minute hoot about the conversion of a painterly still life of groceries into gooey garbage by an advancing camera fronted by see-through plastic (a process dramatically unveiled only at the end, when the tracks become visible).

*****

Presents of Mind

Not surprisingly, Presents (dated 1980, but completed in February 1981)  builds on all this preceding work. I watch it with Snow, who’s been busy lately with complications arising from the unlikely and (we hope) momentary banning of Presents and “Rameau’s Nephew” by the Ontario censor board, which has lately required independent 16mm filmmakers to submit their works for inspection. (Presents has already had a successful appeal.)

The last times I was bold and foolhardy enough to write about Snow films after single viewings (see my Edinburgh coverages in Sight and Sound, Winter 1975-76 and 1976-77), I was also careful enough to mark my observations as tentative. The same goes double for what follows.

1. For about ten minutes, a very thin white vertical line against black widens to become a composition of a nude stretched out in a Goya-like pose on a sofa, in a dressing room of light blue and deep dirty pink, then flattens into a horizontal line, then stretches vertically again. During these transformations, the model stirs and moves about, and an organ-like drone meanwhile shifts to higher and lower frequencies.

2. For about twenty minutes, in sync sound, the dressing room becomes part of a set and the model becomes an actress. After putting on a robe and slippers and calling out “Just a minute!” she goes through a door at the right; the entire set slides laterally to the left as she crosses a very artificial-looking living room to the front door. (The motor moving the set is quite audible.) A man enters with a bouquet of flowers, and proceeds to count very slowly as she says, “I’ll put them in a vase.” The set then moves right to left as she returns to the bedroom, offers to put on a record, and selects a Bach unaccompanied cello suite.

The man continues to count and the set continues to heave noisily back and forth, to the accompaniment of more gleefully tortured dramaturgy: the needle on the record skips about wildly, the walls and furniture quiver and shake, and papers and other objects fall to the floor while the woman looks for something which she finally finds and shows to the man — a picture-like rectangle we can’t see. Then, in the foreground, she closes a theatrical stage curtain, blocking our view of the two-room set.

Ellipsis; the curtains reopen. Bach is still heard. The man is seated frontally at the table, the woman looking over his shoulder at the rectangle. Over a desk against the back wall, the credits of the film are visible, as they were in the last scene. Then, like an avenging movie monster, the heretofore motionless camera suddenly invades this already disheveled space, proceeding randomly this way and that — demolishing whatever lies in its path in an orgy of slapstick destruction. Its presence (and that of Snow behind it) is intermittently reflected in a transparent plastic shield seven feet wide (”a kind of surrogate lens,” Snow calls it) that is doinga ll this damage. A table collapses, loud painful squeaks and synthetic squeals are heard, a sofa is torn asunder, a dummy TV rattles to the junk-strewn floor….

3. For about an hour, one watches approximately 2,000 successive shots, all of them hand-held camera movements executed in relation to a wide variety of stationary or moving subjects: buildings, people, animals, birds, vehicles, places, objects; a caribou hunt, a hip operation. Virtually as many climates and terrains are seen as kinds of motion, and a few subjects — like a metal ball and the film’s credits — have already been seen in (2). Ecah shot begins with a loud drumbeat (it sounds like a snare). Eventually, there’s an accelerating drumroll over a shot of pure red that concludes the film.

After the movie, Snow drives me and a friend of his, Peggy Gale (curator of A Space, a Toronto gallery), to a palatial restaurant in Chinatown, where a few of the dishes are dated (”like works in a gallery,” he notes with a chuckle), and where we procced to eat and talk, mainly about Presents.

*****

There’s Snow Business Like Show Business

Why such a long pause between “Rameau’s Nephew” and Presents?

Well, mostly because I was recovering. I was really hard to do “Rameau’s Nephew” — it sound slike i’m asking for sympathy or something — and when I finished it, I thought, as a lot of filmmakers probably do or maybe they don’t, why would anybody go through that? (Laughs.) You know, it’s really horrible. So it took me a little while to forget that part of it, and I was soon thinking about what else I would like to do, but I didn’t feel like going through it.

It’s funny that Presents is the only one of your films with the running time of a conventional feature. It could prove to be accessible than the others, too.

It also has popular subjects: sex and violence.

Autobiography also seems to play a certain role, especially in the third part, which can be read as a chronicle of your travels.

I think there’s inevitably something diaristic about the fact that you’re going to carry a camera around with you, so that makes the last part partly a background to the first part. It’s a background that’s very wide, but it does include a very small amount that could be said to be autobiographical or diaristic.

It gives a kind of romantic quality to the film that’s very different for me from your other films.

Don’t you think the other ones are romantic?

Well, I’ve just been reading Regina Cornwell’s book, which contrasts you with the romanticism of Brakhage.

Don’t you think this one is like Wavelength?

The beginning certainly made me think of it.

I hope it isn’t like it in the sense that it isn’t different. (Laughs.) But it sort of reminds me of it.

In what way?

Wavelength starts wide  and goes to one thing which has wide implications. As far as the space in the image is concerned, that’s what it does. Whereas this one starts narrow and goes wide — for the same sorts of reasons, I think to myself, anyway.

By wide, do you mean spatially?

Yeah, and in terms of references.

*****

Prescience

How did you get that effect at the beginning of going from a vertical line to a horizontal one?

It was done with video, but I can’t remember the name of the machine.

Just as Plus Tard made me think of art criticism, there’s an art history aspect to your opening image — it’s so painterly.

Peggy Gale: There’s the literal Goya, but there’s also many more implied references. Lots of those.

Snow: In the beginning, when it becomes a rectangle in the middle of the black, there’s very much a feeling about it as a picture, isn’t it? Not necessarily a painting, but the isolation….I think when she moves there’s something terrific about it, I don’t know what it is. She looks back, and she’s so small in the picture. Since it’s gone through a few transformations, it’s a very artificial image. You don’t really believe in the space of the room or in her as a person, it’s very much a picture. And when she moves, it’s a moving picture! (Laughs.)

The layout of the set reminds me a lot of early slapstick — not only the Marx Brothers, but something like Chaplin’s One A.M., where every stock of furniture and prop is used in some way. Everything becomes part of the action.

One of the reasons for moving the set was to get everything into the act. I’ve tried to solve that in a lot of different ways, but if you just have a fixed shot in a fiction film where you watch the protagonists, all you do is take note of the surroundings, it’s not in the picture, really.

I like the idea, too, which seems similar to Breakfast, that by using things, you use them up at the same time.

That it, yeah. It flattens it on the screen. The second part is a kind of realism that’s operating on something that’s artificial. because you do feel that things are resistant — they break and squeeze and squash.

I drove the dolly in that section, and I had a whole course in mind — where I was going to go, what speed, and so on. but I couldn’t really rehearse it, because I’d smash everything….The first thing that happened changed everything. I planned to push against the table very slowly, and was going to push them back as I moved the table and gradually go past them. And the first thing that happened was, the top of the table came out — which is fabulous. I think it’s really beautiful. But it scared the shit out of me, and I didn’t know what to do after that. I had to keep on plowing–

I’m reminded of the table in “Rameau’s Nephew”.

That’s right. In fact, this is connected to “Rameau’s Nephew” in a lot of ways. I wished I’d had enough money to make two sets, to shoot two versions of it. That’s the only time in a film I’ve completely made the image. In the past I’d always assembled the sets, but in this case I designed and built everything.

It’s probably the closest you’ve come to theater as well. That’s even accentuated when the camera invades the space on the stage.

That’s true. in the first part of the movement, this lateral movement which is parallel to the picture plane is done over and over again, which I think sets that up as something that’s maybe not an obstacle, but you recognize that there’s a plane by that movement.

*****

Snow White

All through those hunting-for-caribou shots in the Arctic, I kept thinking of tracking, of puns on tracking.

That’s right. And shooting. In fact, all those terms, like trucking, too. It’s all pretty self-referential- referential both to itself and to film in general.

Do you go to see movies often?

I don’t go to see hardly any movies. It’s really unfortunate, because there are a lot of good things at the Funnel. What was the last movie I saw? Well, there was Le Gai Savoir – I went to see that because a couple of people I read said “Rameau’s Nephew” was like Le Gai Savoir, or vice versa. They are quite similar, actually, for real specific ideas.

The last sort of commercial film I saw must have been Barry Lyndon.

Gale: Heavens.

Snow: No, I saw Close Encounters. That’s very good.

Gale: What ever brought you to see that?

Snow: I only go if someone says, “Let’s go to the movies.”

It’s surprising in a way that you’re continuing with camera movements, after reaching the end of certain possibilities in La Région Centrale. But Presents obviously takes this in a different direction.

Well, moving the subject is one thing, and it’s the reverse of camera movement. And I guess I just really thought I’d try to face up to try to do something with hand-held movement, and find some way to build with it. Maybe because I hadn’t done it before.

Did you have certain editing principles worked out before you shot anything?

Yes — I was looking for certain things, and I was going to try to work with the subjects, but also kinds of space and kinds of movement, like curves, ups and downs — to work with that. And the principle I had was to try to have whatever method that would isolate or individuate each shot as much as possible, and make as little commentary on the cut as possible, except in terms of space — so that, for example, it would jump from being a deep space thing to being a surface thing.

I tried to stay away from too many ironic commentaries of one shot following another. The thing was, as i got going, that set up too much of a system, and I had to say now I was going to break that system. And I wanted to make a fairly even dispersal of all the material I had so that the connections would be made over long periods of time. Yet that also became too much of a pattern, so I had to cluster and then say I wasn’t going to cluster. It was a strange editing job.

*****

Lurid Parenthesis

I was curious about your use of pinups and material like that, women’s bodies as objects.

Bodies as objects: how do you mean that?

Like that page from a girly magazine.

There is that one shot. It seems to stand out in your memory, it’s nice, isn’t it? (Laughs.)

There are a lot of walking women. But men aren’t photographed in the same way that women are.

No. Should they be?

It’s just that I accept the relationship between the shots in the last part being mainly formal, but there are times when the content seems more important.

Oh, well I was trying to work with content, obviously. Certainly the shots are loaded, and they interrelate to produce different kinds of meanings that I was interested in.

Gale: All the women are lush beauties with a fleeting reality, just as the birds are poignant.

Snow: There are so many shots of women, it’s really funny when that stands out, because there are some rather elderly ladies, and lots of shots of women doing work of various kinds. It is a panorama, you know, and that aspect of looking at women is important, because I look at women, and so do other men, and so do women. And it certainly seems that in the beginning of the film, that’s established as a subject.

*****

Gravelength

Part of the tracking idea.

Sure. I mean, looking can be said to be tracking. (Laughs.) I used to think sometimes of the camera as being something that sucked as opposed to shot. And there is something to do with death in the taking of photographs. The images live on another level now, but they really are, in the other terms, ghosts.

You’ve played some before with parodying conventional narrative-illusionist cinema, especially in Wavelength, but you seem to go all the way here.

I think it’s in the title, too. You could say that the second section is entertainment — it uses industry methods in a way — whereas the third one doesn’t, so there’s some kind of discussion between them.

Studio versus location.

Right, and staging as opposed to finding, documentary as opposed to constructing.

There seem to be a few rhyming effects, like the bookshelves and the metal ball and the credits in both parts. Is it ever made clear what the woman is looking for?

You never get to see it. It’s just a screen-proportion rectangle that she hands to him when I tell her to pan.

And there’s a kind of rhyming effect between the man counting in the second part and the drumbeats in the third.

In the first part, the image itself is manipulated and malleable, and so is the sound. It was done with a computer synthesizer that actually does squeeze and stretch, just the same as the image. Then the second section has sync sound — and with that record there’s an interesting kind of sync: what happens to the music is what happens on screen. I think when you have acoustic music or music in which you can recognize the instrument, you tend to see the instrument, so it’s an image too in a way. (Makes a bowing movment with right hand.) And the drumbeat is a very aggressive thing. It would really be very different without that — a flow. The shots wouldn’t be separated.

Another way of approaching the sound is that it’s involved in the ways that there are of making things. There really are only three ways. one of them is to manipulate, mold, pull or stretch any mass of given material. The other ways are subtracting or adding.

I’ve always been interested in the relationship drugs have had to your films. Do they play some role for you in conceptualizing them?

Yes, I’ve always found them inspiring, and still do. We in the CCMC have felt that way — drugs and music are obviously something that go back for centuries and centuries.

They’ve always seemed somehow connected to the presentness and present tense of film.

That’s something wonderful about the music, that it’s amongst the most present kind of experiences that I’ve ever gone through, in that you’re in the middle of something, the wake of which you reccgnize and say, “Oh yes, that’s the arrangement of things,” but you’re moving ahead in time, and you’re partly making the thing that you’re in, but you don’t know where it’s going, so you’re situated right on this spot (gestures with hands), and you can’t control it either totally, so it’s totally present action in relation to this thing that’s moving.

*****

Better Red Than Dead

It seems that the more involved you’ve gotten with film, the more that your other works — like Plus Tardor your photographic book Cover to Cover – suggest film. Flight Stop, for instance, made me think a lot of stop-frames.

It’s true. You’re the first person who’s ever mentioned that, but it seems to me that it’s very cinematic — it’s animation that’s dispersed, because it’s always separate.

Are the red books on the shelf in the second part of Presents the sayings of Chairman Mao?

No- I don’t know what they are. There’s a lot of Communist reference in the parade in the third part. That was May Day in Breslau, Poland.

How do you see that relating to the rest of the film?

Well, the red theme comes up in the first section. And then it keeps on, and there’s a lot of red in it.

I meant the political aspect of it.

It’s just to do with red. By the time you’ve seen that full-screen red at the end, I would think it might contain all the symbolism of red, because there are references to a lot of uses of red in the film.

What countries was the film shot in?

Italy, Poland, Belgium, Holland, England and Canada. Of course it’s several different cities or places in each country.

I was interested in the parts where you were less in control of the movements — like following all the different kinds of cats walking, where they’re dictating the movement of the camera by what they’re doing.

That’s one reason why I was interested in the birds, because they’re a little bit more erratic, and they also make a small spot in the entire frame — like some that are very far away, and I’m following that. But you can’t tell why they’re going to go, so it’s really interesting, trying to shoot them. Some cameramen, like this guy Graham Ferguson, tells me he keeps the other eye open when he’s looking through the camera. I’ve tried that, I can never get it down — I always close one eye, so I’m always down to that one field, and if it goes out of the field, there’s no way.

I guess that’s when it really becomes tracking something down.

Yes. A lot of those birds are predators, they’re hawks.

Gate: They were tracking, too.

Snow: In Flight Stop, it was pretty weird. I had these geese killed and I used one of them, I photographed it all around the body and then on both sides of the wings and around the head and all that. And then we made the bodies out of fiberglass, and put the photographs back on. But obviously it doesn’t work, you know, you can’t put this two-dimensionalized three-dimensional thing back on. So we had to make these patterns, it was just like making a suit — all these things had to be fitted together.

What kind of responses have you had to it?

Fantastic. Everyone seems to like it, from the esthetes to the just folks — it’s really amazing.

In actual area, it’s probably your largest work. Are there any shots inside that mall, Eaton Centre, in Presents?

Yes, there’s one very, very fast one.

–Film Comment, May-June 1981

Review of MOVING PLACES by Nancy Rothstein

The following review of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980), signed by one Nancy Rothstein and entitled “Placing Movies”, appeared in the May-June 1981 issue of Film Comment. In point of fact, this was written by me, with the full knowledge and complicity of editor Richard Corliss, following precedents in the same magazine that had by then already been set by Robin Wood (criticizing his own book on Alfred Hitchcock under the name George O. Kaplan in an article entitled “Lost in the Wood”) and, unless my memory is now deceiving me, by Raymond Durgnat (although I no longer remember any of the specific details in Ray’s case). To be fair, Robin took on his own disguise in order to express some of his own serious misgivings about Hitchcock’s Frenzy. My own motives were somewhat more mercenary, or at least self-promotional; at this point, Moving Places had received very few reviews anywhere, and the publisher, Harper & Row, not only wouldn’t advertise the book but also wouldn’t allow me to do so at my own expense.

I figured that the specific challenge of creating a fictional reviewer (”Nancy Rothstein is working on a book about the Hollywood careers of Eisenstein, Brecht, and Renoir,” read the note in Contributors) made the exercise more interesting than it would have been otherwise. In any case, some of my more attentive readers may notice that a few snippets of Nancy’s prose and ideas were eventually recycled into my own “Looking Back at Moving Places” 13 years later, for the book’s second edition (University of California Press, 1995). I also made a conscious effort to incorporate some of the best unpublished comments that my book had received by then — including those from Paul Schmidt (in his original reader’s report for the publisher, quoted and/or paraphrased in the second paragraph) and Gilbert Adair (in a letter to me about the book, paraphrased in the fifth and penultimate paragraphs) — and I also borrowed a few of the film-related memories of Sandy Flitterman, with whom I was living at the time, and mixed them up with some of my own. For the record, though, by far the most interesting and insightful review this book has ever received has been Adrian Martin’s lengthy consideration of it together with Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, in the December 1995 issue (no. 107) of Cinema Papers (”The Gloves Come Off,” 14-17, 55). –J.R.

Placing Movies

by Nancy Rothstein

Moving Places: A Life at the Movies by Jonathan Rosenbaum, 280 pp., illustrations, index, Harper & Row/Colophon, $5.95 paper, $11.95 hardcover.

The challenging thing about this interesting idiosyncratic memoir is that one really doesn’t know where to place it. As a film critic’s exuberant, show-offy foray into belles lettres, it seems quite consciously a bew of unholy alliances. There’s an application of William Faulkner to Carl Dreyer in the prologue, a transition from J.D. Salinger to Sherwood Anderson (by way of James Dean) in the third chapter, and a mixture of Plato and Fritz Lang in the fifth.

An amalgam of autobiography, cultural history, socio-political critique, and aesthetic manifesto, Moving Places largely proceeds from the premise that when we see a movie, the place in time and space and the moment in our age and consciousness determine, to a great extent, what the film means to us. On the face of it, this is just common sense, although it isn’t an approach that animates much contemporary film criticism (even though Stanley Cavell addresses the subject in The World Viewed, an onthology of film). While reading a book is a private process that catches us up in a flow of imaginary time, “reading” a film is something else again — something much closer to a social act that moves us through imaginary spaces filled with real people and things.

Jonathan Rosenbaum’s own context as a spectator is far from ordinary. As the grandson of a Polish Jew who ran a chain of movie theaters in northern Alabama, his movie conditioning has a number of close familial links which are explored in some detail. In keeping with the technology of the non-fiction novel, he interviews former theater employees, ponders old ads and theater programs, and even explores the melodramatic death of a house manager which may or may not have been film-related. About two dozen photographs — of the theaters, ads,  members of Rosenbaum’s family, another house manager, and the Frank Lloyd Wright house he grew up in –are effectively integrated in the text, giving the reader something to ponder over as well.

One literary subgenre that is suggested in spots is the eclectic detoxification journal, as exemplified by Jean Cocteau’s Opium, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and the lovesick Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo or Letters Not About Love.In the course of a reference to Poe, Rosenbaum declares that the writing of his book is “gradually detoxifying and curing” him of movies “by providing some sort of methadone of the mind.” This process seems to run parallel to his numerous references to stopping smoking while writing the book, which brings up another literary subgenre that Moving Places surely belongs to: the book-about-writing-a-book.

By inserting the very process of researching the past into his narrative, Rosenbaum generates the impression that the book itself is “moving,” along with the reader’s mind and eye — a kind of “cinematic” immediacy that possibly owes as much to jazz as it does to the movies. For every discovery made about the past, the present self is altered, and conversely, every change in the present affects the remembered self, so that none of the material comes to us from a position of lofty, privileged recollection. For this reason, Moving Places, unlike most film books, should be read consecutively. (Only the penultimate chapter — a lecture given at the Venice Biennale — can be followed as a self-contained unit.)

There’s almost as much ironic distance on the author writing the book as there is on Rosenbaum as a child and adolescent filmgoer — although at no point does Rosenbaum’s indefatigible interest in himself ever threaten to slacken. This is arguably one of the triumphs of his longest chapter, “On Moonlight Bay as Time Machine,” which virtually parodies the close analysis of the French structuralists at the same time that it oscillates between at least three separate viewings of that eminently forgettable Doris Day musical, by Rosenbaum at the respective ages of 8, 10, and 34, in Alabama, Maine, and California

At its most graceful and evocative, Rosenbaum’s dreamy prose can induce readers into making their own nostalgic or anti-nostalgic discoveries. (In my case, this would include some unrequited love, in my grammar school days, for a fat mouse named Gus-Gus in the Disney Cinderella, for Peter Finch’s tea plantation in Elephant Walk; a glorious, greedy sense of what being a boy must be like, while watching Prince Valiant with my best friend at a kiddie show run by Harold’s Club in Reno; or the experience of being unreasonably cheered out of the gloom of London and my own doldrums during my first trip abroad, by a piece of fluff called How to Steal a Million. But, like Rosenbaum much of the time, I digress.)

At its least effective, this prose can become clogged. Rosenbaum’s use of a mythical, Aguirre-like figure called the Conquistador to stand for what appears to be narrative-illusionist cinema carries the reader only so far, and then becomes tiresome; even as short linking passages, these sections are at once too coy and too smarmy for their own good. A certain fetishism with place-names, however justifiable it might seem on Proustian principle, becomes needlessly claustrophobic through overuse.

Unlike a Pauline Kael, who loves movies largely for their masculine qualities, Rosenbaum tends to regard the medium as essentially feminine. (Does this account for his furious ambivalence? There are time when he puts one in mind of Quentin Compson, declaiming, “I don’t hate the cinema! I don’t! I don’t hate it!“) Within these parameters, theaters become wombs, watching a film becomes a curious sort of sexual encounter, and a love letter written by Rosenbaum to his mother — “placing” such Fifties touchstones as Dial M for Murder, On the Waterfront and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in terms of his relationship to her at the time — becomes the most affecting part of the book.

In the final chapter, Rosenbaum carries this attitude to its logical conclusion by chronicling his affairs with various films, which are described as if they were people. Not all his candidates are ladies, however. A bit arbitrarily, perhaps, Citizen Kane, Eclipse, and Playtime qualify as he’s, while Sunrise, Last Year at Marienbad, and Celine and Julie Go Boating register as she’s, although the author cleverly sidesteps the challenge of assigning a single sex to any film by renoir or Dreyer.

But the ultimate Western-style showdown in the book, the supreme ideological and aesthetic confrontation, is between Rosenbaum and his corpulent grandfather. The sensual and emotional voyage traced from Bird of Paradise in spring 1951 to Sweet Bird of Youth in spring 1962 resembles in this respect nothing more than a protracted skirmish with Jewish patriarchy.

It would be easy enough for readers of this magazine to regard this book as a logical development of Rosenbaum’s contributions to Film Comment. (The prologue and first chapter initially appeared in these pages, and there extracts from some of his overseas columns.) But it would be a mistake, I think, to regard it simply as an extension of his criticism. More aptly, it might be described as an exploration of the private self that public activity — which includes filmgoing and film criticism — usually conceals.

Indeed, Rosenbaum’s “private” self (which includes eight-year-old Jonny) is a good deal closer to the experience of the ordinary spectator than is the polemical defender of Rivette, Moullet, and the Sternberg of Anatahan.To assume otherwise would be to overlook the profoundly political reflection on the social nature of moviegoing that underlines this book as a whole.

This gives Moving Places the effect of a long parenthesis in a critic’s work, and one that can include such non-cinematic, image-making objects of interest as drugs, racism, jazz, and sexual ideology. Yet the unusually personal side of the story — sometimes irritating, sometimes comic — shouldn’t trick the reader into assuming that the author’s self-absorption has to be shared. In a way, the fact that Rosenbaum wrote this book is the least interesting thing about it; as the semiologists would put it, he is simply “a function of the text,” and at times an obtrusive one. (Also on occasion a klutzy one: Barbara Stanwyck gets mistaken for Betty Grable in I Wake Up Screaming, Cannes’s Carlton Hotel is furnished with an unnecessary e, and The Bohemian Girl is described as “grand opera”.)

Declaring at one point that his book is “an attempt at a narrative exposition of myself through movies and of movies through me,” Jonathan Rosenbaum encourages the reader to explore her or his own personal movie narratives and ideologies, and this is finally the point of his project. More concerned with the processes than with the “obscure objects” of our desires, Moving Places places movies in a refreshing new light for all of us.

– Film Comment, May-June 1981

Declarations of Independents: Marry Royalty and Escape

From The Soho News (May 6, 1981). — J.R.

Impostors

Just a Gigolo

Black and White Like Day and Night

“All bourgeois dreams end the same way. Marry royalty and escape.” — Chuckie (Charles Ludlam) in Impostors

April 20: It’s a pity that  Mark Rappaport: The TV Spinoff, which Channel 13 revives shortly after midnight, only a day before I attend a press show of Rappaport’s Impostors (playing at the Art through Tuesday), won’t be seen by everyone who’s encountering this filmmaker’s original, unsettling work for the first time. As a very witty précis of what watching (and financing and making) his movies can be like, I doubt it could be much improved upon. At the outset, when Rappaport is trying out different kinds of music with different movie stills — just a formal variation, really, of his subsequent tryouts with different costumes, backdrops, front-projections, plots, characters, clips, and raps about his movies — he’s already setting up the paradoxical parameters of his glamorously homemade cinema.

It’s a place where the writer-director and his resourceful actors and crew are all studiously working their asses off to furnish the audience with a kind of do-it-yourself melodrama kit, at once firmly overdetermined and subtly undermined — full of hysteria and intrigue, signifying everything. Rappaport is interested in props and scenic designs, he explains at one point, “not to recreate reality but to suggest a different one.” It’s no wonder that he’s respected more and known better in Europe than in Fun City,  where the zeitgeist often seems like the only game in town.

Rappaport fills most of his movies with enough old-fashioned plot to support an entire course in nineteenth-century fiction, and enough bitchy dialogue to stuff Joseph Mankiewicz’s closet (“Actually, there’s not much difference between being dead and being in Vermont, if you know what I mean,”  simulates opulence in his studio sets  and class in his talented cast. he then uses these elements in part like filtering screens, each of which emotionally and effectually blocks off a portion of all the others. The results of this elegant, intricately tortured process can be humorous and entertaining as well as creepy and uncomfortable. The dramas turn out to be at once so florid and so private that they can improbably suggest a full-scale opera staged at the bottom of a well, or 2001 seen on a bite-size TV screen.

April 21: Impostors isn’t my favorite Rappaport film — I’d assign that place to the 1977 Local Color — but with a $115,000 budget and an all-star cast, it’s probably the most lavish, in thought as well as deed. (I should add that, having watched a fair amount of the shooting two summers ago for a American Film production story, I find it more interesting than I might have otherwise.) The daisy-chain of flirtations, passions, jealousies, relationships, and correspondences between a well-to-do romantic hero (Peter Evans), a pair of murderous magicians impersonating a pair of murdered twins (Charles Ludlam and Michael Burg), their mysterious assistant (Ellen McElduff) and her mysterious soulmate (Lina Todd), are so complexly interwoven that after a while, döppelgangers start to proliferate like bunny rabbits.

Each couple and/or two-way pattern threatens and comments on every other, so that straight and gay sensibilities, male and female characters, and passive and aggressive roles seem perpetually at loggerheads with one another, fighting their way through insults and betrayals into bitter, neurotic stalemates. What’s even stranger is that all the males seem at times like different facets of the same personality — a characteristic that this movie shares with two of its pointed thematic reference points, Proust’s La Prisonnière and Hammett and Houston’s The Maltese Falcon.

A lot of the time, it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or scream; and like certain other obsessive directors, Rappaport often tries to have it both ways — keeping the viewer distanced and testily daring the viewer to get involved and/or pissed off at the same time. Ludlam, in particular, is a superb needler who works with macabre camp as if it were a delicate instrument, stretching out his cackling effects into cadenzas.

“So many corpses, so little treasure!” wails Burg, the other weirdo magician in the movie; he could just as well be talking about the diverse deadends and rewards of narrative itself. To say that Impostors doesn’t “work” finally isn’t to say much at all. Louis Malle’s Atlantic City works like a charm, but leaves me with next to nothing afterward — like a good meal you forget about the following day, or a Jacques Demy movie that makes you feel pleasantly nostalgic about your own dreamy narcissism.

Impostors, a good deal stickier, leaves me with something more, some of which I don’t know what to do with. This is the third time I’ve seen it over the last couple of years; it looks better now than it did, but it still drives me a little batty (as it no doubt should). To my taste (ethics plus erotics), the women in the movie are too elliptical and remote, the Evans character too well armored against ridicule, and the dialogue too doggedly flashy in spots. (One character compares love and romance to an artichoke —“you peel it all away, and there’s nothing left” — when what she or Rappaport apparently means is an onion.)

But there’s a lot more rattling around inside the possibilities of this oddball romantic epic than one can find in most places, and filmgoers who like to take (and honor) bold risks should give this movie a chance. You might wind up hating it; but even if you do, you’ll probably have some interesting reasons.   And either way, I can guarantee that you’ll have plenty to look at, listen to, and think about: the fact that Rappaport has a good eye, ear, and mind already places him well ahead of most of contemporary cinema.

April 27: Just a Gigolo (1978), now at the Eighth Street Playhouse and the D.W. Griffith — directed by the English actor David Hemmings, mainly set in Berlin during the 20s, and reportedly the most expensive movie made in Germany since the war — calls to mind Eisenstein’s regretful description of Viktor Shklovsky: a string of pearls without the string. To be fair, though, several empty oyster shells have also been tossed in, apparently for maximal weight and clatter.

The pearls include David Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, Hemmings, Kim Novak, and Sydne Rome (a sexy American actress who works abroad, and played the lead in Polanski’s underrated and neglected What?), not to mention a certain amount of genuinely lush decor and lurid atmospherics — and an opening virtuoso crane over and around what feels like a good quarter mile of WW1 trenches. What makes these pearls fall all over the place and clutter up the screen, and ultimately seem about as artfully arranged as a dropped bag of jelly beans, is the conspicuous failure of  any unit of thought, time or space to string all of it (and us) together. I’m afraid that includes Bowie, a marvelous nonactorly film objet in The Man Who Fell to Earth who can’t project an interesting or convincing continuity across the chasms that separate the set pieces here.

About half an hour shorter than its original version, Just a Gigolo drifts along in uneven slabs, and it’s impossible to tell how much of this is due to Ennio de Concini and Joshua Sinclair’s script and how much is lost through editing. The filtering out of certain effects, as described above in Impostors, seems to operate here as well, but this time by default rather than by design — in part through the confused handling of lapsed time between sequences — so that what results is not so much a battle of wills as a dispersal of ideas. With everything going everywhere, nothing ever gets anywhere, as it becomes increasingly apparent that the movie is, in effect, merely standing still and grinning at you, trying to leer and get you to leer back.

With an episodic plot rich with comic book props –a gigantic, bottle-shaped sandwich board worn by Bowie; a secret Nazi HQ led by Hemmings that’s housed a la Superman in an abandoned subway car — and predictable conceits (like Dietrich, a madam with a stable of gigolos, singing part of the title tune after hours, Cabaret-style), most of which comes across like a parody of Billy Wilder’s boyhood, Just a Gigolo merely starts and stops, the starts again, like a machine or toy fitfully going berserk.

Ever since I accidentally stumbled into her brief, uncanny cameo in the otherwise dreadful The White Buffalo (1977), I’ve been waiting to see Kim Novak again, and she doesn’t let me down — even in an absurd scene that shows Bowie recoiling from her voluptuous enticements for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom. But Dietrich’s bit from behind a veil is so self-consciously “tailored” to her talents that it becomes sadly unmemorable for precisely that reason — aiming to blend in with the woodwork of our petrified memories and cliche banks, and succeeding all too well.

The erudite Elliott Stein informs me that the death and subsequent glorification of the Bowie character at the end is clearly influenced by Horst Wessel, a 21-year-old pimp and gigolo brownshirt, in love with a prostitute, who was killed in a nonpolitical streetfight and made into a Nazi martyr — celebrated in a famous Nazi song that set his poem “Raise High the Flag” to cabaret music. An interesting movie might have been made about all this, I suppose, but in this case the tail end of the idea merely gets stitched clumsily onto a lot of other incomplete gestures and half-hearted forays. “Marry royalty and escape” indeed: this kind of moviegoing shows you how somebody like Cimino can spend a wad, go for broke, and lose all that wonderful sense of proportion that underlies the low-budget extravagance of a Rappaport.

***

April 29: A surprisingly well-made and engrossing movie about a less than promising subject, Wolfgang Petersen’s Black and White Like Day and Night (1978), a West German movie at Cinema Studio, is only 103 minutes long –a near-miracle of economy these days. It’s about a self-made chess genius named Thomas Rosenmund (the best Bruno Ganz performance I can recall seeing) who drives himself mad pursuing and maintaining his world-champion title (along with showy sidebar stunts, like playing 60 games at once blindfolded, and losing only four — which puts him in the hospital). I’m not sure how Petersen, Ganz, and scriptwriters Jochen Wedegartner and Karl-Heinz Willschrei keep this going as well as they do, but suspect that concentration, in all its meanings, has a lot to do with it, as it has a lot to do with chess.

The problem is this chess is an essentially unfilmable game, like poker, in part because both these games depend on real time. Movies, on the other hand, have to get along on elliptical movie time, where all spectators have to share the same amount of time (very democratic) puzzling out what’s going on at any given point — which is usually never enough time, anyway, because the freedom we have to scan movies rather than simply “read” them discourages and inhibits disciplined work like analyzing a board strategy. Consequently, chess buffs are bound to be as frustrated as prizefight fans are at Raging Bull.

It’s tempting to imagine a split-level, multi-image movie that could speak to both constituencies at once. If a Norman Mailer can situate a “scene scoreboard” next to the stage in his play of The Deer Park, and John Waters can signal appropriate smells in Polyester with Pavlovian numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of certain shots, why couldn’t a filmmaker similarly include a diagram of a chess game while he’s trying to exploit the scene dramatically in other ways? There are hints of that approach here when we see the hero playing his Russian adversary in a theater complete with box seats, a gigantic Big Brotherish video screen projecting a board diagram of their ongoing game behind them. Even though we can’t assimilate the contexts of their moves, the general idea of Projected Thought is so strong — and as neatly decorous as the film’s title, or the recurring crane shots around the hero’s house in the snow — that it makes the developing madness oddly at one with the everyday madness of cinema.

Like Alain Jessua’s Life Upside Down, this movie is so leisurely about its exposition of its hero’s insanity that it works like a spell, slowly drawing you into the mysticism of nicely staged encounters. The existential and Zen notions of combat so common to Westerns, “Easterns,” and movies like The Hustler are delineated and distanced at the same time. Eventually, the hero’s psychic deterioration, paranoia included, seems indistinguishable from his purity of purpose — reflected in his attachment to large pawns and tiny kings, and his bold challenge to God for a match (”You take white, I’ll give you a pawn”), which he didtates to hius wife. For all intents and purposes, this bourgeois dream ends the same way as the others — inside someone’s head.

Suggested for further kicks: The Hardboiled Hollywood series at the Harold Clurman Theater, where you can catch two versions of The Maltese Falcon this Sunday (1931 and 1941) to compare with Rappaport’s acerbic variations. And stay tuned at the same theater for the fabulous Outlaw Cinema series, ranging from Bunuel and Browning to Romero and Russ Meyer, that starts May 24.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2011 at 3:20 am and is filed under Notes. Follow the comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and trackback are closed.

In Search of the American Uncle

From the May 1981 American Film. This is the third and last of my Resnais interview pieces from this period to be posted on this site . — J.R.

“You know, for all European kids of my age, America was a kind of fairyland,” recalled fifty-eight-year-old Alain Resnais on a recent trip to the United States. “We were born with the idea that there was another kind of country where everything was easy and perfect, like cartoon films, and there was a lot of money and freedom. I remember that when I was ten and I was looking at the French flag, I didn’t feel a thing. But when I was looking at the American flag, my heart was really beating.”

The French director also remembered that in his youth every French child had a distant relative who had gone off to America and was never heard from again. (In his own case, this was a great-grandfather who had disappeared into the wilds of Virginia.) The typical fantasy would be that the missing relative had made a fortune and would one day return to solve every problem. It’s the concept alluded to by the title of — and briefly mentioned by all three leading characters in — Mon Oncle d’Amérique, Resnais’ eighth and most recent feature, and his first major commercial success. The film got an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.

Whether the new film can be said to be performing the role of American uncle to Resnais — whose previous graceful, offbeat movies (including Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, and Providence) have often provoked more comment than profit — it’s clear that America no longer seems as remote to him as it once did. “I think now it’s different. Because with TVs, with photos, with planes, with Concorde, it’s a fact that America is closer to Europe, which makes it less picturesque, less exotic in a way.”

What interests him most about American movies? “What I appreciate in American films is that they’re ab;e to do them. Directors seem to have enough money to make them visual enough. In Europe that’s a big problem for us, because we don’t have enough money to make films. So we’re always frustrated with the visual aspect of things; we always have to find a way to make it more economical. When I see some American films, I have the feeling that the director had the means that he wished to convey some visual impact.”

It’s easy to see why Resnais longs for bigger budgets. Two cherished current projects are a sword-and-sorcery fantasy (to be written by Jean Gruault, screenwriter of such classics as Jules and Jim and The Rise of Louis XIV, as well as Mon Oncle d’Amérique), and a thriller called The Inmates (to be written by comic book artist Stan Lee, the creator of Spiderman). The latter project was started more than a decade ago, during one of Resnais’ extended sojourns in the United States. Another sojourn was partially devoted to researching a still-unrealized documentary about the fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft — whose hometown and sense of horror both left their indelible marks on Providence, a subsequent fiction feature written in English by playwright David Mercer.

In a book of photographs by Resnais that has been published in France — mostly pictures of potential locations for unrealized films, many taken in New York during extensive walks over the past twenty years — there are some haunting glimpses of Staten Island associated with the Stan Lee project. They bring to mind the mysterious images of the South Bronx at the end of Mon Oncle d’Amérique.

***

Resnais was almost thirty-seven when he completed in the late fifties his first feature, Hiroshima mon amour, from a script by the celebrated New Novelist Marguerite Duras (now a prolific filmmaker herself). This has led some people to regard him as a late starter in the ranks of New Wave directors — at least alongside such colleagues as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard — when, in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.

Resnais had already enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a director of short documentaries — most notably about painters (Van Gogh, Gaughin, and Picasso), African sculpture (Statues Also Die), the German death camps of World War II (Night and Fog), the Bibliothèque Nationale (Toute la mémoire du monde), and the making of plastics (Le chant du styrène) — before he ever started making features. (His first professional short, Van Gogh, won an Academy Award in 1949.) Even before that — in fact, from his preteens — he had made quite a few amateur films, in 8mm and 16mm.

More than one commentator has noted a disquieting similarity between Resnais’ successive treatments of a concentration camp and France’s largest library. Ecah orderly structure is traversed calmly by obsessively measured camera movements that seem to glide like surveillance guards past prisonlike enclosures.

This relationship is more a matter of elegant visual style than of narration. In his features, Resnais always assigns the task of writing the scripts to someone else — most often, a literary writer with whom he collaborates very closely. It is a method somewhat resembling that of Alfred Hitchcock — another careful planner and shy, formal craftsman with the imagination of a lonely child.

Where Resnais’ method differs most noticeably from Hitchcock’s is in the amount of creative space that he allows his scriptwriters — makinfg his films collaborations in the fullest sense of the word. The trick is to stage the right meeting of minds. In Resnais’ gound-breaking second feature, Last Year at Marienbad, this was initially a matter of agreeing upon certain abstract and formal principles with novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who was then instructed to flesh out specifics of story, action, and character. Resnais then performed a careful, creative edit on Robbe-Grillet’s script before beginning to shoot.

Another long-standing misapprehension about Resnais’ career — the notion that his approach and interests tend to be esoteric and intellectual — relates especially to Marienbad and the widespread bafflement and irritation it caused when it first appeared. A veritable Chinese box of narrative contradictions and chic, ponderous surfaces — set in a baroque luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere, and featuring three characters identified in the script only as A, M, and X — it was also a deadpan, ironic parody of diverse Hollywood intrigues and seductions (as were portions of Providence, including Miklós Rózsa’s lush score). That was a fact that tended to get overlooked in most of the lively debates that the movie inspired. While the chameleonlike temperament of Resnais and his lyrical style made him marvelously adaptable to Robbe-Grillet’s analytical viewpoint, neither was in any sense equivalent to it, as Robbe-Grillet’s own subsequent (and relatively flat-footed) films have demonstrated.

And for viewers who have had the opportunity to to see other Resnais features — including a drama about the wartime past set in Contemporary Bologne (Muriel), a warm and sentimental ode to underground anti-Franco leftists in French exile, with Yves Montand and Ingrid Thulin (La Guerre est finie), a foray into surrealist fantasy involving time travel (Je t’aime, Je t’aime), and a bittersweet, opulent period film with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a famous French financial swindler of the thirties (Stavisky…) — the common denominator of these films us scarcely heavy cogitation. Some critics have spoken of memory and nostalgia as the key factors. The impulse toward experimentation — evident in, say, Muriel and Je t’aime, Je t’aime – is usually more a matter of play than of punishing the audience.

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Interestingly enough, the suspicion that Resnais is an intellectual is reactivated by the first fifteen minutes of Mon Oncle d’Amérique, which promises to be an experience of brain-taxing complexity. It’s a promise that, cheerfully and lucidly, is never kept. By the time the movie is fully under way, the careful construction guarantees that a supposedly indigestible stew of a lecture on the brain and tghree apparently unconnected stories come together as simply and clearly as a snifter of cognac. “Actually, while making a film,” Resnais recently told an interviewer, “the only thing I ask myself, each step of the way, with every single shot, is: Can this be understood?”

A further source of confusion about Resnais’ Gallic irony is that he tends to be much more modest than most of his scriptwriters — not to mention some of his interviewers. When I recently had the temerity to suggest that the theories of biologist and lecturer Henri Labori [see first photo below]t in Mon Oncle d’Amérique contradicted those of the French intellectual and Freudian disciple Jacques Lacan [see second photo below], Resnais was quick to confess, “I know thing about philosophy, science, biology, or anything like that,” and added, “I am totally unable to answer you, because I don’t know anything about Lacan, except that I’ve seen him at a party.” Then Resnais broke into laughter.

One suspects, though, that there are certain elements of a rather critical self-portrait present in the quasi-intellectual character Jean Le Gall (Roger-Pierre) in Mon Oncle d’Amérique, a news director for French radio and a distinguished author. Le Gall’s conversation with a colleague about the French minister of information brings to mind that the late André Malraux, minister of culture. was Resnais’ father-in-law. (His wife, Florence Malraux, works as an assistant director.)

But perhaps the real giveaway is the character’s Breton background, along with a sequence that shows him as a boy in a tree reading the illustrated adventures of the Gold King, an American hero (”Samuel Knight, orphan and millionaire”). It recalls Resnais’ own childhood (and adult) enthusiasm for comics and Anglo-American pop heroes. At a recent question-and-answer session with American graduate students in film and drama, Resnais remarked offhandedly that the tiny island off the Brittany coast where Jean Le Gall spends much of his youth is actually an island that Resnais himself knew well as a boy, and where he shot an 8mm film when he was twelve.

As Le Gall’s name suggests, the character is French to the core. And a paradoxical aspect of Resnais’ fascination with things American is that it’s one of the most French things about him. He even reports that after making an “Anglo-Saxon film,” Providence, he went to a lot of trouble to make Mon Oncle d’Amérique as French as possible. Could this, along with his light comic touch, help to account for the movie’s unusual success? “America doesn’t exist,” a French coporation executive in the film remarks at one point in a French cocktail lounge. “I know, I lived there.” The funny thing about such a gag is that, like Alain Resnais’ American uncle, it could only come from a Gallic sensibility.