JonathanRosenbaum.com

Declarations of Independents: Chance Encounters

From The Soho News (June 24, 1981). — J.R.

Juke Girl is an unassuming Warner Brothers program filler — a Depression movie made in 1942 starring Ronald Reagan as a young socialist hero from Kansas and Ann Sheridan in the tough-and-tender title part. It reminds me of something that Manny Farber said in a recent lecture about what people looked like in 30s films, when “every shape was legitimate,” as opposed to the more constricting notions about what people are supposed to look like in 70s films — a model that remains in force today.

As a general ruleof thumb, I think one can argue pretty plausibly that any Warner Brothers Depression film, however minor, has something going for it on a social/aesthetic level that can’t be found in any over-publicized New Hollywood glitz production, however major. This is less monolithic a judgment than it sounds, especially if one considers the radically different notions of audience involved. A sense of community and closeness that’s founded on mutual dependence in all the meat-and-potatoes Warners staples — kept taut, dynamic and authentic by a snappy, mistrustful stream of wisecracking dialogue that breezes through this ambiguously charged atmosphere — harks back to an era when people when to movies to see other people rather than to get away from them.

Every Thursday through the end of August at the Thalia, you can see whether I’m right or not by going to see a double feature of relatively obscure Warner Brothers feature (a rare privilege), and comparing any of them — I mean any — to any of the brand-new obligatory streamliners playing first-run downtown. Not knowing too much about what you’re going to is part of what I’m recommending, and an important part. Of the more than two dozen features that James Harvey has selected, I’ve seen about a quarter. I regret the absence of a personal favorite, Blonde Crazy, a swell James Cagney and Joan Blondell vehicle which could have made a dynamite duo with Hard to Handle [see below] (another fine Cagney quickie, which is being shown on August 27, with William Wellman’s intriguing-sounding College Coach). But the point of a series like this one is everyone’s discoveries — anyone’s — not mine or Harvey’s.

The Paris Cinematheque educated a generation of filmmakers with just such a strategy of adventure. It’s harder to pull off anything similar in this town, where art isn’t even news now. (Critics clamoring for “adult” entertainment flee in terror from the new Godard, which is precisely too grown-up to make it onto any front pages.) By contrast, a new blockbuster, even in 70mm and Dolby, promises to be only a midway station and momentary rest-stop in a long mass-communication trek leading from promotion to spin-off products — an ad to end all other ads (and thereby justify the others by absorbing them). George Orwell put it very succinctly in 1947: “Much of which goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness.” What better description of Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of its mercenary brothers? (Unlike Numero Deux, it has no sisters.)

Blockbusters either forbid discoveries or impose them, which comes to the same thing. They rarely qualify as human encounters. In the Warners series, on the other hand, your discoveries don’t have to be mine (and vice versa), but we can still feel like we’re watching the same movie together –not merely responding to the same effects and other Pavlovian signals.

Juke Girl was scripted by A.I. Bezzerides (working from Kenneth Garnet’s adaptation of a story by Theodore Pratt), a remarkable scriptwriter who remains to be properly discovered in film history. [See photograph below, of his cameo in On Dangerous Ground.] The only copious references to Bezzerides in print that I can find in my house are a couple in French and several in Joseph Blotner’s biography of Faulkner (a close friend of Bezzerides in Hollywood during the 40s). Yet he’s the man who scripted or coscripted imaginative, original movies like They Drive By Night and Thieves’ Highway (two other trucking movies), On Dangerous Ground, Track of the Cat, Kiss Me Deadly, and William Faulkner: A Life on Paper (a first-rate, two-hour documentary shown on WNET a year and a half ago). Blotner reports thatr in the mid-40s, “Albert Isaac Bezzerides was a strong, dark, massive man of 36. Born in Turkey of a Greek father to an Armenian mother, he was raised in Fresno and educated as an engineer at Berkeley.”

You certainly don’t have to know a whit of this in order to discover and enjoy Juke Girl; it’s just one of many possible threads that make it more fun to follow. (The film’s set in Cat-Tail, Florida, “largest vegetable shipping point in the world,” and the produce market in Atlanta, while the 1949 Thieves’ Highway – with a similar protest plot about an exploitative packing-house boss, based on a Bezzerides novel called Thieves’ Market — revolves around San Francisco’s produce market on the opposite coast. And as Greg Ford points out to me, both movies have major characters named Nick Garcos — a European father figure to Reagan and Sheridan in Juke Girl, played by George Tobias, and the ex-GI hero played by Richard Conte in Thieves’ Highway.)

So there are plenty of reasons to see Juke Girl, which is playing on the 25th with Baby Face (a 1933 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle with George Brent and John Wayne). There’s Sheridan singing a chorus of “I Hate Love But I Love To Hate It” in front of a jukebox, getting fired by a man named Muck-Eye after she helps out the poor farmers and telling Reagan, “Look, Steve, you still got Kansas in your hair. Every time you see a patch of land, you want to settle down.” There’s a little girl named Skeeter and an older man in the same shantytown (Alan Hale, see below) called Yippy. There’s Reagan defiantly swiping a packing-house truck to help Nick Gavros pack his tomatoes, one of which he subsequently crushes into the capitalist villain’s face. But you should go and discover your own reasons. And check out the future Thursday programs for what are sure to be more pleasant surprises, none of which can be spoiled by any media saturation or advance hype — movies that can belong to you rather than their makers.

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More than eight years ago, while discussing the French passion for Jerry Lewis in a “Paris Journal” for Film Comment, I cited the latest Chabrol film, Dr. Popaul, for what seemed at the time to be traces of his local influence — the eyeglasses and buck teeth assigned to Mia Farrow (along with leg braces) to make her look like Lewis’s Julius Kelp in The Nutty Professor, and a string of sight-gags assigned at one point to Jean-Paul Belmondo, the hero. I noted that Dr. Popaul struck me as less worthy of American release than Chabrol’s previous Ophelia, La Rupture, or Juste Avant la Nuit — affirming that I preferred Lewis’s originals to Chabrol’s pastiches–but predicted that “if and when Dr. Popaul should open in the states…it will receive more attention and respect than any of the last few films directed by Lewis.”

Well, now that Dr. Popaul has at last turned up, inexplicably titled High Heels — on a very odd double-bill with Dandy, the All-American Girl (see below) on the 26th and 27th, in the Thalia’s ongoing series of New York and U.S. premieres of buried or ignored films every Friday and Saturday through July 11 — the Lewis connection seems much more remote. Recalling that Popaul is the name of the title character played by Jean Yanne in Chabrol’s Le Boucher, I assume there is some reason to view this as a personal directorial project; yet what I see reveals such directorial contempt or indifference toward the material — above all, the actors — that the script often seems to be hurled at one rather than simply interpreted or delivered. Like many failures, however, it is immensely instructive.

Overlit like Bavarian softcore porn, with bits of mugging from Belmondo that might seem a little excessive in a Three Stooges comedy, Dr. Popaul relates the story of Dr. Paul Simay,  who believes as a youth that “moral beauty exists only in ugly women,” and inaugurates a competition with his buddies to see who can screw the most hideous female. Picking up Christine Dupont for a one-night stand on a Tunisian holiday, and offended when she offers him money afterwards, Simay accidentally re-encounters her in Bordeaux a year later and is induced by her wealthy father to marry her and run his local clinic. Aroused by Christine’s beautiful sister Martine (Laura Antonelli, natch), he contrives to conduct a long-term affair with her — keeping Christine drugged with sleeping pills, disposing of Martine’s suitors and even tricking Martine into having their child (with the help of the clinic) — until…

If this sounds a lot like one of scriptwriter Paul Gegauff’s celebrated macho-glib conceits — he scripted all the most scabrous (and most of the best) Chabrol movies, virtually playing himself (opposite ex-wife Daniele) in Une Partie de Plaisir, and played Mozart in the farmyard in Godard’s Weekend — what is one to make of the casting of Mia Farrow as Christine, which is like getting Jeanne Crain to play a black in Pinky? (Her voice is dubbed in French, by the way, while the subtitles occasionally offer further displacement — my favorite is translating “sil vous plait” as “Do you speak English?”) Yet the interesting thing about this paradoxically self-destructing self-ingratiation (a central Gegauffian theme, it appears) is that it extends the obsessions of minor Truffaut, like the subsequent The Man Who Loved Women, past the point where they could possibly be charming or tolerable or even palatable — a sensibility that, far from protecting itself, its trying its damnedest to gross itself out, and failing spectacularly (although it may succeed with us).

If only the film were more consistent about its passionate misanthropy and cynical self-hatred, it might have at least the status of an anti-masterpiece. Alas, Belmondo’s dumb-ass enactments of slapstick (he runs over somebody in a tractor — it’s supposed to be funny) or all the presiding officials in the nightmare his character has about his own trial (including a homophobic version of a gay magistrate) and too indifferently frenetic to qualify.

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The failure of Dandy, the All-American Girl is a much more honorable one, and one that leaves me with some genuine regrets. On the face of it, watching Stockard Channing and Franklyn Ajaye (who played T.C., the guy with big Afro, in Car Wash) in a scene cowritten by Marilyn Goldin and shot by Vilmos Zsigmond sounds like a plausible idea of happiness. But something misses, or is missing, and I suspect that it has something to do with the apparent failure of the director, Jerry Schatzberg, to work as a catalyst and make me believe in it all. Actually, at odd junctures this movie appears to be remaking an even worse Truffaut movie, Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, except in this case the remake seems underdone rather than excessive.

Schatzberg has already shown a certain affinity for poetic Skid Row landscapes and some of the more futile vicious circles of American poverty — a feeling that’s much more apparent, I think, in the Nelson Algrenesque pathos of Scarecrow than in a relatively academic exercise like Panic in Needle Park, despite the disconcerting Hollywood lip gloss that’s fitfully evident in his work (such as the use of music in Dandy). The pain of rootlessness in his movies may be real enough, but in sketching out the rudiments of a fictional world, he abandons these roots at his own peril.

Somewhere behind the realization of Dandy (or Sweet Revenge, as it’s been retitled) there seems to be the potential workings of an all-American theme — the obsessive car thief as existential heroine (you are what you drive; or sweet revenge, as the motto on Ajaye’s Cadillac has it), with perhaps just a soupcon of Breathless (the hot-wiring ritual) and Two-Lane Blacktop (Warren Oates’ compulsive self-reinventions, which are themselves reinventions of scripwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer out of his novel Nog–a precursor of Channing’s fibs about her criminal past). But the forms of both these earlier movies are predicated on non-stop flow, while Dandy commits the error of meandering and stalling when it should be going places. How much of this is due to the B.P. Perla script revised by Goldin and how much is due to Schatzberg is impossible for me to determine, but there’s an unmistakable sense of absence in the plot and relationships that comes across as a gap in imagination. (The absence of sex in the film, on the other hand, is much more interesting and defensible.) Not even a spectacular car crash toward the end can make up for the “unfinished” aspect in all the characters.

A

A curious coincidence about Dandy and Popaul: both feature concerto-like sequences for their title leads meant to show off their versatility by rushing them through a battery of guises, yet staged in such a way that neither is able to score. Chabrol gives Belmondo far too much rope in his solipsistic courtroom nightmare, while Schatzberg seems to give Channing too little. As Dandy assumes a set of identities in a set of manuevers designed to filch her way to possessing her dream Dino Ferrari, each promising sketch fades abruptly from view before it’s possible to have any fun with what the actress is doing. (She may keep  victimizing fall-guy lawyer Sam Waterston — sort of like the way that Bernadette Lafont keeps fooling Claude Brasseur in Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me — but the movie gives her an even harder time, denying her even a coherent past.) The same thing happens unfortunately with the striking Tacoma and Seattle locations, which are never explicitly identified in the film; had I known where I was, I might have somehow been able to do more with Zsigmond’s fragrantly rundown and weedy glimpses.

Vietnam Dispatches

From The Movie No. 82 (1981). — J.R.

The war in Vietnam created in the United States a national trauma unparalleled since the Civil War, and its after-effects may prove to be every bit as enduring in the American consciousness. It was a war fought not only with guns and napalm in Southeast Asia, but with placards and truncheons on campuses and streets in large cities throughout the western world. It became the largest, most crucial issue of a generation — virtually taking over such related matters as black protest and the youth-drug subculture — but Hollywood was afraid to deal directly with it, even on a simple level.

Hollywood has traditionally done its best to avoid contemporary politics and especially political controversy, largely for commercial reasons. There is always the danger that a shift in public opinions or interest, between the time of a film’s production and its release date, may render a film with a ‘timely’ subject unmarketable in the long run, or sooner; and few producers are ever willing to take such a risk. The profound divisions created by the Vietnam War in American life were too wide, in a sense, to be commercially exploitable — at least while America remained actively involved. Any treatment of the issue was bound to exclude or alienate too large a section of the potential audience.

This happened with The Green Berets (1968), co-directed by and starring John Wayne — the only large-scale, simple-minded war film about Vietnam financed by a major Hollywood company. But even this rather old-fashioned, flag-waving action film saw fit to Include a skeptical journalist with dove-like leanings among its otherwise hawkish characters, as an unbeliever who has to be converted by John Wayne’s Colonel Kirby.

As it turns out, this conversion is largely a matter of acknowledging the unlimited savagery of the Vietnamese Communists — the same sort of racial type-casting often assigned to the Japanese in Hollywood films made during World War II and to the North Koreans during the Korean War. If any major lesson can be extracted from The Green Berets, it is that the mythical, heroic archetypes of American soldiers promulgated by Wayne and others during World War II and Korea were no longer as viable or as believable in the late Sixties, even to right-wing patriots.

At the same time, the subject of Vietnam, while seldom confronted directly elsewhere and most often relegated to the background, represented an important undercurrent in many films made during the period.It soon became an inseparable part of the conflicts and considerations that were being dealt with in most youth films. The cultural and generational conflicts of The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider and Alice’s Restaurant (both 1969), the campus revolts of Getting Straight and The Strawberry Statement, the heightened visions of utopia in Woodstock and of apocalypse in Zabriskie Point (all 1970), had reference to, and association with, the war. Even an artist as seemingly apolitical as Ingmar Bergman could scarcely avoid making a comment on the war in a film such as Persona (1966), when he showed Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) watching the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in South Vietnam on television, and recoiling in agony — in effect, invaded by the deepest suffering in the modern world.

The fact that American viewers could watch the Vietnam War every day on television tended to blunt its impact — a telling aspect of a movie about private domestic violence such as Petulia (1968), where the war is perpetually visible on diverse television screens, yet remains rigorously unmentioned and undiscussed by the characters. The notion of an uncontainable horror eventually produced absurdist, black-humour treatments of modern warfare that conveniently concerned themselves with earlier wars, such as World War II in Catch-22 and Korea in M*A*S*H (both 1970).

Still another way of approaching the subject obliquely was through the historical allegory provided by the Western. Within these terms, the meditative, slow-motion look at the massive slaughters in The Wild Bunch (19691 and the tortured examination of the mutual barbarism of Apaches and whites in Ulzana’s Raid (1972i could both address themselves to the war’s wider issues and emotional conflicts.

in all these instances, a certain ambiguity in the film-makers’ approaches allowed them to address hawks and doves alike. But it was not until the late Seventies that the subject of Vietnam was finally tackled head-on — after a fashion — by the film industry. And even then, the chief response was to dodge central facts about the war for the sake of additional myths and allegories, many of which seemed designed to reinterpret painful recent history in a more positive light — whether as therapy or as alibi, a rationalization or an avoidance of the immediate past.

Perhaps by the Nineties a sufficient time gap will have elapsed to allow filmmakers to approach the subject of Vietnam in a more detached, balanced and analytical manner. In the meantime, The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) both fall into an unavoidable trap. They offer mythical and metaphysical meanings about the war which seem inevitably tailored to the short-term psychic needs of an American or American-influenced audience –- namely, the desire to locate the horror of the war within a containable image of externalized evil rather than to look at it as the consequence and function of internal ideological processes. As the American journalist Deirdre English succinctly puts it, each film “takes a fabricated act of Vietnamese terror” — the ultra-sadistic Russian roulette game of The Deer Hunter, the hacking off of inoculated children’s arms in Apocalypse Now - “and elevates it to become the central metaphor of the war”.

In fact, the evasions about Vietnam in the two films work within very different contexts, though the end results may be similar in some ways. For one thing. The Deer Hunter operates within a mythic system in which “the war” is merely an episode, though a crucial one, in a larger structure encompassing the lives of several men — a sort of trial by fire which destroys or seriously marks all of them, but which is given little or no independent significance. In other words, the mere fact that the war functions dramatically as something external to the characters played by Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken — something that happens to them rather than because of them, or with their complicity — ensures that the Vietnamese Communist torturers absorb the metaphysical weight of impersonal evil that they are structured to embody.

Despite the childlike naivety of the filmmakers and the characters alike, many liberal American critics defended the film on the basis that it was myopic to assume that the Vietnamese Communists did not commit atrocities along with the Americans. At the same time, this naivety allowed the film to function dramatically in old-fashioned terms, with some of the mythic resonance of a John Ford Western — succeeding precisely where The Green Berets had failed, because the dramatic needs (which included a feeling for small-town, communal ties) appeared to structure this view of the war rather than the other way round.

In the case of Apocalypse Now, the ideological cast seems at once more conscious and more deceptive. Designed and assembled more as an environmental entertainment complex — a ‘trip’ in every sense of the word — than as a unified drama, the film manages to incorporate a surprising number of mythical and metaphorical ideas to support several positions regarding the war, some of them quite opposed to one another. It can be said without exaggeration that hawks, doves, and those in between can all find their beliefs confirmed in the film. This indeed seems reflected in the layered manner in which the film was constructed, with John Milius’s fanciful right-wing adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s anti-colonialist novella Heart of Darkness complicated, in turn, by Francis Ford Coppola’s preoccupations with megalomania and Michael Herr’s cynical narration, some of It virtually adapted from his memorable book Dispatches. which mixed personal combat reporting with a sort of lyrical, liberal-humanist rock poetry

Within such a network of cross-currents anti counter-forces, the Jungian archetype provided by Colonel Kurtz (Marion Brando) — representing the dark side of the self driven towards evil, eventually becoming Evil incarnate — operates more as a focal point for the audience’s self-absorption than as a lens trained on America’s involvement in Vietnam. More actively myth-creating than The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now is clearly more cognizant of the possibilities of American guilt regarding the war. Yet in Kurtz’s climactic speech about the di memberment of inoculated children — a detail which can be traced back to Milius’s original script — this knowledge capitulates once again to the image of the Vietnamese Communists as ineffably savage.

By 1976, the war was over, the soldiers were home and Nixon had resigned from office in disgrace. More than one commentator had suggested that the Watergate scandal provided A mericans with a scapegoat for the traumas occasioned by the American involvement in Vietnam. The sense of national shame was somewhat alleviated by the bicentennial celebrations.

Then, out of nowhere — and in true all-American spirit — actor and novice scriptwriter Sylvester Stallone parlayed a $1 million movie into one of the top 20 all-time moneymakers by creating the boxing film Rocky (1976 ). The ‘Italian Stallion’, a white sub-proletarian regular loser — a figure recalling early Paddy Chayefsky heroes like Ernest Borgnine in Marty (1955) — thumbs his nose at a society that could not care less about him, and finds both love and self-respect in a corrupt world. Responding to the fairy-tale quality of this modern-day romance — and, perhaps, to the racial subtext (poor, dispossessed white man triumphing over his ghetto existence and getting his own back on de-ghettoized uppity blacks) — audiences stood up and cheered.

Saturday Night Fever (1977) offered a variation on this theme. Its teenage hero, played by John Travolta, is no less a denizen of an Italian ghetto, an Al Pacino fan with a poster of Stallone in his bedroom. Living in Brooklyn, he is separated by more than just a bridge from the glamour of Manhattan. Identified from the very start of the movie with a ‘body language’ that reflects black culture. Travolta’s Tony Manero paradoxically represents the desire to break beyond the ghetto’s confinement at the same time that his godlike manifestation on a disco dance floor suggests a precise form of cultural containment.

Another loser-hero of the time was Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a Vietnam veteran who takes to driving a cab in Taxi Driver (1976) and murmuring murderous thoughts about New York being an open sewer. The racist underpinnings of Bickle’s alienated, homicidal hatreds are deflected by the film’s ingeniously deceptive strategies so that his potential targets become, in turn, a nondescript political candidate and a teenage whore’s pimps and clients. He only poses an unsuccessful threat to the candidate but he actually destroys the pimps and a client.

Certainly a more equivocal hero than Rocky, Travis Bickle is nevertheless accorded a dreamlike ascension to power and acceptance by the film in a manner that smacks no less of fanciful wish-fuIfillment. Audiences did not stand up and cheer his bloody devastation, as they had previously cheered the vengeful vigilante played by Charles Bronson in Death Wish (19741, possibly because some of the details - fingers shot off, blood splattered on walls. arterial spurtings — were at once too shocking and too suggestive of certain American atnxities in Vietnam, such as the My Lai massacre.

The film concludes with Bickle praised in the press for his deeds and finally respected by the woman of his dreams (Cybill Shepherd), This was an ending that granted the Vietnam veteran a heroic standing in his community that the real world outside the movie theatre denied him. John W. Hinckley, Jr. was too young to have been a Vietnam veteran but perhaps he still bore traces of Its violent legacy and certainly he was enamoured with the screen image of Jodie Foster, who played the teenage whore in Taxi Driver. Only five years alter the film, he made his own bid for fame, and her attention, by shooting President Ronald Reagan in an assassination attempt.

JONATHN ROSENBAUM

Declarations of Independents: Movies for Chameleons

From The Soho News (June 10, 1981). I posted the first part of this, on Raiders of the Lost Ark, some time ago, but this, belatedly, is the full column — and, in my opinion, the best of my “Declarations of Independents” columns for The Soho News. (I believe there were ten of these in all.) — J.R.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams

History of the World, Part I

Of Light and Texture (Museum of Modern Art)

As the most gifted and congenial by far of all the New Hollywood tyros, Steven Spielberg may be the only consummate master of the post-TV movie spectacular — the blockbuster that’s diced out into bite-size narrative units like Chicken McNuggets (every structural hint of bone or body part processed out of existence, every juicy piece a separate unique experience, designed to vanish without a trace). Aspiring to the condition of continuous action as if that were a delirious state of grace — borne aloft by superbly timed jolts and impossibly narrow escapes, usually in three to five-minute setpiece doses — Raiders of the Lost Ark (rated PG for pretty good) all but bypasses character and logic for a string of stunning rides through Disneyland, one right after the other, each one a visceral treat.

Valuing speed over sense, the movie is too energetically rushed to allow itself any detours into lyricism. It’s a surprising turn of events for the director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but the boxoffice blues of 1941 (which I would dearly love to see again) must have led Spielberg to some second thoughts about how to bring an audience to its knees — back to the lessons of Jaws, in other words, with the additional commercial support of George Lucas (who produced and collaborated with Philip Kaufman on the original story).Consequently, even when God puts in an appearance toward the end of this globetrotting adventure –a fiery, vengeful Old Testament God playing yang to the yin of the benign aliens in Close Encounters — He doesn’t get to stick around any longer than a commercial.

I’ll never forget the queasy experience I had one Sunday afternoon last year, in the front row of a crowded midtown theater, watching the grisly elevator murder in Dressed to Kill at the same time that the man who created it, Brian De Palma, was a couple of seats away, watching me and others react to it (and leaving the theater as soon as the experience was over).The curious thing about his gaze, as I recall it, was that it conveyed a lot of pride and satisfaction, yet none of it was directed at the screen.

It’s a gaze I recalled more than once while responding in a similarly helpless way to the merciless mechanics of Raiders of the Lost Ark – and not merely because Spielberg and Lucas are also decadent disciples of Hitchcockian storyboard construction in which The Sequence becomes the whole raison d’être of filmmaking. It was also related to the dawning realization that the real continuity and characters of their movies can be truly located only in their audience responses — not in any autonomous evidence up on the screen, which is bound to be relatively uneven and riddled with gaps (e.g., how does the hero get to the Mediterranean island on a Nazi submarine?

Consider Karen Allen here, a likable, resourceful actress who gets used like one of those convertible stage units in a play full of short scenes. First she’s established (in a drinking bout) as one of the boys, then as some perfunctory variant of the mannish woman (Joan Crawford as Vienna in Johnny Guitar) running a Nepalese saloon, then as a fluttery sort of captive heroine who clearly isn’t one of the boys, then as a background prop; whatever a given scene requires, she dutifully becomes. The same principle holds (more or less) for everyone and everything else in the movie, from hero Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) to villain Belloq (Paul Freeman) to the Ark of the Covenant to somebody’s pet monkey. Try to summon up a composite image anywhere, a feeling or idea that you can salvage when the movie’s over, and you’re mainly stuck with an arsenal of disconnected poses and disposable functions.

There’s a lot of confusion around — most of it to the advantage of banks — about the status of this blunderbuss approach to art. Its effectiveness as dazzling entertainment is hard to quarrel with; I was glued to my seat, and even the monotonous lack of variation in the pacing (as in 1941) has something soothing about it. But the creepy presumption of most criticism nowadays is not only that it’s possible to be a Serious Artist while wielding mega-bucks, but that it’s often necessary to wield those lofty budgets in order to be considered “seriously” at all. Around the time of the release of Star Wars, it was widely reported that Lucas intended to make only avant-garde films in the future. Such a story seemed preposterous then, and I find it even harder to swallow it now. Lucas lacks the freedom to make avant-garde films — assuming that freedom is ultimately a matter of mental space more than budget. Most people, I know, assume the reverse of this — such is the myth that keeps those industry wheels turning — but few highly budgeted directors have ever seemed like exceptionally free individuals to me.

So maybe the real auteur of Raiders of the Lost Ark is neither Spielberg nor Lucas — however brilliant each may be in his separate functions — but the money that plays with them and us, the money that calls all the shots. Combining the dogged desire of Lucas to be pulpier than Sax Rohmer in this 1936 white supremacist archeological romp (while combining all the world’s most important religious myths of the head of a pin and simultaneously whistling Dixie) with the mystical awe and propulsive storytelling of Spielberg, the movie has a certain economic relation to art, like 1941, that might be called Teenager’s Revenge.

How deeply are we expected to get involved in a plot about the fabled Ark of the Covenant which doesn’t feature a single Jew, with “Arab” (i.e., proto-Iranian) and Nazi villains gallore? Raiders somehow contrives to convert the Great Whatsit of Kiss Me, Deadly (nuclear deaths in Pandora’s Box) into the 10 Commandments of Cecil B. De Mille without ever convincing us that either has the moral weight of Cheech & Chong’s roach clip, or the 15 Commandments of Mel Brooks (see below). It mainly locates its few tokens of crunchy transcendence in its audience’s unconscious and its promo campaign. On the screen, it sticks more practically and nihilistically to the short-range task of being a “rattling good yarn” — one, indeed, that rattles and hisses at you in sensuous Dolby while boldly slinging you from one outrageously suspenseful snake pit to another. Before the movie’s scarcely begun, Indiana Jones is being chased by a giant bowling ball through a Peruvian cave that’s otherwise characterized by tarantulas, treasures, diverse death-traps and cave-ins.

“I am a shadow reflection of you,” Freeman says coolly to Ford at one point, alerting those academics who might want to brood seriously over this enjoyable nonsense. The Ark itself is a McGuffin-prop lifted from David and Bathsheba, a Gregory Peck vehicle of 30 summers ago. As I see it, the Great Whatsit here is really nothing more than the Proverbial Magic of Movies — the only subject Spielberg/Lucas seem equipped to tackle head-on, in tandem with the usual dull concentration on the nature of power trips (which is what turned Apocalypse Now from a film about Vietnam into a film about being a director, and what makes the last shot of Raiders a clear steal from Citizen Kane.)

In a way, the opening dissolve from the Paramount logo to the to an actual mountain peak tells us all we need to know. By the time we arrive at the climactic narrative striptease on a mountaintop, we see death pour out of the Ark like a lethal dose of projector light, spilling out hologram-like figures which emerge from the emulsion only to turn ugly and start zapping the Nazis dead. Faces melt fabulously (in the snazziest of all the flashy special effects) as the Nazis are being cremated; the heavens part to suck up all the cinders and then neatly close shut again, like a zipper.

But the most thrilling moment of sexual release for the audience I saw Raiders with was the humorously delayed decision of Jones, much earlier, to shoot a fancy sword-swishing Arab with his gun rather than worry about using his whip. Its offhand genocidal message comes very close to being the only one that New Hollywood (from Taxi Driver to Star Wars to Apocalypse Now to Dressed to Kill) can find beyond its pretty, bejeweled navel — a pithy suggestion, derived from Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, that simply says, “Exterminate the brutes.”

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I mean, like being looked at and doing the looking aren’t always that separate as activities, especially if you’re stoned. So surveillance in Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams — often conducted from the epic vantage point of police helicopters that are higher than kites — has a nice cutting edge that allows you to do it, magisterially, as well as feel paranoid about having it done to you. Just as the spaced-out police sarge (Stacey Keach) gradually turns into some kinna slimy awful lizard reptile ooze from sucking a see-through bong on all the loco weed that his station boys filch off unsuspecting heads, Cheech & Chong — two wild and crazy guys, sloppy humanists both — allow you to step in on either side of the pot dialectic  (Nice Dreams is rated R, for Reagan), take a shower and get down to serious business, man, if you know what I mean. There are also a couple of coke and acid gags; a nice, silly song by Cheech about saving the whales and shooting the seals; and even a slightly hallucinogenic, sparkler-burning Statue of Liberty in the opening Columbia Pictures logo.

It took me most of the movie to figure out who was Cheech (Richard Marin, who co-scripted) and who was Chong (Thomas Chong, who co-scripted and directed); I saw their Up in Smoke (directed by Lou Adler) back in the fall of ‘78, but you know what grass can do to short-circuit memory, make it all go up in whatchamacallit. Anyway, if faulty memory serves, this one is even funnier, also possibly more dumb — either despite or maybe just because of its never getting beyond the Simple Simon deconstructiveness of an old Bing ‘n’ Bob Road comedy. (Neither, for that matter, does the next film in this column. So what else is new?) In a Chinese restaurant, Evelyn Guerrero turns up to play an entertainingly goofy variation of Dorothy Lamour. Later she proposes a sexual threesome with the star High-Cs, until her convict husband, Animal, wearing a patch that says “Give me head ’til I’m dead,” comes home; you can guess the rest, and so can C&C.

***

In spite of a vulgar reputation for being more “physical” and less “cerebral” than Woody Allen, Mel Brooks is conceivably the most literary Jewish comic filmmaker that we have — reminding us at every turn to what degree Judaism is an oral/verbal as opposed to visual culture.  When someone in ancient Rome remarks, “The streets are crawling with soldiers,” you know in advance that Brooks will have to follow this with a non- sequitur visual equivalent, just as Tex Avery used to do in his daffy cartoons about slang — giving the word and voice primacy, literally making it flesh by spelling it out in rebus form.

“Death was greeted with a certain amount of awe,” intones narrator Orson Welles near the start of Brooks’ History of the World, Part I, and everyone standing around in the perfunctory, instantly forgettable shot who isn’t supposed to be a corpse goes, “Awwwww — .” “The only thing we don’t have a god for yet is premature ejaculation,” Brooks rattles on frantically, standup-philosopher style, to Dom DeLuise’s hysterically Juicy Fruit Emperor Nero in (you guessed it) Caesar’s Palace, “and that’s coming quickly.” Saying as well as spraying it, chewing and spewing words until they overspill and start to fill in some of the cracks left by the illustrative images, Brooks is a food as well as word man, and logically enough includes among his several roles in this movie the waiter that breaks into The Last Supper to inquire, “Does everybody want soup?” He arrives, incidentally, just before Leonardo turns up for the portrait and gets everyone to pose on the same side of the table — a neat ellipsis that has to stand in for Brooks’ depiction of the Renaissance. (The reason, according to Brooks, why we have 10 commandments instead of 15 is that Moses dropped one of the three original tablets.)

To be fair, History of the World, Part I, in spite of its title, has a pretty modest aim. It merely seeks to be another cheerful Mel Brooks film, one more bubbly Borscht-circuit surrealist boogie. (When Brooks served as producer on The Elephant Man, he was further exploring his literary bent in a way — following the cozy, genteel, armchair manner of gents like Val Lewton or Albert Lewin in packaging the painterly goods of a David Lynch.) The movie tends to get a little lost and choppy whenever it has to go for long without continuous characters and consecutive plot, and, like many a stage revue, generally becomes a meditation on show biz itself whenever it expands beyond the confines of an isolated blackout gag. (At its workaday worst, it gropes blindly after every chestnut in sight; by now, I find 2001 parodies about as tiresome as Rosebud and Casablanca jokes.) For my money, a gala production number celebrating the Spanish Inquisition improves appreciably on the “Springtime for Hitler” number in The Producers as an inspired amalgam of the best and worst that show biz can offer (and process), all in one brassy package.

The best parts, like the above, all reek of the stage — perhaps another reason why the words tend to predominate, and to take flight from the dull Panavision frames that seek to cage them like winged creatures. “Don’t be saucy with me, Bearnaise,” somebody chides during the French Revolution, and the only “miracle” that can save Brooks from the guillotine is a horse with that name. It’s no wonder that The End in this movie is carved into the side of a mountain that Miracle rides past.

***

Of Light and Texture, an exhibition of films by Andrew Noren (June 11 and 15) and James Herbert (June 16 and 23) at the Museum of Modern Art, offers a filmgoing experience at once so much more intense and diffuse that Spielberg, Brooks, or Cheech & Chong that I can recommend it to a few of you out there as the perfect alternative to standing in line for the amusement park rides described above. Judging from the samples I caught at a press show, there aren’t any (or many) laughs to be had, but there are certainly thrills galore, at least of a particular kind I would call contemplative or meditative (as opposed to conquistatorial or dictatorial) — the kind of space that a cool museum and a quiet afternoon can afford you, and the above movies cannot. For starters, all the films in this program (with the exception of Herbert’s six-minute Pluto, on the 16th and 20th) are silent, allowing you to let yourself think and hear yourself breathe.

“Do these movies go anywhere?” I can hear my more linear-minded and plodding, plot-ridden friends asking, stuck with the necessity of segregating their art from their lives and politics. The answer is yes, they do — deeper and deeper into the substance of light and texture, which of course is something that affects all our daily visual experience, a subject that spreads out over our lives as blandly, as completely, and, most of the time, as unmemorably as a picnic tablecloth over a patch of ground. On the other hand, if you’re convinced that the forgetfulness of narrative — like the forgetfulness of journalism, a similarly self-contained cultural activity — is always better than the remembrance of experience, I’d suggest that you stay away.

We each have our own means of entry (or non-entry) into subjects like light and texture. Mine was the first film I saw in the MOMA series — Andrew Noren’s feature-length Charmed Particles (1977), Part IV of his ongoing The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, which you can see on the 11th and 15th — an experience that regrettably wasted me in relation to Herbert’s Porch Glider (1970) and January (1973), shown just afterward at the press show. (The same thing won’t happen to you at MOMA, where the filmmakers are allotted separate programs.) So black and white that it made me forget that color films existed, and so sensually rich that it made me want to go on a movie diet (just my luck: I had to see the Brooks film, with its low-cal visuals and deep-fried verbals, less than three hours later), this exquisite chronicling of Noren’s self-confessed activity as a “light thief” and “shadow bandit,” mainly within the limited (yet limitless) confines of a small city apartment, create a visual music so concentrated and uninterrupted (George Lucas, eat your heart out) that I’m sure any musical accompaniment would be redundant, or, even worse, reductive in effect.

Mottled shadows flicker across an eye, a horizontal wipe reveals clothes swaying on a line (like a glissando running up a keyboard), silvery light speckles a floor or atomizes on quivering water, wind blows snow crystals at night, fragments of fabric drift past an open window (in a peekaboo pattern remaining a basic rhythmic component throughout, a perpetual give-and-take of now you see it/now you don’t), parts of human and feline bodies and diverse objects conspire in activities (walking, dishwashing, reading the paper, looking at a TV or a movie still).

Often evoking the luminous textures of certain European films in the 20s (like the pulsating light patterns of Faust), as well as the pantheism and “poetic structuralism” of a filmmaker like Louis Hock — with smoke, hair, leafy textures and fabrics treated as delicately as brush-strokes, then mixed together in a sort of blender that suggests Josef von Sternberg’s teasing manner of dissolving his own bric-a-brac – Charmed Particles can the lead the spectator into many possible directions. You might even want to take it with you to a desert island, like Manhattan in June.

Declarations of Independents: The Masterpiece You Missed [DOOMED LOVE]

From The Soho News (June 3, 1981). This is also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism.  — J.R.

How can I persuade you that the best new movie I’ve seen this year, the only one conceivably tinged with greatness, is a voluptuous four-and-a-half-hour Portuguese costume melodrama, shot in 16-millimeter? Obviously I can’t. So rather than make you feel guilty about missing a masterpiece — as a couple of my friends managed to do when it was at MOMA last spring — let me assume at the outset that you will miss DOOMED LOVE all ten times that it shows at the Public between May 26 and June 14. Bearing this in mind, the following notes are an account of what you missed, are currently missing, or will miss.

1. If it’s confusing and misleading for some to call DOOMED LOVE an avant-garde film, this seems mainly because of the widespread working assumption that “avant-garde” is a social category above and beyond an aesthetic one. As industry-oriented critics like Kael and Sarris are frequently reminding us (the former obliquely, the latter unabashedly), the crucial professional issue is not what movies we go to as critics but what parties, junkets, festivals, universities, grants, and other circuits of power we have easy access to — not what we see but what we have is our calling card, whereas “taste” is largely a rationalization for the personal erotics of self-gratification, cooperation, conflict, and flattery founded on such a system of exchange. From this standpoint, calling DOOMED LOVE avant-garde might be tantamount to signing its death warrant. Indeed, it might even be worse than that, because avant-gardists as a group aren’t even likely to claim the body at the morgue afterward. Practically speaking, in a philistine New York context, the film lacks both a launching pad and a burial ground; yet like any irritating, yammering masterpiece it somehow manages to create its own space for breathing and existing. Spoil-sports who insist on acknowledging and humoring it could do a lot worse than consult Carlos Clarens’s perceptive interview with the seventy-three-year-old writer-director Manoel de Oliveira in the May–June Film Comment.

2. Adapted from a famous nineteenth-century Portuguese novel of the same title by Camilo Castelo Branco, DOOMED LOVE is a veritable workshop of ideas about the incestuous relationship between novels and movies, and the diverse possibilities of literary adaptations. (In this respect, GREED is an obvious precursor.) Most of the so-called avant-garde aspects of the film derive directly from this meditation and problem, whereby each scene becomes the filmic solution to a literary challenge. They are aspects, in other words, that need to be examined existentially, in terms related to the inner needs of the work — means for expressing an otherwise inaccessible content — not games specifically designed to tease or torment mainstream critics who are insulted by movies that attempt more than CAVEMAN . Vocabulary is part of the problem here. One set of words about films exists for people who see them, another set for people who make them, and a third for the academics who study them. Assigning any or all of these sets to DOOMED LOVE is like copying down those celebrated descriptions given by several blind men who’ve been groping the same elephant. Put all these accounts together and you still don’t have a single functioning mammal. The best new films always confound the old definitions, anyway. Much of the time, de Oliveira is using mise en scène and off-screen narration to create two-part expositional structures (e.g., a WAVELENGTH-like camera movement up to a window while the narrator reflects on the fates of the characters), each part tailored to the other.

3. At the center of the process of literary adaptation underlining DOOMED LOVE is a dialectic between the seen and the imagined, the perceived and the unperceived. Early on, there’s a strangely literal fleshing out of a literary image: “The marriage of Venus and Vulcan obsessed him,” says the narrator of a character, and, sure enough, we see a blonde in a loin cloth with similarly garbed attendants and a bearded Vulcan with a hammer. (As de Oliveira clarifies in the Clarens interview, there are actually two narrators. One of them, female, forecasts the future — rather like Mariana, one of the leading characters.)

Intricate dovetailings of narration and dialogue produce some elegant displacements and overlaps in and on the sound track. When the heroine’s father shouts at her in close-up, the sound of his voice ceases at the precise moment that the male narrator announces that the (off-screen) daughter doesn’t hear him because she’s left the room. Much later, the imprisoned hero responds in person to the narrator’s off-screen report of Mariana’s blacksmith father’s announcement (visible but not heard) that his daughter is delirious — a scene much easier to follow than to describe. Here the collision of the two narrative conventions, far from dismantling the scene, gives it a kind of layered density — an effect that’s amplified by the gradual accumulation of objects and furniture in the hero’s cell, which seems to make the space grow deeper at the same time that it inches its way closer toward an ordinary domestic interior.

4. A vest-pocket period spectacular set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, DOOMED LOVE has clear affinities with such low-budget epics of obsessive energy as Sam Fuller’s PARK ROW, Werner Schroeter’s EIKA KATAPPA, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s WINSTANLEY, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s HITLER, A FILM FROM GERMANY. Following an aesthetics of economy that reduces spectacle to a shadow-dance of the mind — an abstraction of love rather than a glitzy substitute display (the Hollywood solution, despite a sunset or two worthy of Technicolor Selznick) — de Oliveira’s long takes are often positioned in front of clearly (and sometimes beautifully) painted backdrops, and intermittently orchestrated in relation to a percussive contemporary score (by João Paes).

The first shot in part 2 of the movie, after the intermission, is a static red-tinted landscape (mountains, sky) that modulates to the tone of light brick as day breaks and church bells start to ring. There’s a cut to the camera prowling around a courtyard where the hero, Simao (António Sequeira Lopes), is seated while the pealing continues — a rhythmic idea picked up by Paes’s score until a woman rings a doorbell and the music stops. Shortly afterward, in the same pivotal scene, Simao commits a crime of honor — shooting a rival who happens to be the cousin of his beloved Tereza (Cristina Hauser) — which seals his fate for the rest of the film and all eternity, whichever comes first. (Like Romeo and Juliet, the teenage couple come from feuding noble families.)

5. A considerable portion of the plot consists of the epistolary romance between Simao and Tereza, conducted (a ), in part 1, while he’s secretly convalescing from a gunshot wound in the home of a blacksmith whose daughter, the devoted Mariana (Elsa Wallencamp), takes care of him (like Lancelot in Escalot), and Tereza is sequestered in a convent, and (b ), in part 2, while he’s serving a voluntary prison term for killing the cousin, having refused any appeal, and Tereza herself has become bedridden with a wicked Camillean cough. In both (a ) and (b ), elaborate subterfuges are of course necessary to keep the correspondence going. As in the protracted agonies of separation that structure the plot of PETER IBBETSON , the couple never gets it on — when he’s shipping off to India as a convict, she dies while waving a distant farewell to him from a balcony — and the whole narrative leading up to this becomes galvanized into an explication of what’s keeping the couple apart in separate shots, as well as a formal explanation of what’s binding these shots together. Personally, I found every stage of this process absolutely absorbing.

Mulishly persistent in their devoted renunciations, their obsession with medieval codes of chivalrous duty, Simao and Tereza are equaled only by the sacrificial Mariana, as self-effacing as Melanie in GONE WITH THE WIND . “When I see I’m not needed, I’ll end my life,” she flatly declares to Simao, around the same time she’s sailing off with him on the prison ship. True to her word, she leaps into the sea only a matter of seconds after she’s overseen his own burial; significantly, the two events occur within the same shot. If the theme of martyrdom evokes Carl Dreyer, it’s worth noting that de Oliveira has had a lifelong struggle in getting his few features made that seems comparable to Dreyer’s cosmic difficulties. (In a filmmaking career spanning half a century, his seventh feature to date, FRANCISCA , just surfaced in Cannes.)

6. The consistently inventive mise en scène of DOOMED LOVE can’t be adequately summarized here, but a few more generalizations and examples may be in order. The use of both long shots and long takes is masterly; an early instance of the two together — in which the camera, accompanied by Handel, pans from a discreet distance with Tereza as she scurries through an autumnal forest, then returns to Simao sitting on a log — is simply breathtaking. (A bit earlier, in a lush interior, actors seem to freeze as in MARIENBAD or INDIA SONG , becoming distilled essences in a mural.) As the characters and situations — that is, our perceptions of them — grow, the camera often moves in closer during certain long takes, as if following the defensible assumption that intimacy and emotions have to be earned before they can be shared or shown. (Elliott Stein has aptly compared the film’s paring-down principles to Bresson’s.) Along with Mark Rappaport (an early enthusiast of DOOMED LOVE , whose somewhat related efforts in IMPOSTORS can still be seen on weekends in the Bleecker’s James Agee Room through mid-June), de Oliveira probably does about as much with mirrors as Hitchcock and Ophüls do with staircases. But part of his own game is to relate this usage to his very elaborate play with windows and open doorways, and in certain cases deliberately confuse us about what we’re actually watching. In one memorable shot, Tereza’s father, facing left in fuzzy close-up, addresses Tereza, who’s facing us in a clear-focus medium shot; by the end of the scene, both characters are facing the camera, until he turns around and she, now walking away, is shown to be a mirror reflection.

7. The title DOOMED LOVE Can be taken as a definition of acute cinéphilia — the same fatal disease that infected Dreyer (”What is film to you?” an interviewer asked him in 1950; “My only great passion,” he replied) — and what this elicits and engenders. Ironically, it seems to work less well as a description of the lives of Simao, Tereza, and Mariana — all three of whom seem so busily, engagedly preoccupied with their all-consuming obsessions with one another that it’s hard to regard either them or their love as “doomed” in any way. In a sense, the whole force of the film can be felt behind the tension of that contradiction, whereby cells of confinement eventually become banal domestic interiors and obsessions turn into everyday commonplaces. It’s a staple of fiction probably dating back to Clarissa, a genre convention in which getting it on equals either ending or else somehow violating the plot. François Truffaut — whose TWO ENGLISH GIRLS, THE STORY OF ADELE H. , and THE GREEN ROOM can all be regarded as faltering (if poignant), formally bashful, conceptually timid steps in the direction of defining a grand literary passion that only DOOMED LOVE succeeds fully in articulating — has been trying to make this movie most of his life.

Watching this classically wrought example of controlled madness for 270 minutes, in the small auditorium of the Public’s Little Theater — a black-walled vault that used to house the “Invisible Cinema” designed by Peter Kubelka for Anthology Film Archives a decade ago, all ninety seats shuttered or blinkered to screen out all social distractions (a perfect way to see LA RÉGION CENTRALE , but lousy for Buster Keaton) — I was reminded once again of the battles between narrative and nonnarrative cinema that used to be waged in this room. (Today the battles are over, the warring tribes shipped off to separate schools or summer camps, and a mongrel like DOOMED LOVE, doomed by its own integrity, has to walk the night without the sponsorship of either ghetto.)

Seen in terms of Freud and Barthes, the conflicts I’m talking about were largely Oedipal versus pre-Oedipal impulses, plaisir versus jouissance, pursuit of plot versus a polymorphous-perverse grabbing after everything else (at least within hailing distance of an infant’s fist). Staging yet another shotgun marriage between these warring families in every spectator, at every moment, for existential rather than socially expedient reasons, DOOMED LOVE is heavy and long with its curling, curving linear plot, yet rich in the sort of meditations (and concentrated meditativeness) that can usually take place only around stasis. What a pity that you didn’t get to see it.