JonathanRosenbaum.com

August Humor

From the Soho News (August 20, 1981). — J.R.

Film India: Indian Film Festival Museum of Modern Art, through August 23

Buster Keaton Film Festival Lincoln Plaza, through September 19

Directed for Comedy Regency, through October 17

Honky Tonk Freeway Written by Edward Clinton

Directed by John Schlesinger, opens August 21

AUGUST 7: The first movie I see for this column isn’t a light comedy, but it sure puts me in a sunny mood. The prospect of a three-hour Indian film in Temil with no subtitles is a little off-putting, I would say -– wouldn’t you? On my way into the sparsely populated auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art this afternoon, I hear not one but two separate senior citizens crack jokes about what a nice opportunity this is for a nap.

And yet, just as Indian film buff Elliott Stein has predicted, I have surprisingly little trouble following the plot and action of Chandralakha (1948). The quaintly illusionistic charm of a black-and-white movie like this, about a good and bad brother vying for the throne in a mythical kingdom – with a large palace protected by a drawbridge –- is part of its primal pull from the beginning.

I’m struck, for instance, by the carefree crosscutting in the opening sequence between the hefty hero in exterior locations, participating in a robust Northwest Mounted Police sort of song, and the heroine he suddenly meets in front of a gorgeously painted backdrop -– as if the two were totally continuous (or at least contiguous) spatial realities. Afterwards, she wanders off into an artificial bucolic set reminiscent of Curse of the Cat People, sniffing flower petals on a tree while belting out a happy song in a manner worthy of Jane Powell.

Some of Chandralakha has the lurid look of a Flash Gordon serial (although, mutatis mutandis, so does Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, when you think about it), and the movie’s often a string of deconstructive technical oddities that summon up such unorthodox and alienated Western filmmaking spirits as Oscar Micheaux and Edward D. Wood, Jr. (e.g., when a conspirator whispers to the young, wavy-haired hero, the soundtrack abruptly reverts to a parch of dead silence à la Godard’s Band of Outsiders.) Battle scenes are edited so fast that you can barely tell what’s happening, but then the film stretches out into longer, more leisurely takes for the spirited songs.

Before long, we learn that the hero and heroine are called Baba and Chandra, respectively; and when Chandra encounters a traveling circus, things pick up considerably. A comic dressed in a bear suit scares and fools practically everyone; some of the “300 Gemini girls” announced in the credits perform vigorous calisthenics under the Big Top; and a protracted nonnarrative display of acrobatics temporarily turns the movie into a version of the Ed Sullivan Show. Lions, tigers, goats, camels, and elephants eventually get into the act, too –- as well as the actors, who have a strong, silent-movie sense of how to do a lot carnally with their eyes.

But all these amusements are a mere prelude to the grand Quo Vadis of outdoor musical numbers toward the end –- reeking of Esther Williams and/or Leni Riefenstahl, though it also suggests Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen restaged by Busby Berkeley. Scores of women dance on majestic steps and on the tops of 72 (by my rough count) gigantic conga drums, which turn out to be holding the members of an invading army like so many Trojan horses.

Set in a fairy-tale universe that can accommodate all sorts of kinky set designs, Chandralakha also has a climactic sword fight during which it becomes possible to determine that the villainous brother has an even fancier hairdo than Baba. Described along with the later Avaiyaar (1953) – also being recently shown in MOMA’s “Historical Retrospective of Indian Films” -– by producer-writer S.S. Vasan of Gemini Films, as one of the “pageants for our peasants,” this made-in-Madras costume drama makes for a pretty action-packed 186 minutes. All things considered, it belongs to the same childhood continuum as Lang’s late India-based movies, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb.

AUGUST 11: At a press show where I’m reseeing two of Buster Keaton’s best shorts (Cops and The Electric House, both 1922) and one of his weakest features, directed by Herbert Blaché (The Saphead, 1920) – just one of the 14programs in the wonderful ongoing Keaton festival being presented at the Lincoln Plaza by Raymond Rohauer and New Yorker Films –- the fact that The Electric House and The Saphead [see photo below] have musical soundtracks while Cops doesn’t clarifies a central aspect of the purity of Keaton’s art.

Keaton’s moves, at their best –- in moments of pure physicality, movement, and concentration, as glued to their own secret private projects as characters are to tasks in the films of Robert Bresson – are visual music pure and simple, irreducible rhythmic and melodic inventions that are furnished by a polyrhythmic imagination. (If any proof of this needed, make haste to see The General, one of the finest examples, which is on through Saturday; alternately, check out either The Navigator or Seven Chances, both on next month.) It stands to reason, therefore, that any other music that’s used, even as “background,’ is bound to detract from this visual achievement -– bound to confuse, obscure, and otherwise distort the visual complexity.

The standard argument against hearing silent movies silently –- and it’s a good one -– is historical: most audiences in 1922 saw The Electric House with rinky-tink keyboard music, so why not today? A harder question to handle is whether the use of this music today merely perpetuates a bad habit. I’m speaking of Keaton now, not the silent cinema as a whole. But the issue is a crucial one, for it revolves around whether we believe sound is a means of anaesthetizing the senses or instructing them.

The frequently distracting music used with The Saphead (a movie that, one must admit, is very easy to get distracted from, for it mainly uses Buster as a well-dressed stick) — in which one block of musical material often overtakes and replaces another, as if someone were randomly twisting a radio dial — appears predicated on the assumption that listening is a passive, semiconscious activity. But in this case, and even more flagrantly in The Electric House, it can lull you into missing some of the greatest stuff that Keaton is actually doing up there on the screen, as director and performer. Setting in motion an escalator, a moving bathtub, sliding doors, a fully automated game of billiards, and a no less automated meal, mechanically-minded Buster, as character and as creator, builds rhythmic layers of complementary speeds and intensities – just one part of his perpetual dialogue and lovers’ quarrels with machines (like his romance with a runaway locomotive in The General) -– that the added music blithely smothers like a wet blanket. By contrast, the silent unreeling of the splendid Cops is a delight – a music whose exquisite rests are allowed to play over silence.

The comic treats in store at the Regency this week are an impressive lot: Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, and Fatty Arbuckle on Wednesday; Thursday through Saturday, a friendly 40s George Stevens flick about strangers meeting and becoming flatmates in Washington, D.C. – The More the Merrier – teamed with Preston Sturges’s demonically brilliant The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (see below). Among the many recommendable highlights next month are three Billy Wilder double-bills, the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup and Horse Feathers, Jerry Lewis’s self-defining The Nutty Professor and The Disorderly Orderly (the latter directed by Frank Tashlin), Tati’s Trafic, and Clair’s A nous la liberté. But the “Directed for Comedy” series runs through mid-October, and these titles are merely a start.

One of the best things about the goofy, outrageous Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is Sturges’s baroque styling of the dialogue delivery. Officer Kockenlocker (William Demarest), a short, squat, and hilarious pug-nosed cop, barks a series of suspicious messages at quavering, dithering, Norman Rockwellish-small-town-nerd Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), which go something like this: “There’s getting to be quite a little talk in this town….Where I come from we don’t skulk about the bushes, you get me?…When we gotta cross the street, we don’t crawl through the sewer to get there….When we got something to say, we say it!” Sturges, thus setting down his American, home-fried version of Dickens in precisely annotated musical terms (the preceding is punctuated by tortured chirps from Norval, “Oh…yes-sir…Y-y-es, sir…Yes, sir,” another set of improvised variations), is out and sailing.

Virtuoso jazz charts, Sturges scripts are scored for the instruments of individual voices. Norval and Trudy Kockenlocker’s impromptu, desperate wartime wedding with a querulous justice of the peace, much funnier than DeNiro’s monkeyshines with Liza Minnelli’s in New York, New York, is largely shaped around combinations of Norval’s manic stutter, the sadistic requirement that all difficult names be spelled out (a percussive idea) by him and Trudy (Betty Hutton) alike, and the fact that Norval’s fake name for the occasion happens to be none other than Ignatz Ratzkiwatski (which has a uniquely Sturgean music all its own). The results are as exciting, in a way, as hearing Dizzy and Bird play “Confirmation” in unison without stepping on any of the cracks. For Sturges, though, it’s just a stretch of everyday ensemble orchestration.

AUGUST 13: Advance reports on Honky Tonk Freeway, the only new movie I have to write about this week, led me to expect an utter disaster. What comes out instead is a surprisingly agreeable, offbeat mess – agreeably surprising, that is, if you go expecting a dull disaster. But go expecting a nonpretentious, non-urban fantasy farce of merging miniplots – a mobile Airport, a Nashville about the Florida interstate freeway, or a Citizen’s Band about a small resort town that desperately needs to become a freeway exit – and you probably won’t be halfway disappointed. It’s a foreigner’s appreciative vision of American life as a tacky yet surreal and legible comic strip, hatched out in part by Scottish coproducer Don Boyd and English director John Schlesinger.

In a way, the whole movie evokes a sleazy roadside stand I once encountered in Florida (or perhaps dreamt I did), which advertised, “All the orange juice you can drink for a buck”: after one measly glass, I was told, “For a buck, that’s all you can drink.” On the debit side, William Devane, who was fine as the slimy villain of Hitchcock’s Family Plot, doesn’t convince me for a second here that he’s either a small town mayor or a Baptist minister. And the usually congenial Beau Bridges bores me with his strenuous efforts to seem normal. For my taste, Beverly D’Angelo and Teri Garr are more fun to watch.

For whatever it’s worth, the outsider’s democratic view of conspicuous consumption in this movie seems much more humane and politically palatable than the insider ‘s elitist view of S.O.B. If servants are stridently stereotyped in the Blake Edwards film, it’s a governor and other state officials who come off as impossibly overdone caricatures in Honky Tonk Freeway – which gives you some idea of where this movie’s heart and head are: namely, in a more populist place that’s shared by the visions of Sturges and Tati.

As Marguerite Duras recently remarked [to me, during a visit to New York], Tati is the greatest living film director, “at least in a classical sense,” and it’s a pleasure to see his influence at work, even in a flimsy movie like this one. The social construction of the plot of Honky Tonk Freeway is strikingly akin to the overall dynamic conceptions of Playtime and Trafic (although execution, alas, is something else again). In Schlesinger’s version of social regrouping, a decentered, hero-less narrative of crisscrossed trajectories on the interstate (such as Geraldine Page and Deborah Rush as fellow nuns, Paul Jabara as a singing truckdriver, and Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy as a couple whose car is stolen) is set against a repeatedly recentered narrative about the klutzy town of Ticlaw, which paints itself pink, plants an elephant on water skis, and ultimately dynamites a bridge in order to catch the freeway flow.

In the closing sequence of Honky Tonk Freeway -– a multivehicular highway wreck with as many interlocking parts as a Rube Goldberg machine -– Trafic is virtually ransacked, in details ranging from a stray rolling wheel to a bowed member of the clergy examining a battered part. Schlesinger makes it fun to watch; but check out Tati’s original at the Regency about a month from now if you want to see the genuine brilliant article.

Reading about Looking and Looking at Reading: review of CAMERA LUCIDA and IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER

This is one of the last book reviews that I wrote for The Soho News, a weekly alternative newspaper in New York that didn’t survive the 1980s but that afforded me during the early part of that decade my only extended and regular opportunity to date to review books as well as films. This particular piece, a double review, ran in their August 18, 1981 issue, under a different title (”Reading about looking”), and I was pleased to hear some time later from Susan Sontag that it was of my pieces that she clipped. –J.R.

Reading about Looking and Looking at Reading

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

By Roland Barthes

Translated by Richard Howard

Hill and Wang, $10.95.

If on a winter’s night a traveler

By Italo Calvino

Translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95

In most bookstores, the new Barthes and Calvino books stare at one another like mutually envious friends in their separate ghettos, eyeing one another across a great divide and empty space: the social space separating essay from fiction.

Barthes’ grief-stricken gaze at photography sees beyond it to his own desire, then sees beyond that desire to the hypothetical Proustian (or Jamesian) novel he will never write — a nervous gaze that leaps like a butterfly across a crowded garden, never lingering with any simple petal-like photo for long, frustrated and impatient at the uselessness of this activity in summoning back his beloved mother. Calvino’s chipper, common-sensical look at the erotics of reading — the same subject addressed in Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, but approached here in the form of a love story — is more steady and measured and continuous, seeing only one brightly suspended plot after another, each one pulled out like colored scarves from a magician’s hat — each another sign that you can always shake away the blues if only you can convince yourself that there’s always another scarf to pull.

Calvino, with all his unfinished miniplots, never quite gets around to starting the essay about fiction and narrative he wants to write. Barthes, with all his unfinished miniessays (a crystalline form developed in the aphoristic formats of all his late books, where characteristically each paragraph — rather than, say, each sentence or page — offers a fresh beginning), never quite manages to start the novel about his own life that his writing has been flirting with for years. (”It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel,” reads the handwritten inscription that opens the mise en scène and mise en page of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, only four pages away from Barthes at age ten clinging to his mother, in a photograph captioned, “The demand for love”.)

If on a winter’s night a traveler is an interesting title for what Calvino’s novel keeps shrouded in darkness, an ellipsis with seemingly infinite tacked-on extensions, a way to begin all over again. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (or La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie, in the original), on the contrary, promises the closure of light and clarity, the framing of an end that encloses the bright self like a coffin.

“You are about to begin Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler,” starts you-know- who at the beginning of you-know-what. “Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.” Just like a movie, whose nonstop pacing Calvino at every point seems to be emulating. “Such are the two ways of the Photograph,” concludes Barthes at the end of his last (nonposthumous) book. “The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle  to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality.”

Criticizing “A Sign in Space” in Calvino’s Cosmicomics because it “comes perilously close to being altogether too reverent an obeisance to semiology,” Gore Vidal signals the influence of later Barthes that imposes itself no less insistently on If on a winter’s night a traveler. Barthes, returning the regard, refers to Calvino near the end of Camera Lucida — specifically “what Calvino calls `the true, total photograph,’” which, Barthes explains, identifies reality with truth, “becomes at once evidential and exclamative” and “bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness; it joins what Kristeva calls “la vérité folle“. Some fun, this “true, total photograph,” which Barthes makes sound like a snake consuming its own tail — which may actually describe his own giddy practice in Camera Lucida better than Calvino’s.

Each section of Camera Lucida (half as long a book as Calvino’s novel, though it has twice as many chapters, four dozen in all) begins with the drama of Barthes “happening upon” a photograph –a narrative event that gives us all the roomy lassitude of an event in a novel by James or Proust. In Part I, this is a picture of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, which makes Barthes reflect with amazement that he is looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor. Part II, “Chapter” 25, makes a quantum leap to Barthes’ alienated responses to pictures of his mother shortly after her death, his consternation that these photographs refused (objectively speaking) to speak. Neither Jerome nor Mme. Barthes appear photographically in Camera Lucida (although the latter, as noted above, figures at the beginning of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes), and, like much of A Lover’s Discourse, the form of personal disclosure employed has a lot to do with indirection.

Studium and punctum are the key Latin terms in Barthes’ phenomenological musings about his own experiences of certain photographs (most of which are reproduced) — the first comprising “application to a thing…a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment,” the second consisting of “that accident” in a photograph “which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Not so much an erotics of seeing, exactly, as a dynamics of sight that includes the studying gaze as well as the piercing revelation.

Barthes uses the terms to stand for the dialectical registers of the spectatorial consciousness — much as plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss or coming) are used in The Pleasure of the Text to stand for dialectical registers of reading consciousness. Here, however, the notions of plaisir and jouissance play a more problematical role. There’s less of the kind of play that’s reflected in Calvino’s sexy narrative glosses on earlier Barthes, where he appears to be representing via his characters the “readerly text” (as two readers who are lovers) and the “writerly text” (as a reader and writer who are potential lovers):

Lovers, reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again,has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phrases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives….

…What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at the same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.

Wasn’t it Barthes himself who compared narrative to both striptease and the Oedipal search, suggesting that all three activities were closely related? But words are infinitely extendable, like sections on a train or strips of film, while still photographic images are closed and final — one thing accounting for the different tempers of these beautiful, related, and irreconcilable books.

–The Soho News, August 18, 1981

Wolfen Pleasures

From the Soho News (August 11, 1981) — J.R.

Wolfen

Written by David Eyre and Michael Wadleigh

Based on a novel by Whitley Streiber

Directed by Michael Wadleigh

Tarzan, the Ape ManWritten by Tom Rowe and Gary Goddard

Directed by John Derek

I Hate Blondes

Written by Laura Toscano and Franco Marotta

Directed by Giorgio CapitaniHeavy Metal

Screenplay by Dan Goldberg and Len Blum

Directed by Gerald Potterton         (opens August 7)

It was at the Cannes Festival in 1970 — a happy, unreal event — that I first came upon the awesome, utopian Woodstock, in 70mm and stereo, along with its pie-eyed director, Michael Wadleigh. He spoke beatifically about the convergence of art and politics in his press conference, and quite movingly dedicated Woodstock before its screening to the students who had just been killed at Kent State. After the movie, he passed out black armbands in the Grand Palais; I took one and wore it for a while. Eventually, some of the boutiques along the Croisette started selling them — which made it hard to know whether one was representing the New Left or Warner Brothers. I’m not sure that Wadleigh was entirely clear about this either. But I’ve been waiting over a decade to see his second movie, and Wolfen doesn’t let me down.According to the current state of received ideas, rightwing formalism in movies (e.g., Escape from New York or Raiders of the Lost Ark) is “good clean fun,” not politics at all, while leftwing formalism (e.g., Numero deux) is supposed to be pleasureless politics, no fun at all. The incredible thing about Wolfen — a spectacular, metaphysical mystery-horror fantasy about New York that’s visceral and leftist in about equal doses, often at the same time — is that it builds its exciting, unfashionable politics largely through pungent sounds and images.

Some stunning uses of visual and aural subjectivity suggest what the world (specifically, lower Manhattan and the south Bronx) looks and sounds like to wolves, who are poetically linked to members of other vanishing and territorial dispossessed species, like Indians. Not everything in this visionary metaphor pans out politically or logically –- it’s not clear why blacks are frequent victims while, say, Indians are not –- but on a gut poetic level, it conceivably says as much as Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” does in Woodstock. In contrast to the reported uses of black and white footage to approximate ordinary canine vision in Samuel Fuller’s upcoming White Dog, Wolfen exudes some of the most gorgeous Day-Glo colors this side of solarizing –- many of them lushly reverberating tones on the multilayered soundtrack. And the fact that the mystery exposition is very gradual lets these achievements work at leisure on the imagination; not knowing what’s going on becomes an agreeable sensation, and a productive one.

Over the years I’ve come to regard Woodstock, paradoxically, as the Triumph of the Will of counter-culture – a visionary epic taking place in Heaven (“three days of love and music”). It’s not surprising that the offscreen terrorist group in Wolfen that is confused with the wolves (whose police informer turns out to be Wadleigh himself) is called Gotterdammerung, twilight of the gods. Wadleigh continues to see Woodstock as political, and in a recent phone interview stressed that he had nothing to do with the chopped-up, depoliticized Woodstock Revisited, with added commentary, that was shown recently on TV. (Considering his need of a large canvas, it’s understandable that he was opposed to Woodstock turning up on TV in any form.) Nor can he be said to have had everything to do with Wolfen, having been replaced by John Hancock as director (who remains uncredited) before the end of shooting. (Many writers were hired and replaced, too.)

Linking Wadleigh to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl may sound capricious and unjust; yet it’s hard to think of many other talented counterparts to an epic, lyrical naivite that is at once so exalted and  passionately pluralistic in its reverence for collective strength and power. The fact that Wadleigh exalts an outsider’s society of mavericks and underdogs in both parts of his diptych has to be considered, too. It’s worth noting, however, that Leni also had a thing about wolves as superior beings — check out her Tiefland (1945) for copious illustration.

In fairness to the full range of Wolfen — which boasts a fine, understated performance by Albert Finney as a detective, with one of the best manufactured American accents I’ve heard since Olivier played Eugene O’Neill’s James Tyrone on the London stage — the movie has some of the delicate economy and reticence associated with the team of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur in the 40s, especially in their luminously feline quickies, Cat People and The Leopard Man. Their poetic movies hold their monsters mainly at bay and offscreen — wispy notations in the mind’s eye that creep through parks, alleyways, zoos, and bedrooms, and linger in ambiguous pockets of quiet and dark.

One astonishingly beautiful sequence of Steadicam delirium turns us into a wolf darting down a narrow Manhattan street in what feels like the West Village, and pausing beside an iron railing. (Wadleigh mentioned Moby Dick as a reference on the phone, but it’s hard for me not to think also of Steppenwolf.) Later, there’s the luscious, liquid, even splashy kaleidoscopic Dolby effect of what Albert Finney and Diane Verona’s lovemaking looks, sounds, smells, and feels like, at least to the wolfy, multisensorial voyeur in all of us. Certain other moments aim for semisubliminal jolts, obtainable from climactic pay-off shots that are so fast you can barely tell what hit you, or, in one case, a beautifully inflected reverse-zoom to frame both Finney and Verona that punctuates a particularly jumpy moment. (Seeing Wolfen a second time with a weekend crowd, and sharing the same shreiks and laughs, was like riding a roller coaster with friends.)

Wadleigh told me his interest in wolves went back to when he was in medical school at Columbia. He discovered that man’s evolution caused his upper brain to crowd out the lower, making his senses decidedly inferior to those of wolves. Thus the lie detectors used by the police in Wolfen to spy on interviews — which look and sound a lot like the subjective wolf shots — represent man’s attempt to regain those powers, which are sensitive to nuances like heat change and psychological stress.

At different points in our conversation, Wadleigh cited both the film’s length and “resistance to doing things that were experimental” that led to his leaving Wolfen, without going into further detail. The current Cinefantastique reports that he exited “`for political reasons,’” meaning, “the exact reasons are still unclear”; what’s clear enough from still other sources is that they’re too complex and various to allow for any easy paraphrases here.

Even when it doesn’t make total sense, Wolfen is a giant among munchkins in the present batch of summer entertainments for the sheer grandeur and folly of its scheme (which includes everything from Carlos Castenada’s Don Juan to urban renewal to the monster movie’s “return of the repressed”. For its soundtrack alone — which deserves to be heard in a fully equipped theater — it is a worthy successor to Woodstock. And its warm, riffy uses of Gregory Hines as a hip black medical examiner and Tom Noonan as a spacey zoologist involve the kind of throwaway virtues that Val Lewton excelled in.

But the movie’s own favored vantage point is much more grandiose and myth-hungry. Its view is essentially the one we get at the movie’s beginning and end, from the towering top of a bridge — an Indian’s view of the Manhattan skyline, in more ways than one — and it turns us all into gods, conceptually speaking, or else Pygmies if we’re standing below. Either way, Wolfen is an inspired sensual orgy about something real, and a political thriller with eyes, ears, and guts — even if, like its beautiful animal heroes and heroines, it has to devour the brains of others.

***

By and large, Bo and John Derek’s Tarzan, the Ape Man — produced by and starring Bo, shot and directed by John — turns out to be about as absurd as one would expect it to be. Beginning with Tarzan’s celebrated jungle holler coming from the MGM lion, and ending with Tarzan (Miles O’Keefe, wearing a hippie headband and loincloth), a money, and a bare-breasted Bo as Jane strenuously trying to cavort and frolic in innocent R-rated bliss, this lethargic family romp tends to be a bit more childish than childlike.

The adventure-hungry kid in me strongly resented the absence of any treehouses. The grizzled adult longed for the anthropological comedy of Tarzan’s New York Adventure (an earlier, lighter version of Wolfen, in a way), whoile even the horny adolescent tended to concede that Less is More when it comes to the nondistinctive, San-Diego-central-casting charms of Bo Derek — as 10 and Playboy have each in related ways demonstrated. If anything charms here, it’s the smashing locations in Sri Lanka and the Seychelles Islands, and a few trees, monkeys, and elephants.

In order to get to these, though, you have to put up with acres of tireless, cranky scene-chewing from Richard Harris (the anti-Albert Finney par excellence), putting even the monkeys to sleep; pathetic tributes, complete with hippie body paint, to Apocalypse Now (with a matching Playboy spread); and an especially ugly form of lurching slow-motion every time the title hunk (who’s cuter than Bo — maybe because he has no lines) has to swing anywhere on a vine. The audience I saw this movie with hooted a lot, but they didn’t seem to be having much fun. Something tells me we all should have gone swimming on our own instead.

***

I Hate Blondes, by contrast, is more standard stuff — Italian boulevard farce, pure and simple — although it boasts at least two actresses (Corinne Clery, Marina Langner) who are sexier to me than Bo Derek, at least on a human level.The plot concerns Emilio (Enrico Montesano), a nebbishy ghostwriter of whodunits who seems closely modeled after Woody Allen’s persona, unable to peddle his own poetry while grinding out potboilers for the burnt-out celebrity author Donald Rose (Jean Rochefort, who’s closer to Spam than ham in his style of overacting).

Emilio gets involved with Angelica (Corinne Clery), a burglar after Donald’s possessions, and before you can say Jack the Ripoff, there are as many opening and closing doors as you’ll find at rush hour in a Feydeau farce — and lots of frantic slapstick that never slows down long enough for you to taste much of the bitterness behind the central premises. Good-natured and dumb about its patronizing fear of intellectuals (a conflicted emotion that Woody Allen’s popularity also seems related to), I Hate Blondes can be almost as brainlessly mechanical in spots as some of the sleaze-balls it ridicules — like Donald Rose, his publisher (Ivan Desny), and his agent (Renato Mori) — but at least it keeps moving under Giorgio Capitani’s well-paced direction.

***

If TV, according to the late Frank Lloyd Wright, provides chewing gum for the eyeballs, the supposedly rapid nonstop narrative flow of Heavy Metal — an animated movie based on the adult comic book — is like soft shewing tobacco for the mind: steady and dreamy and flaky, going nowhere. It’s the Yellow Submarine for the Me Generation, featuring a smorgasbord of graphic styles which nearly all seem a mite hastily drawn, and which all tend to promote (visually and aurally) the same basic tits & ass, s&m, b&d, blood & guts, Sturm & Drang, and rock & roll, in proportions, shapes, personalities, and quantities that quickly become indistinguishable, a mere quivering mass of jelly, despite the ostensible lineup of individual stories and profusion of individual artists. Overall, it’s a lot more consistent erotically than aesthetically — assuming that there’s anyone left who can make such a distinction.

The gory metallic mood evokes that of s-f writer Alfred Bester– apart from some charming extraterrestials, BEMS, and robots that I warmly associate with Dan O’Bannon (who collaborated on Dark Star, and wrote two of the episodes here), who remind me more of cuddly creatures in tales by Stanley Weinbaum and Edgar Pangborn. There are distances recalling the endless depths of the Krel in Forbidden Planet; and the barbaric blood-lust spectacle of pagan rites in Cecil B. De Mille is never very far away.

Another movie in the so-called apolitical “good clean fun” genre — probably ideal for adolescent boys who like to masturbate to mutilation, dismemberment, decapitation, and annihilation fantasies with racist trimmings from Soldier of Fortune and Terry and the Pirates, rather than to plastic-nubile foldouts from Playboy — Heavy Metal is no less simpleminded or gulpy about its own Jungian pretensions than Wolfen (which is easily ten times as much fun to sit through). But it’s rightwing instead of leftist, hence ideologically safer — acceptable in part to everyone, and a crashing bore.

“Stürme über dem Montblanc” - aufgebrochene Gletscherspalten, 1930. Im Film “Stürme über dem Montblanc” verkörperte Leni Riefenstahl mit der Astronomin Hella Armstrong eine moderne Wissenschaftlerin. Das Bild zeigt die im Frühjahr aufgebrochenen Gletscherspalten. Der Film von Regisseur Fanck besticht durch eindringliche Aufnahmen der Bergwelt. Lawinen und Gletscher gehörten bei den Dreharbeiten zum Alltag.

Olympia, 1936: “Achter drängen sich an der Wendemarke”. Die in Kiel ausgetragene Segelregatta wurde im Teil 2 “Fest der Schönheit” gezeigt. Amerikanische Cineasten und Top-Regisseure zählen die Olympia-Filme Leni Riefenstahls bereits im Jahr 1956 zu den besten 10 Filmen aller Zeiten.

Olympia, 1936: Goldmedaillengewinner im Turmspringen der Männer. Das Bild zeigt Marshall Wayne aus den USA, den Goldmedaillengewinner im Turmspringen der Männer. Anfangs werden im Film noch die Namen der Sportler genannt, dann nimmt die Bildgeschwindigkeit langsam ab, bis die Springer schließlich in Zeitlupe fliegenden Vögeln gleichen.

Olympia, 1936: “Die Entzündung der olympischen Flamme”. Fackelläufer Anatol entzündete die Flamme in Griechenland an einem Säulenfragment. Mit den Säulen des Parthenon beginnt “Fest der Völker”, der erste Filmteil des Dokumentarfilms über die XI. Olympischen Spiele, die vom 1.-16. August in Berlin stattfanden.

Olympia, 1936: Sprung vom 10-Meter-Turm. Das Turmspringen bildet den abschließenden Höhepunkt des 2. Teils von Leni Riefenstahls Olympia-Dokumentation. Die Turmspringer wurden mit drei Kameras und unterschiedlichen Tempi aufgenommen.

Leni Riefenstahl: bei Dreharbeiten zu ihrem Film “Tiefland”. Leni Riefenstahl bei den Dreharbeiten zu ihrem Film Tiefland in Krün im Karwendelgebirge. Erstmals arbeitete sie bereits 1934 an dem Projekt, das dann aber wegen einer Erkrankung der Regisseurin eingestellt wurde. Durch den Kriegsausbruch und viele Schwierigkeiten verzögern sich die Dreharbeiten immer wieder, die erst 1944 abgeschlossen werden konnten.

Leni Riefenstahl: “Starfoto als Junta” im Film “Das blaue Licht”, 1932. In ihrem ersten eigenen Film “Das blaue Licht” übernahm Leni Riefenstahl nicht nur die Hauptrolle, der Film begründet ihre dritte Karriere als Regisseurin. Sie produzierte und schnitt den Film selbst, auch das Drehbuch schrieb sie zusammen mit dem jüdischen Filmtheoretiker Béla Balázs. Der Film gewinnt auf Anhieb die Silbermedaille auf der 1. Biennale in Venedig und verschafft ihr internationale Anerkennung.

Haarstern, Malediven. Während ihrer zahlreichen Tauchgänge machte Leni Riefenstahl auch Filmaufnahmen. Ausschnitte des noch in Arbeit befindlichen Films über die Unterwasserwelt waren bereits im preisgekrönten Dokumentarfilm “Die Macht der Bilder - Leni Riefenstahl” von 1993 zu sehen.

Review of THE CELLULOID CLOSET

From The Soho News (August 4, 1981), very slightly tweaked on January 27, 2010. –J.R.

The Celluloid Closet:
Homosexuality in the Movies
By Vito Russo
Harper Colophon Books, $7.95

Want to read the first comprehensive study in English of homosexuality in the movies? Go hunt up Parker Tyler’s Screening the Sexes (1972). Prefer a more theoretical and political, less coterie-oriented approach? Try Richard Dyer’s first-rate Gays and Film (1975), which includes Caroline Sheldon on lesbians, Dyer on stereotyping, and Jack Babuscio on camp. Like something even more up to date, dealing with the “textual incoherence” of recent Hollywood movies like Cruising and Looking for Mr. Goodbar from a gay lib perspective? Check out Robin Wood’s interesting and fruitful article (no pun intended) in the current issue of Movie.

Where does this leave Vito Russo’s serious and ambitious The Celluloid Closet – which incidentally bears the same subtitle as Tyler’s book? Not so much in the lurch as the above list may imply. As the best researched and illustrated book on the subject — entertainingly and intelligently written in epigramatic journalese, and clearly backed up by years of patient fact-finding and interviewing — it deserves to be considered a significant reference point and a source of reference in the years to come.

As sustained argument or comprehensive survey, it is rather less impressive — representing different successive stages of an evolving position which curiously coexist in the same present tense of Russo’s writing, and omitting works as variously relevant as The Bitter Tea of Petra von Kant, Bitter Victory, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Conversation Piece, Daughters of Darkness, I’m Not From Here, Ivan the Terrible, Orpheus, The Outlaw, and the collected works of Werner Schroeter and Carmelo Bene. But don’t get me wrong, as Sidney Skolsky likes to put it. As a straight moviegoer who is more than a little perturbed about the ravages of Hollywood on my sexuality, I don’t doubt that Russo has plenty of good reasons of his own to be steamed about media censorship, evasion, and distortion — which provides much of the best of his book, and helps to explain the negativity of his title.

What I’m a little less certain about is Russo’s estimation of what movies should be doing in relation to gays — which is where his argument tends to break down into discrete and inconsistent micro-units, some more persuasive than others. Most of this problem, I think, reflects Russo’s economics and aesthetics more than his sexual politics — a pragmatic contradiction he seems to share with Stuart Byron, whereby a leftist stance and an overall piety in relation to the capitalism of the film industry make for strangely compatible bedfellows.

There are the parts that chronicle the equivalents to Baby’s First Steps in the treatment of gays in film. (The Laughing Policeman contains “the first acknowledgment in a commercial film” that a gay lib movement “existed in America”; Norman, Is That You? “may have be the first progay fag joke”; the first TV show to portray gays was NYPD in 1967.)

Then there are the parts that convincingly argue it is useless to expect more than an “acceptable lie” from Hollywood: “Clearly, commercial cinema is only an amusement park; films that speak to gay women and men must come from the independents.” “To ‘ask’ Hollywood for anything is a waste of time for any minority group; to ask that a reflector of society show lesbian and gay men as being part of rather than outside the social norm when they have not yet become a visible part of it is unreasonable.”

Then there are the isolated overstatements: “America hated Sunday, Bloody Sunday“; with the exception of only three movies — Five Easy Pieces, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and A Perfect Couple –  “American cinema was unable to portray gay characters without their being sex-obsessed or sex-defined”. Dog Day Afternoon “failed to touch” the lives of Middle America (lots of territory being covered here), but “you can like or dislike the lesbian characters in Manhattan” — Vito says it’s okay — “because Woody Allen is neurotic for a living, and Manhattan is a great film” (no explanation offered).

“The movies await permission from the world-famous general public before they will portray gays as a fact of life,” Russo rightly complains (perhaps prior to the release of La Cages aux Folles), but there are times when he appears to be awaiting permission from both the general public and gay lib before portraying film as a facet of art rather than of sociology, commerce, or cosmetics. Whatever one’s biases about art, anyone who considers Woody Allen more significant in relation to Russo’s title than Sergei Eisenstein — who isn’t mentioned once, not even in the filmography — can’t be losing much sleep over the matter.

But in the land of the sometimes trivial, the witty are king, and some of this book is very sharp and funny to read. There’s the intertitle gleaned from John Ford’s silent Three Bad Men in which “the grizzly ‘Bull’ (J. Farrell MacDonald) tells a fancy Dan who says he has just reached manhood, ‘Then you’d better reach again.’” There’s the ingenious response of Holly Woodlawn to a talk show host’s exasperated query, “What are you? Are you a woman trapped in a man’s body? Are you a homosexual? A transvestite? A transsexual?” “But, darling,” Woodlawn rhetorically counter-queried, “what difference does it make as long as you look fabulous?”

Russo seems most at ease when he’s working in short takes, and two of the most enjoyable parts of The Celluloid Closet are the appendices — a filmography including one-liners about and/or classifications of more than 300 movies and a mordant “necrology” of 33 gays condemned to die by movies, ranging chronologically from Conrad Veidt in Anders als die Anderen (Different from the Others, 1919 — suicide by poison) to Robert Christian’s transvestite in And Justice For All (1980 — suicide by hanging).

“Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider,” Pauline Kael wrote in the early 60s. I wonder if she’d hesitate at all before writing the same sentence today, when sex has become more a matter of taste, and taste is often merely a rationalization for sexual preferences. Russo is adroit and provocative when he offers an auteurist reading of James Whale’s horror films (buttressed by a pungent personal quote about the director’s gayness from Robert Aldrich), and alert to the nuances of Robert Walker’s matching performances in Strangers on a Train and My Son John.

But I feel that he needlessly stereotypes some of my gay friends when he says that Nicholas Ray’s beautiful Johnny Guitar “features a butch Joan Crawford and an even more butch Mercedes McCambridge in a series of confrontations that keep present-day audiences howling,” and misses the point when he praises The Rocky Horror Picture Show in isolation from the live contributions of its cult audience (whose existence is acknowledged, but whose nature and meaning are disappointingly skimped). On the other hand, it’s hard to feel anything but grateful for a book that preserves for posterity Peter Finch’s reply to the London Times reporter who wanted to know how he could bring himself to kiss another man onscreen in Sunday, Bloody Sunday: “I just closed my eyes and thought of England.”

–The Soho News, August 4, 1981