JonathanRosenbaum.com

Playing Oneself

From The Soho News (October 27, 1981). — J.R.

It’s no surprise that My Dinner with André (loved by Vincent Canby), now on at the Lincoln Plaza, was one of the most popular films at the New York Film Festival — or that Lightning Over Water (hated by Canby), and now on at the Public, was one of the least popular. It isn’t just that the former movie says something that many of us want to hear, and says it well — nor that the latter says something that few of us want to hear, and says it problematically.

Each movie stars two artists who work in the world of make-believe, playing themselves, and yet the respective positions each pair takes in relation to playing this game couldn’t be more different. For André, director Louis Malle worked from a script by the two performers, playwright/.actor Wallace Shawn and stage director André Gregory. For Lightning, film directors Wim Wenders and the dying Nicholas Ray almost concurrently wrote and directed their own performances, after a fashion.

Having once played myself in a film (Peter Bull’s The Two-Backed Beast, or The Critic Makes the Film), at the same time that I was writing a critical memoir that allowed me to play myself in a book (Moving Places: A Life at the Movies), I can well appreciate the subjective factors that enter into any exercise in self- representation. By the same token, I should expose my own slants on André and Lightning by acknowledging my personal links to each artist-performer. I’ve known Wally Shawn intermittently over a 22-year period, and he’s just about as nice as anyone can possibly be to someone he regards as a social inferior. I’ve met André Gregory once, recently, and then only because Wally asked to bring him along to our interview. I’d seen Nick Ray a few times during the last six years of his life, always as a social equal and acquaintance, never as a friend, and I’ve encountered Wim Wenders on similar amicable terms, most recently in connection with Lightning.

We all plays ourselves at times, which should qualify us to understand others doing the same thing on film. But it doesn’t. Too many offscreen facts intervene between us and these people to allow us to see any of them whole, so we settle all too easily into the first fictions about them that come our way. Often we don’t recognize that we’re selecting fiction over fact, or conflating the two into the kind of pseudo-truth that we usually expect from movies.

***

Whatever else one says about My Dinner with André, its technical achievement should not be denied. For the better part of 110 minutes, two friends meet at an expensive Manhattan restaurant and talk; longeurs are not entirely absent, but there aren’t many, and the naturalistic look of a real encounter is deftly maintained. Most of the talk comes from Gregory, recently back from mystical adventures in a Polish forest with an experimental theater workshop. He’s introduced in Shawn’s narration as a brilliant director who’d originally discovered Shawn’s plays, but who had since given up his career and mainly left his family to roam around the globe on various religious pursuits. Shawn listens in wonder, but eventually offers up some comic declarations of rational skepticism. Two seemingly dialectical worldviews are counterposed, and the men part as friends.

At the beginning of André, Shawn shuffles like a downtrodden near-derelict along a scruffy Soho street, complaining on the soundtrack about his life as a struggling, unproduced playwright: “I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was ten years old I was rich. I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music.” After Shawn delivers the next line, the audience is squarely in his back pocket: “Now I’m 36, and all I think about is money.”

Most people who respond to this common-man earthiness aren’t aware that he’s the son of William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker – a fact that has sometimes made me reflect that, given Wally’s social connections, it must be very difficult for him to evaluate his own work and career. My first information about André as a project came from one of his favorite playgrounds, the front page of the Sunday Times‘ Art and Leisure section, in an article about him and his father that was careful to work in tasteful fundraising pleas in the third paragraph and again toward the end.

“Louis encouraged us to treat the script as if we were two actors who received it in the mail,” Wally said at the festival press conference. “It doesn’t remind me of me.” Maybe not. But the movie reminds me of the New Yorker – the return of the repressed? — from beginning to end. Doesn’t Malle already have the same kind of economic/spiritual kinship with that magazine that Roger Vadim has to Playboy? Gregory’s “intimate” monologues about himself and the world are like long J.D. Salinger stories about the Glass family, complete with mystic parables, arch digressions, masochistic yet starstruck self-deprecations, and even toothless satire about the rich and spoiled. Shawn’s reaction-shot grimaces are like cartoons. The restaurant itself is a fair summary of the magazine’s ads, with the consumerist metaphor of the meal serving as a perfect corollary to “Goings On About Town” — the ponderously nonspecific chatter about The State of the Theater (”It can actually help people to come in contact with reality”) done in the anonymous style of any “Talk of the Town” item.

Something like a résumé for both its stars, André is a Hollywood art movie that doggedly flatters its audience, cozily inviting it to feel intelligent and concerned without thinking too much. “Whatever documentary aspect it may have,” Wally told me, “we wanted it to stand on its own feet as fiction. That, for instance, is different from Lightning, where obviously no attempt is made to create that illusion.”

Unlike the narcissistic self-hatred of Shawn’s play Marie and Bruce — which ends on a note of soppy uplift cribbed from the last pages of Ulysees and Franny and Zooey – André affirms something: friendship. Yet its equally conservative appeal invites identification, recognition, and confirmation, not discovery or reflection. No fewer than 40 people are listed in the credits for the realizing of this precious dialogue, shot in 16mm and blown up to 35.

***

“In the Wim Wenders movie,” Gregory told me, “which I admired enormously, “I felt that a problem was that the audience becomes separated in a way, and isolated by certain confusions.” “I’m never going to be finished with this movie,” Wenders was quoted as saying in the September 30 Variety. “Each time it’s shown, I still feel as if it needs the same kind of energy from me it needed when we were filming.”

People who denounce Wenders for exploiting Ray in Lightning don’t seem to realize that if the film hadn’t been made, Ray would have probably wound up dying in a charity ward. (He was virtually broke, having burned a lot of bridges behind him, and the production immediately took over his expenses.) “I did my part to help Nick a lot,” Tom Luddy told me about Ray’s last years, “and so did many others. But nobody did what Wim did, which was to really allow him some decency.”

Los Angeles critic Myron Meisel described Lightning to me as “an act of witness for Nick’s sake. It was made to be made, not made to be seen.”  I would describe the first, [then] unreleased version of Lightning edited by Peter Przygodda [now known as Nick’s Movie and available in Europe] — which showed publicly at Cannes and Venice in 1980, before Wenders withdrew it and re-edited it into the present version — as an act of witness for the truth’s sake, however indigestible the truth of that tense, grim shooting might have been for the people involved. As it stands now, the film is an unholy jumble of things, some of them moving, some appalling, some in between the two (like Ray and Wenders playing themselves badly), some naive, some protective shields (like Wenders’ brittle film noir narration, which wasn’t in the first version) — all united, perhaps, by the disturbing yet revealing phenomena of what happens to certain people when you place a camera in front of them.

The fact that Lightning begins with a self-conscious, artificial restaging of something that really happened (Wenders arriving by cab in Soho to make a film with Ray), while Shawn’s convincing schlep and subway ride across town to meet Gregory for dinner is a fabrication, only begins to describe the different codes of etiquette that apply. The same goes for privileged information. Of the five participants and three observers on Lightning that I’ve spoken to, not one has ever told me anything in confidence, or intimated that there were any “inside” stories to dig for, despite all the real traumas that the shooting occasioned. But Shawn was divulging production secrets to me even before our interview started, indicating that he wanted to keep the real location of the restaurant a mystery. Big deal. [2011 footnote: It was in Richmond, Virginia, where I’m currently retyping this article.] If, as he puts it in the movie, all he thinks about is money, maybe that’s the major difference.

What do we need to know in order to make sense of Lightning, either as a work (modernist scrapbook documentary) or as a deed (act of witness)? It helps if you know that 16 years have passed since Ray collapsed on the set of his last Hollywood feature, and he has not even brought his one surviving independent/maverick production, We Can’t Go Home Again, to completion; also that, after a lifetime of alcoholism, Ray joined AA and quit drinking in the late 70s, only to find that he still couldn’t finance a production of his own, and had terminal brain cancer besides. At this point, Wenders was able to mobilize enough money for a low-budget West German/Swedish coproduction.

When people say that Lightning was monstrously misconceived, it’s hard for me to know what they mean. Are they saying that Ray should have had the good taste to die without even trying to justify his last 16 years — or that Wenders should have had the good taste to prevent him from trying? Or are they implying, rather, that Ray had a perfect right to make a movie about facing death, and to ask us to face it in turn — as long as he made it entertaining, like André, with the right box office values?

As a feminist friend points out, playing with oneself is the subject of both movies, an activity from which ladies are basically excluded. According to Canby, the only people in Lightning who “come off sympathetically” are the directors’ spouses, Ronee Blakely and Susan Ray. I agree that the failure of both versions of Lightning to deal with Susan’s relation to Nick, whether willed or not, is almost total, and a serious flaw. But when I reflect on all the resentment I’ve heard from people who worked on the film about the star-turns imposed by Blakely, on a project that she was initially related to only because of her marriage to Wenders (now a thing of the past), I can’t feel quite so indulgent as Canby, who describes her “gamely” attempting “to improvise a most peculiar sketch with Mr. Ray,” when it appears that the game was chiefly hers.

Both Lightning and André are available in book form, although only the latter (Grove Press, $4.95) is represented in its original and longer version. The former, published by Zweitausendeins for $15, is to my mind worth far more than that. Coproducer Chris Sievernich rightly speculates that Lightning may work better as a book than as a film — not only because the dialogue is easier to grasp and absorb that way, but also because the more casual eye of a reader makes the subject matter somewhat less relentless and more subject to reflection.

André, by contrast, has less to offer in book form, intellectually or aesthetically. Without the charismatic direction or performances to give the words life, they lie flat on the page, the issues never advancing very far beyond those of a high school debate — blocked as they are by unending torrents of self-ingratiation.

“Suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life,” Shawn muses, “well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we really don’t dare to ask each other.”

“No,” says Gregory. “It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.”

It’s a conversation that could only take place between show-biz types. In any case, no one in André is ever asked to drop his role — not even the spectator.

On Transes

From “Festival Journal,” The Soho News, October 13, 1981. Transes recently became available on a French DVD released by the World Cinema Foundation. –- J.R.

October 1: The best new movie I see all week is a particular favorite. I’ve been told, of Susan Sontag’s. I share much of her enthusiasm for the French/Moroccan coproduction Transes, directed by Ahmed El Maanouni, if only because this movie has some of the best sound-mixing and most infectious music I’ve heard in ages. Both of these are central aspects of its subject, the North African tour of an indigenous pop group called Nasa El Ghiwane, which comes from the Casablanca ghetto and sings about extreme poverty – a genuinely subversive male quintet whose popularity has spread like wildfire since the 60s. Originally banned from Moroccan radio and TV, they can automatically command an audience of 20,000 wherever they play in Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia.

The movie starts wonderfully by establishing direct continuities between the music and the Casablanca ghetto (the latter traversed from a car window) -– a sequence that was almost cut by the local government until the powerful Nasa El Ghiwane group intervened; and the transitions throughout between both physical and aural subjects are handled with a remarkable ear and eye. Some of the instrumental music is rather Coltrane-like – there’s a plucked stringed-instrument solo that’s almost as sexy as Jimmy Garrison’s bass on Coltrane’s Crescent album – while the spoken or sung lyrics range from the incantatory (“Oh, Arab brother!” say the subtitles) to the poetic (“At the marriage of tea and amber, you invite absinthe and mint; my glass alone is sad”) to the analytical/political (“We bury what unites us – language and rhythm, and a plethora of beliefs. Is not man a reflection of man?” “The twentieth century – and one still feeds, like flies, on carrion.”)

Interspersed are raps and rehearsals with the group, newsreel footage of the funeral of the father of the present Moroccan king in 1960, and the earliest surviving film footage shot in Morocco, circa 1918-1920, which (naturally) features French Legionnaires cavorting with bare-breasted prostitutes. The movie’s overall forms recalls Don’t Look Back, Leacock-Pennebaker’s record of a Bob Dylan tour, but the music in question is even more participatory – hence (one could argue) more political. Trying to scribble my notes in the dark, I have to forcibly resist turning my pen into an improvising drumstick. Even when this movie makes my mind wander, it leads me into interesting places. If it ever opens in a quiet burg like Gotham, I could return to it with pleasure.

The Violent Years

From The Movie No. 71, 1981. — J.R.

From Psycho and Spartacus (both 1960) to The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider (both 1969), the Sixties might be regarded as the period when screen violence gained a new aesthetic self-consciousness and something approaching academic respectability, at least in the public mind. To put it somewhat differently, the contemporary spectator of 1960, shocked by the brutal shower murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho as an event — without observing that it was a composite film effect created by several dozen rapidly cut shots –- would have been much likelier to notice, in 1969, the use of slow motion in the depiction of several dozen violent deaths in The Wild Bunch.

The key film document of the decade, endlessly scrutinized and discussed, was not an entertainment feature at all, but the record of an amateur film-maker named Abe Zapruder of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963; the close analysis to which this short length of film was subjected was characteristic of a changing attitude towards the medium as a whole.

In the Sixties many established cultural, social, and political values were radically thrown into question, at the same time that the media -– including television and pop music as well as cinema — were becoming closely examined ins their own right. (The late Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media, published in 1964, was widely regarded as a seminal text.) These two phenomena converged to create a different conception of what violence was, both as a method and as a subject.

Alfred Hitchcock, who always kept a close eye oh fashion, might be considered as one barometer of that change. In Psycho and The Birds (1963) he approached the intricate problem of how to create the impression of violence in the spectator through technique and technology, from fast editing to detailed special effects. Yet by the time he made Torn Curtain (1966), a spy thriller, he was implicitly criticizing the technological fantasy engendered by such James Bond films as Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), and Goldfinger (1964), whereby a villain could be despatched virtually with the tool flick of a switch or push of a button. Hitchcock made this point by depicting the killing of a heavy as protracted, messy, and extremely difficult –- not the sort of thing that suave 007 normally had to contend with.

The unusually long, drawn-out deaths in The Wild Bunch, on the other hand, were defended by the director Sam Peckinpah as a cathartic strategy: “‘to make violence so repulsive as to turn people against it,” was the way he expressed it in a trade Journal. Other filmmakers argued, quite simply, that a liberal display of violence was merely what their stories and their subject-matter demanded — most notably, in war films such as Samuel Fuller’s Merrill’s Marauders (1962), Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) and John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), and in such critiques of the genre as Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) and Peter Watkins’ television film Culloden (shown by the BBC in 1964).

“Get up, you scum-sucking pig.” So the gun slinger played by Marlon Brando savagely challenged another tough character in One Eyed Jacks (1961). In the same year, gangs of juvenile delinquents fought each other in pitched battles (’rumbles’) to the music of Leonard Bernstein in West Side Story, and a pool-hall hustler (Paul Newman) had his thumbs deliberately broken by rivals in The Hustler. But it would obviously be wrong to assign the Sixties any sort of monopoly in making violence look particularly glamorous, photogenic or graphic.

Yet the Sixties saw the introduction of the ’spaghetti’ Western as well as the James Bond thriller; this suggests that the overall sense of violence possessing an aesthetic of its own was an increasingly international phenomenon, in which cultural cross-influences played a decisive part. This was no less true of the comic mishaps of Peter Sellers as inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964) -– both Hollywood comedies set on the Continent — and the violent, hallucinatory nightmares of European art films as diverse as The Trial (1962), Repulsion (1965), Blow-Up (1966), Weekend (1967), and Performance (1970).

All these films highlighted the cross-breeding of American and European elements in a number of ways. ‘Spaghetti’ Westerns, for instance — spearheaded by a succession of hits starring Americans Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson and directed by the Italian Sergio Leone, with music by the no less Italian Ennio Morricone — revitalized familiar American myths with Catholic symbolism, operatic intensity, and a heavy emphasis on ritual, in films such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Later, this became intertwined with still other strains to produce even stranger mixtures; for instance, El Topo (1971 was a gory Mexican surrealist variant of spaghetti’ Western with mystical drug-culture overtones, and an early favorite in the midnight cult circuits.

Any thorough survey of international trends in stylizing violence would have to acknowledge the crucial role played by Japanese cinema, more specifically, by the team of director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune, mainly in an inspired series of action films ranging from Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne Of Blood (1957) to Yojimbo and Sanjuro (both 1961).

Indeed, several commentators have claimed. that the ’spaghetti’ Western and all its derivatives can be seen growing directly out of Yojimbo, a film with plenty of American antecedents of Its own. One American critic, Manny Farber, called it ” a bowdlerized version of Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest, with a bossless vagabond who depopulates a town of rival leaders, outlaws and fake heroes.”

Another critic, Donald Richie, compared the town in the film to ” those God-forsaken places in the middle of nowhere remembered from the films of Ford, of Sturges from Bad Day at Black Rock, or High Noon.”

No less striking was the cross-fertilization in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) between nouvelle vague impulses (such as the mixture of moods and genres). Hollywood showmanship (in Arthur Penn’s direction of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) and perhaps just a dash of Kurosawa (in the. slow-motion. balletic deaths, two years before The Wild Bunch). A grittier, black-and-white version of gangster lovers on the run followed in The Honeymoon Killers (1969 ) — interestingly enough, a favorite film of Francois Truffaut’s, where the poetry had a more romantic tinge. Just prior to this, Truffaut had been paying his own homages to American-style violence in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), his futuristic study of book-burning, and La Mariée était en noir (1968, The Bride Wore Black), the tale of a widow’s revenge on her husband’s killers. And if the latter film smacked of Hitchcock even down to its emotive Bernard Herrmann score. English directo John Boorrman’s exciting American thriller Point Blank (1967) drew upon the time-fragmented structures of nouvelle vague directors, particularly Alain Resnais. Here could also be detected a satirical offshoot of the equation of people with objects already noted in the Bond films: a violent gangster. played by Lee Marvin. in three separate scenes destructively attacks a car, a telephone, and an empty bed.

A few real-life robberies of the period seemed to have been modeled closely after those in Bonnie and Clyde, once again raising the question of how seriously screen violence could affect public behavior. To what degree should it be considered merely a reflection of already existing violence, as opposed to offering the spectator fresh inspirations and incentives? Recent studies of mass responses to violence, most of which have concentrated on television, have suggested that a great deal depends on how the audience’s identification is solicited, and what sort of characters have been established as role models. In the Sixties, the general use of the gangster as identification figure gave way to a similar use of the law enforcer. The critic Robert Warshow had said in 1954. “The two most successful creations of American movies are the gangster and the Westerner: men with guns.”

From this standpoint, there may be relatively little difference between filmmaker and novelist Norman Mailer’s playing successively a gangster in Wild 90 and a policeman in Beyond the Law (both 1968), his first two independent features.

In fact, a closer look at the cinema’s overall shift of attention away from the criminal’s viewpoint may reveal a subtle subterranean continuity. The wolf in sheep’s clothing can be no less bloodthirsty than the wolf without disguise, but his new social role and costume might be enough to exonerate him in part from guilt and society’s censure. Thus, in 1963, Underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger could explore the homoerotic potential of Hell’s Angels bikers putting on their gear in Scorpio Rising –- a sort of striptease in reverse involving chain and leather fetishes. And precisely ten years later, a fledgling director, James William Guercio, could create a comparably worshipful context while presenting the detailed dressing-up of his own hero, a likeable highway cop (Robert Blake). in Electra Glide in Blue (1973).

In a recent study of crime movies, film historian Carlos Clarens has noted that action director Don Siegel shifted his own focus in mid-career from the mad criminal in Baby Face Nelson (1957), The Lineup (958 ) and The Killers (1964) to the policeman in Madigan, Coogan’s Bluff (both 1968), and Dirty Harry (1971). Hollywood’s reluctance (with a very few exceptions, such as The Green Berets) to deal directly with the war in Vietnam during this period created its own forms of displacement, whereby the emotional weight of the Vietnam experience became transferred to domestic law-and-order thrillers like Madigan or Bullitt (1968), which brought home the war only in the most oblique terms.

Meanwhile. as the political mood of the Sixties became increasingly polarized, violence often came to represent either society’s aggression against the young or youth’s own reprisals. in such hits as Wild in the Streets, 11 . .(both 1968), Easy Rider (1969) and Pe (1970). At the same time, the legacy of an equally violent past was being unearthed in certain period films — the marathon dances in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the oppression of the Paiute Indians in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (both 1969).

Confronted by a more recent past of senseless mass murders, In Cold Blood, Targets (both 1967) and The Boston Strangler (1968) all tried to deal with the missing motivations. In Cold Blood, adapted by Richard Brooks from Truman Capote’s non-fiction account of the arbitrary murder of a family in Kansas by two disaffected loners, added heavy doses of Freudian flashback to the original material, while The Boston Strangler focused in a quasi-documentary manner on police procedure, using a striking multi-image technique. Targets depicted a character based on the real-life University of Texas sniper and counterpointed his case with the story of an ageing horror-film star (Boris Karloff), making little attempt to explain the sniper’s motives beyond implied criticism of the gun laws and of the boredom of American family life. Dryly pursuing this two-part invention about contemporary horror, the director Peter Bogdanovich followed the lead of Truffaut by turning to Hitchcock for much of his inspiration, as would other disciples in the violent Seventies. JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Festival Journal: N.Y. Film Festival, 1981

From The Soho News, October 6, 1981. I’m embarrassed to confess that over three decades later, I have no recollection at all about Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet apart from what I wrote about it, although I’m happy to report that the film is still in distribution, and available from Icarus Films. — J.R.

September 22: From a global or even a continental perspective, much of this year’s New York Film Festival belongs under the staunch division of Business as Usual. This basically means that the festival is involved in ratifying certain important discoveries (of ideas or filmmakers) that were made during the 60s or 70s, often by the very same members of the selection committee, rather than risking its self-image or self-composure in order to seek out many new challenges or talents.

This makes New York precisely the reverse of the more footloose, friendly, and unpredictable film festival in Toronto. There the specialty tends to be, rather, a flavorsome if occasionally warmed-over newness of look, sound, and/or signature: an underground movie about everyday life in the Watts ghetto (Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep), a corrosive and shocking black comedy about the mourning business in Israel in relation to war memorials (Yaky Yosha’s The Vulture), a flaky German film based on a French best seller about Proust by his maid, played by Fassbinder alumnus Eva Mattes (Percy Adlon’s Celeste). French treats ranged from the florid pyrotechnics and adolescent, operatic passions of a stylish thriller called Diva (a first feature by Jean-Jacques Beineix) — voted the second most popular movie in Toronto after Chariots of Fire, and just picked up for U.S, distribution by the resourceful U.A. Classics) — to the photogenic Pigalle enclosures, funky Renoir (and noir) ambience and staccato actorly patterns triumphing over a dimwitted, disassembled plot in Juliet Berto and Jean-Henri Roger’s Neige (another vivid, watchable first feature that deserves to be seen here).

What’s going on in world cinema? The message of this year’s New York Festival — apart from many welcome standbys, and a few discoveries made elsewhere — is that New York neither knows nor cares. (No wonder it’s the last stop for so many films of interest, after slowly wending their way across the rest of the globe). By and large, and to all appearances – the upcoming premiere of a 16mm Rivette film seems a striking exception — most of this year’s selections have been adroitly tailored to the intellectual limitations of our local mainstream celebrity critics, whose deep and blissful sleep has for the most part been respected and protected. To learn about most intellectually demanding or ambitious work being done outside of America, one simply has to live somewhere else. If the New York Festival once served to deliver a substantial part of the news (e.g., the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet), this is clearly no longer the case.

That much said, there are still plenty of interesting and important films on view – including all four of those discussed below. Through a perverse relationship between this week’s press shows and Soho News’s copy deadline, all of these will have been shown at the festival before this reaches the stands, but surely (or at least hopefully) they’ll all be seen in these parts again. (Lightning Over Water, for one, will resurface at the Public in late October as part of an extensive Nicholas Rau retrospective, and I would be horrified indeed if New Yorkers were deprived of another look at Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet, which should be made available on every street corner.)

***

In order to access Wim Wenders and the late Nicholas Ray’s Lightning Over Water properly, as a work and as a deed — something that I plan to try to do in these pages at greater length in the near future, in relation to André Gregory, Wally Shawn, and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André (which is also opening soon) — one has to contextualize it in some detail. One has to see the terms of Ray’s contribution, first of all, in relation the fact that he knew he was dying of brain cancer, and had not brought a feature film to completion ever since 55 Days in Peking virtually finished him in 1963.

It helps, too, if you know that the opening sequence, in which Wenders arrives at Ray’s Spring Street loft, is essentially Ray’s own direction — with a bold use of spatial dialectics between the two characters at opposite ends of the loft that is worthy to stand with his best 50s work. And the last sequence before the (mainly regrettable) epilogue, a close-up of his ravaged face delivering a discontinuous monologue that runs for an entire reel, is no less redolent of the best and worst of his unfinished We Can’t Go Home Again, entirely his own doing, and improvised on the spot. In between these two virtual monuments hangs an ambiguous chasm that seems supervised more by Wenders.

Reading Samson Raphaelson’s moving memoir about Ernst Lubitsch in the New Yorker of last May 11, three days after this press show, I’m immediately struck by the odd parallel whereby a younger cineaste writes a premature obituary for an older cineaste and then discovers, to his chagrin, that he has to thrash it out with him in the present tense. Raphaelson’s existential confrontation (like Lubitsch’s) is, however, recollected in tranquility many years later, while Wenders’ final version comes only two years after the event, and only one year after Peter Przygodda’s first edited version [Nick’s Movie] showed in Cannes and Venice.

Having seen both Przygodda’s version on its way to Cannes and Wenders’ once before, I remain hamstrung in any attempts to come to simple conclusions about the overall experience. But anyone who wants to consider this film in detail should contemplate purchasing the extraordinary large-format volume published by Zweitausendeins in German and English, beautifully illustrated by color frame enlargements from every sequence — currently available at both the Idle Hour and Cinemabilia for about $15. (The film’s producer, Chris Sievernich, informs me that 4,000 of the 10,000 copies printed here have already been sold internationally.)

***

September 24: Over a year and a half has passed since I last saw and enjoyed Maurice Pialat’s Passe ton bac d’abord (Graduate First) at the Museum of Modern Art, and I certainly don’t mind the festival letting me see it again — even if this violates its own supposedly cardinal rule of sticking to New York premieres. An uncharacteristically honest poet of the middle class who can occasionally be almost as brutal about its awfulness as Flaubert, Pialat fully deserves all the attention and praise that the local bozos usually shower on Paul Mazursky and sentimental French hacks. I’d be even happier if the festival dipped back into the recent past and rectified its own previous omission of Pialat’s best film, La Gueule ouverte (The Mouth Agape, 1974) — even if that meant having two terminal cancer movies in one festival –-but you can’t have everything. And Graduate First, which excels in handling such subjects as an endless wedding party and a teenage café hangout called Le Caron, has plenty in its own right.

At one point in the movie, a guy in a car asks directions for getting to Rue de Rozier, and a local tells him, “Nowhere near here.” Unless my ears and rampant cinephilia are both deceiving me, this is Pialat’s sly way of distancing himself from the New Wave films of Jacques Rozier (Blue Jeans, Adieu Philippine, Du côté d’Orouët, etc.), which also focus on the antics and exuberance of provincial teenagers, but with a less fatalistic view of social consequences, despite a superficially similar (and lively) surface texture.

The deadly accuracy in Pialat’s case — mainly cheerful, though less buoyant than Rozier — becomes cumulatively oppressive over the course of the film through a plethora of minor, underplayed details: a glib cocksman with posters of Che Guevara and Emmanuelle in his bedroom, an argument on a beach about the comparative worth of Pink Floyd and Bob Marley, a grinning female flirt in a blue Fruit-of-the-Loom pullover. More healthy in its unstated attitudes toward sex than any recent American movie that comes to mind, Graduate First tends to regard screwing as at once the only worthwhile activity to pursue in the provinces and the greatest obstacle to breaking away from them. Like the shots of graffiti carved into classroom desks combined with the chatter of a philosophy teacher, which open and close the film, Pialat works, as these people live, within narrow and well-defined limits, but within these terms, he’s something of a master.

***

September 25: Grateful as I am to see both the 48-minute Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet and the 54-minute Resurgence: The Movement for Equality versus the Ku Klux Klan in one dynamite double-bill, I can’t help but wonder if the only reason why they’re shown in the above order is that the latter is six minutes longer. I bring this up only because Tighten Your Belts strikes me as conceivably the most intelligent, powerful, and informative rabble-rousing leftist film that I’ve seen in years, and can’t imagine why the festival organizers didn’t want to maximize its impact by showing it second.

The more conventionally conceived Resurgence, codirected by Pamela Yates and Thomas Sigel and costing around $75,000 has the pure documentary value of showing us goony Southern white retards killing anti-Klan demonstrators in Greensboro with impunity, and/or wearing T-shirts with Mickey Mouse giving the finger and saying, “Hey, nigger!” (The Disney studio people who have shown such concern about obscene desecrations of their cartoon animal emblems should certainly alert their lawyers about this one.) It has the integrity, too, of its sentimental good intentions in crosscutting between this material and the struggle of black women and others in Mississippi in organizing against impossible work conditions. A lot of serious work and information is evident here. The only problem is, as critic Ruth McCormick has pointed out to me, extended footage of leftist rallies tends to preach only to the converted, and the film’s a good 10 or 15 minutes longer than it needs to be.

Tighten Your Belts, codirected by James Gaffney, Martin Lucas, and Jonathan Miller over four and a half years and costing a third as much as Resurgence, is a stunning example of how this work and economy can pay off in dividends. Expertly incorporating animation, live-action interviews, and other footage of diverse kinds with a good jazz score (by Nick Scarim), the film has the rare virtue of using all its materials to build a clear linear argument that progresses at every stage. Contrasting the recent fiscal crises in New York and Cleveland and the antithetical approaches taken by their mayors, the filmmakers delineate and document the capitulation of New York to the caprices of banks and the resistance of the city administration of Cleveland to corporate takeover, sparked by the forging of a broad popular front by the exciting Dennis Kucinich.

Exemplary in its clean, polemical construction, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet deftly incorporates a specific popular struggle – the 18-month campaign in Brooklyn’s Northside to keep a firehouse – into its overall argument, without succumbing to any of the temptations of a political travelogue. In other words, it means business. It sends you out of your seats making you believe that positive change is actually possible – and that if any single force finally succeeds in radicalizing the American working class, it may well be the good ole Reagan administration.