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On TOO EARLY, TOO LATE

Excerpted from a chapter in my book Film: The Front Line 1983. — J.R.

Of all the films discussed at length in this book, Too Soon, Too Late (1981) is conceivably the one that has had the strongest impact on me, although I have seen it only twice.  After having seen it the first time, in Spring 1982, I was sufficiently impressed to put the film at the end of my “all-time” top ten list for Sight and Sound’s international critics’ poll later the same year.  Consequently, it seems paradoxical yet unavoidable that of all the films dealt with here, Too Soon, Too Late automatically qualifies as the most difficult and elusive to write about.  My two previous efforts have yielded only a few inadequate and hastily conceived sentences in the introduction to my Straub-Huillet catalog, and a somewhat more reasoned paragraph in the conversation with Jonas Mekas which opens this book.  The notes below cannot pretend to be more than an interim report;  further and more extensive analysis will have to await a future date:

(a)  First, a few concrete facts about the film.  For the first time in a Straub-Huillet film, the texts used are all read off-screen, making separate versions in different languages possible without any recourse to dubbing.  Hence the film exists in four separate versions, with the same two people - Danièle Huillet and Bhagat El Nadi - reading the three texts in each one:  English, French, German and Italian.  Consequently, it is the first Straub-Huillet film that can be seen in an English-speaking country without the distraction of subtitles.  Otherwise, the sound in the film, as is usual for Straub-Huillet, is all direct.

(b)  A few more facts:  The first text, read by Huillet, is an excerpt from a letter written by Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky describing the impoverished state of the French peasantry on the eve of the French Revolution - accompanied by a shot moving through a busy Paris intersection.  Then come longer excerpts from the Cahiers de Doléances (1),  while we see the various places in France that are described as they appear today - ranging from spots just outside Lyon and Rennes to more rural places including Tréogan, Mottreff, Marbeuf and Harville.  These sequences, filmed by a mainly panning camera in June 1980, are practically all devoid of people, giving them, in Straub’s words, a “science fiction, deserted-planet aspect”.  The second part of the film, roughly twice as long, uses a more recent Marxist text about the Egyptian peasants’ resistance to the English occupation prior to the “petit-bourgeois” revolution of Neguib in 1952 - a more journalistic text by Mahmoud Hussein, author of Class Struggles in Egypt. In both sections, it is suggested that the peasants revolt too soon and succeed too late.  Once again, the locations cited in the text are filmed by Straub-Huillet (the shooting of this portion was done in May 1981), basically the sites of revolutionary struggle, again mainly rural.  Here the camera occasionally remains motionless - most noticeably in the longest single take in the film, which shows workers leaving a factory in Cairo.  But there are also a certain number of slow lateral and circular pans, as well as more rapid views from a car moving through various villages.  (The only shot taken from a moving vehicle in the first part, if memory serves, is of the busy Paris intersection.)  After this section is a sort of Egyptian coda containing unsubtitled newsreel footage from TV of a speech relating to the 1952 revolution, followed by a downward pan that passes from a skyscraper in contemporary Cairo to waves from the Nile beating relentlessly against the shore.

(c)  Central to the unique impact of Too Soon, Too Late - which Dave Kehr, the very perceptive critic of the Chicago Reader, called “the most sensually captivating film” he saw in 1982 - is the resonance it gives to specific places, particularly in the second part;  no other film has come even remotely close to making me feel I’ve been to Egypt, which this film does.  A lot of this has to do with tempo, rhythm, pacing:  the sight and sound of a donkey pulling a cart down a road towards the camera is recorded in long shot and at leisure, with no sense of either ellipsis or dramatic underlining according to any principle other than the placement of camera and microphone in relation to the event.  The extraordinary result of this technique is that one almost feels able to taste these places, to contemplate them - to observe and think about them.  Some spectators find this activity tedious;  many of the first spectators of Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) complained about it in a comparable manner, claiming that “nothing happens”.  Yet the significant relationship between Straub-Huillet’s long shots and Tati’s is that something is always taking place in them, if only the spectator can learn to watch and listen without expecting to be led by the nose through the sequence.

Discovering this capacity in one’s self is part of the experience the film potentially offers.  Is there any other film about the countryside and landscape - barring only special cases as James Benning’s work and Snow’s La Région centrale (1971) - in which something is always happening in the shot?  It’s the absence of plot and characters that causes one’s initial feelings of loss, absence and/or boredom;  yet once the feel and complexity of these places begin to seep into one’s consciousness, without the confusions and distractions of a story or a too-rigid thesis that might regiment or codify them, something at once mysterious and materialistic starts to take place.  (Many American critics, myself included, have committed the error of identifying the mysterious aspect of the film as “religious” - an assumption I believe a European critic with more familiarity with a Marxist tradition would be less likely to make.  It is ideologically interesting that American’s find it difficult to recognize any intense practice that is not capitalistic under any category except religion or mysticism.  The intensity of Straub-Huillet’s materialism may indeed seem “religious” and/or “mystical”, but such labels in this case may well run the risk of confusing more than they clarify.)  Too Soon, Too Late may have no characters, but it is the most densely populated and inhabited of all Straub-Huillet’s films - a paradox that the entire film is structured around.

(d)  Questions of camera distance in Too Soon, Too Late, like those in Playtime, are ultimately moral questions, as well as practical ones: how does one see what one needs to see without exploiting either the spectator or the person being filmed?  (Many related questions of tact are broached by the landscape paintings of Patricia Patterson.)  Serge Daney has some relevant things to say about this in his lovely newspaper review of the film for Liberation (20-21, February, 1982), entitled “Cinemeteorology”, which I translated for the Straub-Huillet catalog:

… [In overpopulated Egypt], the fields are no longer empty, fellahs work there, one can no longer go anywhere and film anyone any which way.  The terrain of performance again becomes the territory of others.  The Straubs (whoever knows their films realizes that they’re intransigent on this matter) accord much importance to the fact that a filmmaker should not disturb those whom he films.  One therefore has to see the second part of Too Soon, Too Late as an odd performance, made up of approaches and retreats, where the filmmakers, less meteorologists than acupuncturists, search for the spot - the only spot, the right spot - where their camera can catch people without bothering them.  Two dangers immediately present themselves:  exotic tourism and the invisible camera.  Too close, too far.  In a lengthy “scene”, the camera is planted in front of a factory gate and allows one to see Egyptian workers who pass, enter and leave.  Too close for them not to see the camera, too far away for them to be tempted to go towards it.  To find this point, this moral point, is at this moment the entire act of the Straubs.  With perhaps the hope that the “extras” thus filmed, the camera and the fragile crew “hidden” right in the middle of a field or a vacant lot would only be an accident of the landscape, a gentle scarecrow, another mirage carried by the wind.
These scruples are astonishing.  They are not fashionable.  To shoot a film, especially in the country, means generally to devastate everything, disrupt the lives of people while manufacturing country snapshots, local color, rancid back-to-nature museum pieces.  Because the cinema belongs to the city and no one knows exactly what a “peasant cinema” would be, anchored in the lived experience, the space-time of peasants.  It is necessary therefore to see the Straubs, city inhabitants, mainland navigators, as lost.  It is necessary to see them in the middle of the field, moistened fingers raised to catch the wind and ears pricked up to hear what it’s saying.  So the most naked sensations serve as a compass.  Everything else, ethics and aesthetics, content and form, derives from this.

To Daney’s second paragraph, two personal footnotes should be added.  Danièle Huillet, who sent me a copy of Daney’s review, added one small caveat:  “Jean-Marie is a ‘Stadtkind’ [city-child] but I grew up in the country, though born in Paris …”  And Sara Driver has suggested to me that Too Soon, Too Late may indeed be more Huillet’s film than Straub’s, reflecting her country background - just as En Rachâchant (1982), again according to Driver, may be more Straub’s.

(e)  As I suggested earlier in this book, Too Soon, Too Late inverts the usual relationship in a Straub-Huillet film between landscape and text - the landscape becoming the film’s central text, the verbal text becoming the film’s “setting”.  Practically speaking, this reduces the relative importance of the verbal texts in the films - although when I mentioned this notion to Straub, he countered that nevertheless the film could never have been made without those texts.  And the documentary side of this - which is of course the major element apart from comedy separating Straub-Huillet’s use of long shots from Tati’s in Playtime - has specifically musical implications.  The uncontrolled movements of people, animals and weather function on this terrain like improvisations that play against the “composed” framings and camera movements, somewhat in the manner of jazz.  When I proposed this parallel to Straub, he replied that a principal reference point for him and Huillet while shooting the second part of Too Soon, Too Late was the late quartets of Beethoven - particularly the use of suspensions and slow tempos.  The very slow pans, according to Dave Kehr, always move in the same direction as the wind, and it is largely the sense one has of the film’s profound attentiveness to the material world that makes the film so singular a documentary - calling to mind the three living quotations cited by Straub before the screening of the film at the Collective for Living Cinema on April 30, 1983:

D. W. Griffith at the end of his life:  “What modern movies lack is the wind in the trees.”

Rosa Luxembourg:  “The fate of insects is not less important than the revolution.”

Cézanne, who painted Mont Saint-Victoire again and again:  “Look at this mountain, once it was fire.”

Endnote

(1)  These “notebooks of grievances” were written by mayors of those villages prior to the “Reunion des États Generaux” in 1789, held because of the fiscal crisis occasioned by Louis XVI’s desire for further taxation.  The meeting turned into a trial of the monarchy as certain representatives of the clergy and the nobility (such as Mirabeau) joined forces with the others - the bourgeois representatives of the “Tiers-États” (the Third Estate) - to launch the French Revolution.  For the average French pupil, these facts are as well known as the Boston Tea Party and the War of Independence are to an American.  (For all of the above information, I am indebted to Bérénice Reynaud.)

Published on 23 Sep 2011 in Notes, by jrosenbaum

Mark Rappaport [from FILM: THE FRONT LINE 1983]

The following is a chapter from my book Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver, CO: Arden Press) — which is still in print, although it probably remains the least well known of my books. I’m immensely grateful to Jed Rapfogel and Stephanie Gray at New York’s Anthology Film Archives for furnishing me with a document file of this essay so that I could post it here, originally to help promote their Mark Rappaport retrospective in March 2011. Readers should also consult my separate articles about Rappaport’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and From the Journals of Jean Seberg as well as my interview with Rappaport about the latter, all of which are also available on this site. — J.R.

When the critic of a narrative film is feeling desperate, the first place that he or she is likely to turn to is a plot summary. Feeling rather desperate about my capacity to do justice to the last two features of the remarkable Mark Rappaport, I looked up the synopses and reviews of The Scenic Route and Impostors in the usually reliable Monthly Film Bulletin, which appeared precisely three years apart (February 1979 and February 1982), only to discover that each critic, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Simon Field, respectively, starts off with the admission that his own synopsis is misleading. “To summarize the ‘story’ of Impostors,” writes Field, “is to misrepresent its structure, to face assumptions of causality and rounded characterization in a film that has no such preoccupations, that loves the red herring, the non sequitur, the scene for its own sake, and in which one person might not be entirely distinguishable from another.”

The fact that Rappaport — a nineteenth-century figure who studied the Victorian novel at Brooklyn College and New York University before abandoning a graduate school scholarship at the latter to become a filmmaker — usually furnishes his features with more plot than one can shake a stick at doesn’t invalidate Field’s point in the slightest. But it does suggest one aspect of the nature of the problem involved in describing his films. And it’s a direct corollary of this problem that Rappaport currently occupies that dreaded no man’s land between the avant-garde and the mainstream that threatens to make non-persons out of most of Rappaport’s European contemporaries as well. (I’m writing this in late February, less than a week after an entertaining black-and-white “art film” clever enough to predict its own doom in this country, Wim Wenders’ well-titled The State of Things — winner of the Golden Lion Award at the last Venice Film Festival, contemptuously rejected by the last New York Film Festival — was brainlessly and pitilessly buried by a New York Times review that couldn’t even tell two of the major characters apart: a movie that obviously commits the grievous error of not catering to the right crowd. In a way, for all their radical — and perhaps even irreconcilable — differences, Wenders and Rappaport share the same handicap in one respect: they make intelligent films in English that ultimately belong to a European as opposed to American frame of reference, despite the central importance of Hollywood to both directors.) And the fact that Rappaport isn’t a European even though he gets treated like one only complicates the injustice.

To keep things manageable and separate, I’ve generally avoided listing work in video by filmmakers in this book (which makes for certain omissions — and major ones in the case of filmmakers like Louis Hock, whose recent work is all in that medium). But having seen and benefited a great deal from Rapport’s own 28-minute Mark Rappaport: The TV Spinoff (1980), it’s hard to avoid mentioning it here, because it’s the best possible introduction to Rappaport’s film work that I can imagine — and an ideal one or anyone who’s encountering this filmmaker’s original, unsettling work for the first time. As a very witty précis of what watching (and financing and making) his movies can be like, I doubt it could be much improved upon. (Come to think of it, this provides another intriguing point of comparison with Wenders, whose short film Reverse Angle 1: New York, March 1982, initially made for French TV, is equally helpful about Hammett and The State of Things.) At the outset, when Rappaport is trying out different kinds of music with different movie stills — just a formal variation, really, of his subsequent tryouts with different costumes, backdrops, front-projections, plots, characters, clips, and raps about his movies — he’s already setting up the paradoxical parameters of his glamorously homemade cinema. (“All bourgeois dreams end the same way,” snarls a character called Chuckie, played by Charles Ludlam, in Impostors. “Marry royalty and escape.”)

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

As suggested earlier, Rapport fills most of his movies with enough old-fashioned plot to support an entire course in nineteenth-century fiction; there’s also enough bitchy dialogue to stuff Joseph Mankiewicz’s closet (a line from Impostors: “Actually there’s not much difference between being dead and being in Vermont, if you know what I mean.”) He simulates opulence in his studio sets — all established within the confines of his lower Manhattan loft and generally shot by the very able Fred Murphy (who was also responsible for operating the camera in The State of Things) — and class in his talented cast. He then uses these elements in part like filtering screens, each of which emotionally and effectually blocks off a portion of all the others. The results of this elegant, intricately tortured process can be humorous and entertaining as well as creepy and uncomfortable. The dramas turn out to be at once so florid and so private that they can improbably suggest a full-scale opera staged at the bottom of a well, or 2001 seen on a bite-size TV screen. For the first ten minutes of The Scenic Route one might laugh uproariously; for the second ten minutes, one might twitch or flinch — but neither response can comfortably sustain itself indefinitely without some enormous act of repression. Stated differently, Rappaport’s films are bright, impossible objects, motored by obsession and protected by wit, neither of which is effectively allowed to cancel out the other.

For a good bit of its tight, elegant construction, The Scenic Route depends on a European art film staple — the leading character who narrates his/her story off-screen, a direct descendant of the first-person novel, in this case a worrywart heroine named Estelle (Randy Danson). To get her plot out of the way, in standard Monthly Film Bulletin style, let’s turn to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s helpful synopsis (to which I’ve appended a couple of actors’ names; others in the cast, one should note, include filmmakers Eric Mitchell and Claudia Weill):

A woman, Estelle, describes in voice-over a painting of Orpheus and Eurydice. She is then seen writing in her diary, and the voice-over continues, now describing events she remembers and is relating in the diary. Various scenes from her life are then accompanied by voice-over or occasionally by sync dialogue. She is assaulted by Jack, her estranged husband; she witnesses a stabbing in the street; she acquires a new lover, Paul [Kevin Wade], and is in his company when another stabbing occurs, this time in a swimming pool. The relationship develops: she gives Paul her ring, he gives her his address book. After the arrival of her sister, Lena [Marilyn Jones], she begins to see Paul less often, preferring to cultivate her relationship with her sister. Lena takes to picking up men in the street and bringing them home; one turns out to be Jack, causing Estelle some embarrassment; another is Paul, which is even worse, since he soon moves in as Lena’s lover. Estelle consoles herself with visions of going on a journey, and with the fond belief that she is Paul’s real beloved — Eurydice to his Orpheus. But more violent thoughts obtrude, including the death of the lovers at the hands of a maniac killer. No resolution to this triangle is found; Estelle returns to her diary, and comments, “In my notebooks it ended like this.” (1)

In keeping with Rappaport’s nineteenth-century-novel preoccupations, one should note in passing both the theme of incest (no less important in Impostors) and the rather absurdly Heathcliffian romantic figure cut by Kevin Wade’s Paul — quite comparable, all things considered, to Barbet Schroeder’s Olivier in Céline et Julie vont en bateau as a figure representing the stiff, charred remnants of that novelistic (and specifically Gothic) tradition.

To Nowell-Smith’s summary we should add some of Rappaport’s own descriptive and analytical comments. The first paragraph is a statement written by him to introduce the film; the last four come from an interview with Tony Rayns in the February 1979 Monthly Film Bulletin:

Love, jealousy and revenge. All standard components of melodrama — but a very “dry” melodrama. Expectations are thwarted and rechanneled. Instead of explanations and motivations, visual counterparts are offered. The film slides back and forth between passion and an irony which redirects it but doesn’t dilute it. A film about myths and myth-making, about the Madame Bovary in each of us, about delusions and romance in a fragile world where violence erupts randomly and unexpectedly. The film was made very cheaply in and around New York, where violence is a way of life and everyone always talks of going away.

The various elements only really fall into place when the narrations are there. The use of narration in low-budget films in general brings us back to finance; it’s cheaper and more accessible than sync-sound dialogue. But I like narration: I like the fact that you can create a discrepancy between what characters say and what you see of them. It’s something that we’ve learned from Melville, via Bresson. I think it’s an incredibly rich technique; it allows you to concentrate on essentials. Plus my mind is always full of ironic double-think … always re-assessing, always re-evaluating.

Movies like Out of the Past and Sunset Boulevard used narration for exposition, as a device for opening the closed door, always from a single character’s point-of-view. I try to use it more centrally: what happens if you use narrations from five points-of-view?

I once described the entire script of The Scenic Route to someone (not the truncated version that I put on the screen), and he thought it was very dry, very dehydrated. But there’s enough material there for five of the melodramas that Warner Brothers used to do! Only with all the melodramatic juices pumped out. The elements of melodrama (and of theatre) that I like have more to do with painting: it’s the gesture, the mise en scène, the lighting, the arrangement, the pregnant moment right before something happens or right after it has.

The emotional tenor is not parody. If I’m parodying anything, it’s the fact that we can only respond to emotional situations in prescribed ways. They’re the only ways we have to respond to the trite elements of our lives. I guess it’s more a matter of irony than of parody. I rely on associations to previous things as a kind of shorthand. It’s not that audiences have to know which films I love, and I’m not interested in hommages. But it’s all retreads — human relationships have been explored, re-explored, de-explored, and yet we still respond to the grain of truth that we recognize at the heart of these situations when they’re represented on a screen. One wants the falseness to be true.

One should clarify Rappaport’s statement about narration by mentioning that his notion about five points-of-view is theoretical rather than actual (although Local Color comes close at times to that level of intricacy, and The Scenic Route intermittently uses Lena as a second narrator). Nevertheless, the sort of distinction he draws between his own work and Hollywood melodrama is accurate in its broad outlines, and it’s important to keep in mind that however well Rappaport knows the American cinema, his films are probably closer to the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet than they are to the movies of Ernst Lubitsch, Joseph Mankiewicz, or George Cukor.

But as Rappaport himself indicates, it’s the melodramatic and theatrical side of painting that perhaps comes closest to his concerns. And from one point of view, what could be more melodramatic and theatrical than the American flag? (Consider the cornball rhetoric of its flaunting by Robert Altman at the end of Nashville — the kind of pretension that invariably suckers xenophobic, all-American patriots who criticize European films for their “heaviness.”) And it is the American flag whose formal coordinates are used in the obsessively reiterated picture of Orpheus and Eurydice glimpsed at the beginning —an icon and reference point that is restaged and rethought as often as the old photograph of the Chinese couple that begins and ends Leslie Thornton’s Adynata. In certain variations of this mythical pose — a man watches an ornate woman sleeping in an ornate bed — part of the wall and bed spell out precisely those coordinates, as if to give one more expression to the European vs. American and classical vs. romantic feuds being waged in this movie.

Rappaport is invariably at his best when thinking up ingenious compositions of this kind. Two other strong examples in The Scenic Route involve screens between people: slides of atrocities winking on and off between Estelle on screen left watching her sister Lena kissing Paul on screen right; Estelle at one end of a row of movie seats, a man at another, while enormous black-and-white close-ups of a couple kissing play on the movie screen over their heads (entailing an odd yet satisfying reversal of directions because they’re both looking away from the screen). Still another striking melodramatic effect is achieved in a shot between the two previous examples, when Estelle backs away from Lena and Paul only to wind up next to a gigantic black-and-white photograph of the same couple, discovered at the end of a camera movement that follows her stealthy retreat. Still later, after Paul buys a record of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (2), one twice sees the ornate wallpaper in Estelle’s flat rise like a curtain to reveal each sister standing outdoors in front of the same autumnal landscape; then a backdrop of snow-capped mountains also lifts behind Paul to show that he’s standing in the same spot previously occupied by the other two.

The desire to be part of a work of art infects virtually every register of representation broached by the film, keeping one’s distinctions between subjective fantasies and objective narrative information almost as confused as their respective emotional impacts. Paul and the two sisters dance in Estelle’s living room at one point to a rock tune (“Dr. Love”), and the effect is as wonderfully deadpan as the performance of the Madison by the goofy trio (two males and one female) in Godard’s Band of Outsiders. Some of the equally deadpan lines are just as funny, particularly in their mockery of New York clichés of attitude and intonation. “I was afraid to go out — I was afraid to stay in,” Estelle remarks early on in the narration, not before she’s seen walking outside when a woman with a dagger in her back falls rather promptly into her arms (echoing the United Nations corpse near the beginning of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest). Estelle’s morose follow-up comment is just as crazy in its banality: “It was the first time I ever touched someone’s blood. It was also the day I got a letter from Lena….” “I think I’m ready for a meaningful affair,” she says elsewhere; and Paul at one point utters a line that perfectly catches the claustrophobic, paranoid mood of pose and posture at the point of self-mockery: “I wouldn’t even tell you a lie, much less the truth.” “I feel uneasy with you,” Estelle responds, understandably.

Impostors isn’t my favorite Rappaport film — I’d assign that place to the infinitely plotty Local Color, with The Scenic Route a close runner-up — but with a $115,000 budget and an all-star cast, it’s probably the most lavish, in thought as well as deed. (Readers interested in details about the making of the film should consult my production story in the October 1979 American Film.) The daisy-chain of flirtations, passions, jealousies, relationships, and correspondences between a well-to-do romantic hero (Peter Evans), a pair of murderous magicians impersonating a pair of twins (Charles Ludlam and Michael Burg — the latter a leading actor in Local Color), their enigmatic assistant (Ellen McElduff), and her mysterious soulmate (Lina Todd), are so complexly interwoven that after a while, döppelgangers proliferate like bunny rabbits.

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

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

“So many corpses, so little treasure!” wails Burg, the other weirdo magician in the movie; he could just as well be talking about the diverse deadends and rewards of narrative itself. To say that Impostors doesn’t “work” finally isn’t to say much at all. Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, released the same year, works like a charm, but leaves one with next to nothing afterwards — like a good meal you forget about the following day, or a Jacques Demy movie that makes you feel pleasantly nostalgic about your own dreamy narcissism, without forcing any of the accompanying impostures into a state of crisis.

Impostors, a good deal stickier, leaves me with something more. After seeing it three times, it still drives me a little batty (as it no doubt should). To my taste, the women in the movie are too elliptical and remote (as are the men in The Scenic Route), the Peter Evans character too well armored against ridicule, and the dialogue too doggedly flashy in spots. (One character compares love and romance to an artichoke —“you peel it all away, and there’s nothing left” — when what she or Rappaport apparently means is an onion.)

But there’s a lot more rattling around inside the possibilities of this oddball romantic epic than one can find in most places, and viewers who like to take (and honor) bold risks should give this movie a chance. You might wind up hating it; but even if you do, you’ll probably have some interesting reasons you never would have thought of otherwise. (After all, all bourgeois dreams end the same way — inside someone’s head.) And either way, I can guarantee that you’ll have plenty to look at, listen to, and think about, both here and in The Scenic Route. The fact that Rappaport has a good eye, ear, and mind already places him well ahead of most of contemporary cinema. He merely has the misfortune of living in the wrong century and on the wrong continent, meanwhile making the best movies that he can.

Michael Snow

From Omni (September 1983). — J.R.

For a conceptual artist who’s more often concerned with representation than with straight entertainment, Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow can be a pretty jokey fellow. In fact, of all the avant-garde artists I know, he may well be the one who laughs the most and the hardest. His longest and craziest movie — the 260-minute, encyclopedic “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen – contains a grab bag of assorted puns, puzzles, and adages, from lines like “eating is believing” and “hearing is deceiving” to a mad tea party where words and sentences recited backward are then reversed to sound vaguely intelligible. Even “Wilma Schoen” in the title is an anagram for Snow’s name. One of his shortest works, the eight-minute Two Sides to Every Story, is projected on two back-to-back screens, simultaneously showoing the same events in the same room from opposite angles.

Just as typical, in the living room of Snow’s house in Toronto, where I recently interviewed him, is a front door that isn’t in use — or rather is in use, but not as a front door. Over the side facing inside the room is life-size color photograph of a painting of the same door. A concept of a front door in place of a real one? A statement about representation instead of a portal to walk through? Perhaps a bit of both. But there’s another detail in the photograph that makes the whole thing funnier and stranger: a gigantic hand in the foreground holding a lit match. This image is many times larger than life, totally contradicting the supposed equivalence between the real door and the represented door.

Perceptual and conceptual gags of this kind abound in Snow’s work. Sometimes they’re amazingly literal: After making an epic film trilogy in the late Sixties and early Seventies about possible ways of moving the camera — zooming, panning back and forth, and rotating every which way — he built a set on rollers for a section of another film (Presents, 1981). Then he used a couple of forklifts to jerk the whole flimsy construction to and fro so that the camera wouldn’t have to budge an inch. In the ensuing slapstick mayhem (a needle on a Bach record skips wildly, walls and furniture shake, objects crash to the floor, actors are buffeted about), something about the perception of movement — as well as the intimate relationship between creation and destruction — is being explored.

Just a few short subway stops away from Snow’s house is the best known and most popular of all his works, Flight Stop. It isn’t a movie, but it makes many people think of one. Located in the largest enclosed shopping mall on ther continent, Eaton Center, which reportedly attracts more visitors annually than Niagara Falls, this photographic sculpture consists of 60 fiberglass geese, each suspended from three wires and glued to a contoured photograph of a real goose. Extended over about six stories, the gese seem to be landing in formation, and there’s something eerily cinematic about the overall spread, as if each bird were a separate stop-frame in a dispersed simulation of animated flight.

For epic visual breadth, perhaps the only Snow creation to rival Flight Stop is the three-hour film, La Région Centrale (The Central Region, 1971), in which a computer-operated camera spins in endlessly changing configurations around an uninhabited mountain landscape in northern Quebec. It probably wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this film one of Snow’s least popular works — it certainly has the fewest laughs. But that’s largely because it’s so scary. There’s a direct assault on the senses, including one’s center of gravity, as the flip-flopping camera makes circular patterns at variable speeds that no human being could possibly duplicate, producing an experience roughly akin to riding a demonic ferris wheel. “I wanted to make the film a condensed day,” Snow explained. “It isn’t, really, but it does start in daylight, and then there’s sunset and sunrise, and it’s over at something like eleven.”

In order to make the film, Snow enlisted the help of Montreal technician Pierre Abeloos, who designed a machine that used audio tapes to program the camera’s 360-degree movements without any direct human contact. Then Snow went out looking for a wild location, where nothing man-made was visible, finally settling on an area near Sept-Iles, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. renting a helicopter, he flew there with three crew members, installed Abeloos’s machine on a remote mountain plateau, and hid from camera range with the others for five cold days in September while the film was being shot.

Why was it so vital to have nothing human either in front of the camera or behind it? “On the one hand, I wanted to have the machine make the film,” Snow told me. “But on the other hand, I wanted to make what you see more yours than the cameraman’s or the director’s, in a way. Even though the height of the camera is the usual human standing height, five feet or so, it makes for a kind of experience that’s not anthropomorphic; it’s an experience that comes explicitly from the machinery.”

“Ultimately,” Snow went on, “the director or the artist is removed just one step in this particular case. Because it is directed. And it is controlled. But the control is not that control of directing your heartstrings. It makes the wilderness yours in one sense, because there’s such a distance between the means of recording it and the kind of thing that the wilderness is. And it also brings into question the whole process of the perception of nature.”

Forever resourceful in reusing material, Snow later remounted Abeloos’s machine in a video-installation piece with four monitors. “The camera goes in the center and you can set it for different patterns. It’s really nice; he National Gallery of Canada bought it. It’s called De là. Obviously it’s a completely different thing from the film, because you get involved in watching the machine move and seeing the kind of drawing it makes that it makes on the monitors, relating the movement to the kinds of images that are produced.”

Something of a prankster and philosopher at the same time, Snow, in his mid-fifties, has a flair for starting off with an unlikely or outrageous idea and somehow making it work. In his first major film (Wavelength, 1967), 40-odd minutes long, he begins with a stuttering camera zoom across an 80-foot Manhattan loft: not much action, as most movies go. but he uses this central concept like a clothesline on which to hang abstract notions about space, time, color, waves, death, storytelling, and representation. (Characteristically, the shooting took him a week and the editing, a couple of weeks, “but I did spend a lot of time musing — a year.”) In Snow’s most recent film (So Is This, 1982), with roughly the same running time, he has the brass to fill his silent screen with nothing but one printed word after another; his imagination and resources keep audiences amused and involved all the way through.

How does he pack so much into so little? In Wavelength, the zoom’s journey across the loft — joined on the soundtrack by a sine wave gradually moving from its lowest note to its highest — starts uneventfully. But as the camera approaches the four double windows and intervening wall space of the other side of the loft, a man is heard breaking into the building and walking upstairs. He staggers into the frame and drops dead on the floor — just before the zoom blithely lurches past him.

Still later, a woman enters, discovers the moribund body, and phones her boyfriend while the camera steadily approaches one of the photographs posted on the central wall space. The photo proves to be a picture of sea waves. The sound of an approaching police siren merges with sine wave, which by now has risen from 50 to 12,000 cycles per second.

As prosaic as all this sounds, Snow has been passing his painterly image through many changes along the way. He uses a variety of color filters, film stocks, superimposed flashbacks of earlier stages in the zoom, and qualities and degrees of processing and light exposure ti keep the film moving like a kaleidoscope; yet it seems to be practically standing still. (Many of the same technical variations in Wavelength are used to comparably fluid effect on the single words in So Is This.) In Snow’s elegant description of the movie’s progress, “The space starts at the camera’s — spectator’s — eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen — the mind.” He has also described the film as a “pun on the room-length zoom to the photo of sea waves, through the light waves, and on the sound waves.”

A simpler and wittier forward camera movement defines a 1976 Snow short called either Breakfast or Table Top Dolly. In this case, a camera fronted by a sheet of see-through plastic slowly creeps across a table, converting an artistic still-life of groceries — eggs, orange juice, sugar, Dixie cup, plates, and fruit — into a sticky, gooey mass of garbage while the sounds of dishwashing are heard offscreen. A movie about consumption? If eating is believing and hearing is deceiving, you had better believe it.