JonathanRosenbaum.com

Romance of the Ordinary [on Chantal Akerman]

This was written for the January 26, 1990 issue of the Chicago Reader, a good five years before the premiere of at least one of my absolute favorite Akerman films: her non-fictional From the East (see the first photograph below; just below that is a smaller still from her subsequent From the Other Side in 2002, which isn’t exactly chopped liver either ). But in fact there have been many high points and wonders from Akerman since then, and I’m thrilled that her most recent project is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, with a script cowritten by my friend Nicole Brenez. — J.R.

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THE FILMS OF CHANTAL AKERMAN

On one hand, the films of the 39-year-old Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman are about as varied as anyone could wish. Some are in 16-millimeter and some are in 35; some are narrative and some are nonnarrative; the running times range from 11 minutes to 205. The genres range from autobiography to personal psychodrama to domestic drama to comedy to musical to documentary to feature-in-progress — a span that still fails to include a silent, not-exactly-documentary study of a run-down New York hotel (Hotel Monterey), a vast collection of miniplots covering a single night in a city (Toute une nuit), and a feature-length string of Jewish jokes recited by immigrants in Brooklyn exteriors (Food, Family and Philosophy), among other oddities.

On the other hand, paradoxically, there are few important contemporary filmmakers whose range is as ruthlessly narrow as Akerman’s, formally and emotionally. Virtually all of her films, regardless of genre, come across as melancholy, narcissistic meditations charged with feelings of loneliness and anxiety; and nearly all of them have the same hard-edged painterly presence and monumentality, the same precise sense of framing, locations, and empty space. Most of them are fundamentally concerned with the discomfort of bodies in rooms. (Akerman is basically geared toward interiors, which may be one reason her latest feature, Food, Family and Philosophy, set mostly in exteriors, is not one of her strongest. The fact that virtually all of Window Shopping, her musical, is set inside a shopping mall sets up an interesting ambiguity about whether one is inside or out — until the shock of the ending, when the film finally moves out into the open air.)

Her movies generally rely quite a bit on real time (as opposed to film time), and although her sound tracks tend to be constructed in layers rather than randomly recorded, none of them, with the exception of Window Shopping, uses offscreen music. Finally, a good many of her movies qualify as remakes of her earlier works: Jeanne Dielman, her longest film, can be regarded as a remake of Saute ma ville, her first film and one of her shortest; and the medium-length The Man With a Suitcase can be seen as a remake of Jeanne Dielman. Similarly, from a certain standpoint, Les rendezvous d’Anna is a remake of Je tu il elle, and, to a lesser extent, Food, Family and Philosophy is a remake of Toute une nuit.

The Akerman retrospective that started at Facets Multimedia Center earlier this month and concludes in early February isn’t quite exhaustive: probably the most significant omissions, currently unavailable in the U.S., are Dis-moi (1980), The Man With a Suitcase (1984), and her most recent feature, Food, Family and Philosophy, aka Histoires d’Amérique (1988). (An uncharacteristic and fairly conventional documentary about Pina Bausch and her dance company, One Day Pina Asked . . ., also made in 1984, which turned up on cable a few years ago, is also missing.) Nevertheless, this is the most complete presentation of Akerman’s work that Chicagoans are likely to get in the foreseeable future. And considering both the importance of her work and its general scarcity in the U.S. — none of her films, for example, has yet made it onto video — interested viewers should brave the risk of uneven and/or calamitous projection that plagues Facets screenings and check this filmmaker out. Whether you love or hate her work, I can guarantee you won’t find anything else remotely like it playing anywhere else; and three of her very best films — Window Shopping, Toute une nuit, and her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman – are showing this week.

There are, however, two potential obstacles to appreciating Akerman’s films that might be mitigated by a discussion of them. The first has to do with the role of a director and how it’s perceived. It’s widely believed, with some justice, that film criticism and appreciation in general made a significant step forward when the French term mise en scène was introduced in this country in the 60s, largely through the writing of Andrew Sarris. Becoming aware of the director, or metteur en scène, meant becoming aware of a director’s style and vision, and even though Sarris’s adoption of the term needlessly added hyphens to the French — giving “mise-en-scène” a certain mystical flavor in English which it retains even today — the term has added something of value to our overall conception of cinema.

Mise en scène literally means “place on the stage,” making us aware that it is the director who places the actors, the décor, and the camera in relation to one another. It is the stage of filmmaking that takes place after the writing of the script, during the shooting, and before the editing, and because the commercial Hollywood cinema tends to break up these three activities according to a strict division of labor, the importance of mise en scène as a creative concept is that it is distinct from both of the other processes.

But there is another French term, in some ways an even more important one, that has never crossed the Atlantic to enter common usage in the U.S., in part because the concept behind it is a little more difficult to grasp: découpage. In terms of its popular French usage, it has three separate but interlocking meanings: the final form of a script, the breakdown of a film into separate shots and sequences prior to filming, and the basic structure of a finished film. (The verb découper means “to cut out” or “to cut up.”) The term découpage implies that there is a continuity between script and editing — a continuity imposed not by a writer, director, or editor, but by a filmmaker who carries the project through from beginning to end — and that mise en scène becomes a means toward an end in this continuity rather than an end in itself.

If the term mise en scène implies an industrial model of cinema, the term découpage implies an artistic or artisanal model. The latter term makes sense in France, where a filmmaker’s right to final cut is a part of actual law; it makes very little sense in a country like ours, where even the writer-directors who have an unusual amount of creative freedom — Woody Allen, for instance — do not produce a découpage in the sense that Robert Bresson does. (As we know from Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen’s book When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins, practically all of Allen’s features are restructured and re-created in the cutting room, and the original scripts are quite different from the finished products.)

In this context it is misleading to talk merely about Akerman’s mise en scène in spite of her close attention to framing, because from that vantage point, many of her movies look rather anemic. It’s her découpage that matters — that is, not only what happens in her shots but what happens between them, among them, across them, and through them. (The same thing applies to practically all of the most important filmmakers in the history of movies: Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles may be known to us as master directors, but their art is ultimately the art of découpage rather than simply mise en scène.) Consequently, comparing Akerman to someone like Woody Allen, Susan Seidelman, Paul Mazursky, or Steven Soderbergh on the level of “mise en scène” is about as meaningless as comparing a microscope to a microwave, or a minimalist artist to an entertainer.

The second obstacle to appreciating Akerman’s films has to do with Akerman’s being a Belgian Jew—though she has spent extended periods of her adult life and shot several of her films in both France and the U.S. Most of her films are in French, and it has been all too easy for many critics to discuss her work as if it were essentially part of the French cinema; but it’s an impulse that should be firmly resisted. The cultural dominance of France and the U.S. in relation to such countries as Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada has led to a streak of cultural imperalism that confuses our understanding of filmmakers as important as Michael Snow (Canadian) and Jean-Luc Godard (Swiss) as well as Akerman.

The fact that Snow made his best-known film, Wavelength, in a Manhattan loft and that Godard made many of his best-known features in France obviously adds to this confusion, and at the same time it falsely enhances the reputations of these filmmakers by seeming to make them more fashionable. It’s been argued more than once that if Wavelength had been shot in, say, a Toronto loft, it might never have been so important to many Manhattan critics, and it’s worth adding that the period when Godard was most fashionable coincided with the period when he was based in Paris; now that he’s based in the vicinity of Lausanne, Switzerland, his work is generally considered a good deal more perverse and impenetrable.

The main point to be stressed here is that because she is both Belgian and Jewish, Akerman has a stance that is essentially that of an outsider in an international context. While it is possible to link her work to that of a few other, much lesser known Belgian independents — such as Samy Szlingerbaum, with whom she collaborated on one of her earliest films, the hardly ever shown Le 15/8 (1973) — and to see connections with a few Belgian painters (most notably Paul Delvaux, whose surrealist night scenes bear an eerie resemblance to some of her shots), it is probably even more pertinent to note the degree to which exile is a recurring theme in her work. (Major examples would include News From Home, Les rendezvous d’Anna, Toute une nuit, The Man With a Suitcase, Window Shopping, and Food, Family and Philosophy.)

***

Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.– Flannery O’Connor

If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.– Chantal Akerman

A yearning for the ordinary as well as the everyday runs through Akerman’s work like a recurring, plaintive refrain. It is a longing that takes many forms: part of it is simply her ambition to make a commercially successful movie; another part is the desire of a self-destructive, somewhat regressive neurotic — Akerman herself in Saute ma ville, Je tu il elle, and The Man With a Suitcase; Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman; Aurore Clement in Les rendezvous d’Anna — to go legit and be like “normal” people. Je tu il elle and Les rendezvous d’Anna both feature a bisexual heroine who wants to either resolve an unhappy relationship with another woman or to go straight; in Saute ma ville, Je tu il elle, Jeanne Dielman, and The Man With a Suitcase, the desire to be “normal” is largely reflected in the efforts of the heroine simply to inhabit a domestic space.

This desire for normalcy accounts for much of the difficulty of assimilating Akerman’s work to any political program, feminist or otherwise. As an account of domestic oppression and repression, Jeanne Dielman — whose full title is Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — largely escapes these strictures, and Akerman herself has admitted that this film can be regarded as feminist. But she has been less willing to let her other works be viewed in a political context — she once refused to let Je tu il elle be shown in a gay and lesbian film festival — denying that she considers herself a feminist filmmaker, despite the efforts of certain feminist film critics to claim her as one.

The two most extreme expressions of neurotic regression in Akerman’s work are probably the first third of Je tu il elle and the last half of The Man With a Suitcase, both of which show Akerman herself alone in a room, steadily growing crazier and crazier over several days. In Je tu il elle she compulsively rearranges her few items of furniture, eats only from a bag of sugar, writes and rewrites a letter to a real or potential boyfriend (rearranging the various drafts in a series of piles like a game of solitaire), and takes off her clothes and drapes them over her body like bed sheets. In the more comic The Man With a Suitcase, made ten years later, in which she is sharing an apartment with a young American man she hardly knows, she barricades herself in a single room and sets up a TV camera by the window to monitor his comings and goings.

Perhaps the most extreme evocations of “normality” in Akerman’s work are the many heterosexual couples seen in Toute une nuit and Window Shopping. And somewhere in between are the formidable figures of Jeanne Dielman, a widow and compulsive housekeeper who turns tricks with male clients in the afternoons, and Anna in Les rendezvous d’Anna, a Belgian filmmaker traveling on the train from Cologne to Paris via Brussels and making various stops on the way. One token of Anna’s in-betweenness is her visit with her mother, played by Léa Massari, in Brussels. Instead of going home, where Anna’s ailing father is already asleep, they check into a cheap hotel room where Anna, lying naked beside her mother in bed, calmly describes a lesbian affair she has recently become involved in. (Her lover is never seen in the film, but she’s heard on Anna’s answering machine when she returns to Paris; and, to complicate matters, the voice is Akerman’s.)

Considering Akerman’s craving to make a commercially successful film, it’s ironic that she gave the same French title, Les années 80, to both a feature-length preview of the musical she was trying to raise money for in 1983 (shown here as The Golden Eighties) and the finished musical that she finally made three years later (known in English as Window Shopping) — which certainly didn’t help matters much. It’s no less ironic that the preview — which consists of an hour of videotaped auditions with actresses, followed by 25 minutes of sample scenes from the movie in 35-millimeter — proves in many ways to be more emotionally affecting than the completed work. (If memory serves, these sample scenes aren’t included in Window Shopping because Akerman wound up making cast changes in the interim, although the same catchy songs — with music by Marc Herouet and lyrics by Akerman — are heard in both.)

A noble failure, Window Shopping is a musical inspired not so much by Hollywood as by some of the films of Jacques Demy — chiefly Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and The Young Girls of Rochefort — which are themselves inspired by Hollywood. Composed of several intersecting stories about romances that occur between various workers and customers at a shopping mall, the movie evokes Demy in emotional tone and plotting rather than in filmmaking style: a character named Sylvie pining away for her boyfriend in Montréal directly evokes the heroine of Lola, while the fortuitous encounter in the mall of a middle-aged couple who haven’t seen each other in 30 years — an American (John Berry) and a Polish refugee (Delphine Seyrig) who now runs a boutique in the mall with her husband (Charles Denner) — harks back to The Young Girls of Rochefort.

Major differences include Akerman’s occasional use of characters — such as a youthful male quartet that suggests a French version of the Hi-Los — singing directly to the camera, and her avoidance of dancing, as well as an overall klutziness in the songs’ staging that often results in simple weirdness rather than the charm of Demy’s numbers. (No choreographer is listed in the credits, and the few desultory dance moves that are introduced in a number in a beauty salon are even clunkier than those in a similar setting in Spike Lee’s School Daze.)

The main problem with Window Shopping is that in spite of the power of the songs and the appeal of many of the performers, the movie as a whole proves to be rather uninvolving. The dialogue sequences are rather flat, and Akerman’s attempts to breathe life into her musical-comedy characters — which can be quite moving when we see her making that effort in The Golden Eighties — prove to be more compelling than the final results of her work.

There is something heroic about this failure, however, because in keeping with Flannery O’Connor’s statement quoted above, part of Akerman’s integrity as an artist consists of what she is not able to do. The yearning for romance and for the romance of the ordinary is a central ingredient of her work, but the most remarkable moments in her films are those in which her other, demonic impulses rebel against this fantasy. Emblematic in this respect is the ending of Toute une nuit, an insomniac’s movie about insomniacs, in which a couple’s lovemaking is gradually smothered, and all but obliterated from our attention, by the hectoring sounds of early-morning traffic outside. The tortured aggressiveness of such a moment is finally what her filmmaking is all about — her cold, elegantly symmetrical compositions and brutal sounds being hammered into our skulls with an obstinate will to power that makes Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Peckinpah, and Clint Eastwood all seem like pussycats.

Mystery Train

Jim Jarmusch’s fourth feature gives us three separate stories occurring over the same day in a sleazy section of Memphis: “Far From Yokohama,” about the visit of a young Japanese couple (Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase) to the shrines of their demigods, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins respectively; “A Ghost,” about an Italian woman (Nicoletta Braschi) whose husband has just died on their honeymoon, who shares a hotel room with an American woman (Elizabeth Bracco) who has just left her English boyfriend, and who glimpses the ghost of Elvis himself; and “Lost in Space,” about the grief of the English boyfriend (Joe Strummer) alluded to in part two, who hangs out with two buddies (Rick Aviles and Steve Buscemi) and shoots a clerk in a liquor store. All three stories gravitate toward the same locations, including a rundown hotel presided over by night clerk Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and bellboy Cinque Lee, and Jarmusch gets a lot of mileage out of the formal satisfactions to be found as the three separate stories periodically pass over the same places and moments in time. There’s also some thoughtful work in the selective color of Robby Muller’s cinematography, and a great deal of the wit, poetry, and sensitivity to character that made Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law so appealing. The lack of familiarity with Memphis makes too many of the secondary characters and gags register like New York transplants, and the third episode suffers from a lack of imagination and depth (the characters and situations both seem borrowed)–serious problems for a minimalist master whose smallest moves count–but the charm of Kudoh, Nagase, and Braschi helps to compensate for the fact that they’re partially replaying certain notions about foreigners in the U.S. that we already got in Jarmusch’s last two movies. In short, this is far from a total success, but certainly worth a look. (Fine Arts)

Three on a Mensch [on ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY]

From the January 19, 1990 Chicago Reader. –J.R.

ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Paul Mazursky

Written by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky

With Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin, Margaret Sophie Stein, Alan King, Judith Malina, and Mazursky.

It’s a truism of film criticism that the best movie adaptations of novels usually aren’t taken from the best novels. A good novel, like a good movie, has its own raison d’être, and attempting to translate one person’s novel into another person’s movie usually entails removing the novel’s raison d’etre or at least transmogrifying it beyond recognition. A classic example of misplaced piety, in the sense of a movie trying to follow a novel too closely, is Joseph Strick’s Ulysses (1967): despite the fact that characters, settings, and entire textual passages from Joyce are all dutifully delivered and rendered, Joyce himself is absent from the movie. The personal, historical, and formal determinations of the book have nothing to do with those of the director of the film, working almost half a century later. The gap between Joyce’s reasons for writing Ulysses and Strick’s reasons for adapting it is so cosmically wide that the two sets of motivations aren’t even on speaking terms.

Everybody has his own horror story about his favorite book being massacred at the movies — the history of film is strewn with these stillborn corpses — and the handful of exceptions to this rule often meet their deaths elsewhere: either at the hands of the scissors-wielding studios (I’m thinking of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons) or the equally pitiless box office (as in John Huston’s Wise Blood and Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping).

Still another problem governing adaptations of novels, good or bad, is posed by the issue of which version one encounters first, the book or the movie. When one reads a book one conjures up characters and settings, space and scale, out of the author’s prose, and any movie replacements of these images are bound to register as interferences. Conversely, seeing a movie before you read the novel can easily impair your first encounter with the author’s prose by allowing its images to supplant or forestall your own. Either way, something is lost as well as gained, and the first version that one encounters tends to dominate one’s responses.

To make matters worse, good adaptations usually compound this problem. As a teenager, I saw the horrific Hollywood versions of The Sound and the Fury and Miss Lonelyhearts shortly before I read the novels, and though ludicrous memories of Yul Brynner’s Jason Compson and Robert Ryan’s Shrike hovered over my initial experiences of those books, the power of Faulkner’s and West’s writing eventually buried them. No such effacement took place, however, when I read Frank Norris’s McTeague after seeing Stroheim’s Greed, or when I encountered Booth Tarkington’s Ambersons after meeting the same family in Welles’s movie: the casting was too sensitive and precise, and both films had a personal urgency that wound up influencing and spilling over into my readings of Norris and Tarkington.

I’m certainly not trying to imply that Paul Mazursky, the director and coadapter (with Roger L. Simon) of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a Love Story, belongs in the same league — or even on the same planet — as Stroheim or Welles. I can’t even say that prior to Enemies (the movie) I’ve been any sort of Mazursky fan at all. At best an entertaining comic writer-director, at worst a vulgar propagandist who promotes the worst habits of the American middle class in the name of middlebrow sociology, he is the sort of filmmaker who winds up mauling his own beloved European models — Truffaut’s Jules and Jim in the cutesy Willie and Phil, Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning in the garish Down and Out in Beverly Hills — by removing their subversive sting in the process of “remaking” them.

For all of Mazursky’s deftness with actors — which usually registers more effectively with nonstarring actresses (such as Ellen Burstyn in Harry and Tonto and Shelley Winters in Next Stop, Greenwich Village) than with his male leads (such as Art Carney and Lenny Baker, respectively, in the same films) — the broadness of his directorial style is usually matched only by the narrowness and flatness of his understanding of anything that doesn’t fall squarely within bourgeois norms. This hasn’t prevented him, of course, from milking a voyeuristic and often hypocritical fascination with “deviance” — wife-swapping in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, bohemian life in Next Stop, Greenwich Village, feminism in An Unmarried Woman, voluntary homelessness in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and so on — for bourgeois delectation. In An Unmarried Woman, Mazursky’s perception of the life of an artist (Alan Bates) — executing a painting, eating breakfast, and making love all at the same time — is just how his middle-class audience thinks of artists; that it has little to do with the way a painter might actually paint seems almost beside the point.

I should confess that I’ve never quite forgiven Mazursky for a statement he made several years ago; I haven’t been able to trace it, but I can remember it well enough to paraphrase: “I defend the American middle class because no one else does.” No one else? The implication, somehow, was that everyone else in Hollywood was mounting radical critiques of the status quo while he, brave nonconformist, was going out on a limb in favor of middle-class squares.

All of which, to get finally to my point, left me totally unprepared for Enemies, a Love Story — an emotionally complex story about holocaust survivors in New York City with much of the humor but virtually none of the glibness that I’ve found in Mazursky’s previous work. It also happens to be his first real adaptation, which accounts for much of the difference. Most of the leading characters happen to be middle-class, and Mazursky certainly “defends” them, but for once these two facts seem coincidental rather than merely ideological: one never feels that Mazursky is defending them simply because they’re middle-class. And they’re mainly Eastern Europeans still living through the aftereffects of the holocaust, which makes them far from typical.

At the beginning of the film, after cheerful Jewish folk music plays behind the credits, we hear barking dogs and angry male voices; from the inside of a barn, we see the doors open and soldiers enter with the dogs, the camera quickly gliding past the grisly flayed head of a cow carcass. What turns out to be a nightmare/memory ends with a maid (Margaret Sophie Stein) screaming. The hero, Herman (Ron Silver), wakes up and looks out the window at a ferris wheel; a title informs us that it’s Coney Island in 1949.

Herman, we soon learn, is now married to Yadwiga, the girl in his dream. A non-Jew, she was his maid in Poland and she saved his life, caring for him while he hid from the Nazis in a hayloft; she now happily waits on him hand and foot. We also learn that Herman habitually lies to her — he’s a speech ghostwriter for a wealthy Manhattan rabbi (Alan King), but he tells her he’s a traveling book salesman, which enables him to carry on a passionate affair with another Jewish holocaust survivor, Masha (Lena Olin), who lives with her mother (Judith Malina) in the Bronx. Separated from her own husband (Mazursky), Masha is jealous of Herman’s marriage to Yadwiga, and hopes to marry him as soon as she can secure a divorce.

The plot thickens when Herman discovers that his first wife, Tamara (Anjelica Huston), who he had heard was killed along with their two children by the Nazis, is now alive and well in Manhattan. When they meet and Tamara learns of his marriage to Yadwiga, she makes no demands about resuming their own marriage, but serves Herman as a friend and occasional lover (as well as adviser after she learns about Masha). Eventually Herman finds himself married to all three women, a trigamist.

These sexual dynamics suggest male chauvinism with a vengeance, but it’s part of the wit, beauty, and power of the story that indecisive Herman, while remaining sympathetic, steadily shrinks in his stature as a character while the wives correspondingly grow in strength and capability. Most surprising of all, while virtually all of the story is told from Herman’s viewpoint, he vanishes from the plot by the final scene, and he clearly isn’t missed by either the other remaining characters — all female — or by the audience.

I won’t recount any of the movie’s remaining plot — which is fairly intricate, often comic, and informed by tragic events and overtones that are scarcely suggested in the preceding summary — but I would like to bring up Singer’s novel, which I read after seeing the film for the first time, and which, for obvious reasons, I find difficult to evaluate apart from Mazursky’s movie. I should add that seeing the movie a second time made me more aware of Mazursky’s strengths (which mainly, if not exclusively, have to do with his overall fidelity to Singer) as well as his limitations (which mainly, if not exclusively, have to do with resemblances between Enemies and earlier Mazursky movies).

Concerning Mazursky’s strengths, the movie has uncommonly good dialogue and nearly all of it derives directly or indirectly from Singer, either through direct quotation or paraphrase. The performances of the leads are more than just good; in the cases of Silver, Huston, and Stein, they’re downright incandescent. If I omit the volatile Olin from this honor roll, this is chiefly because she doesn’t quite bring off a climactic scene involving hysterical screams, but candor compels me to admit that she more than makes up for this lapse elsewhere; her final scene, which concentrates and expands everything we know about her character, is played to perfection. Mazursky’s own single scene is both rich and restrained — a judiciously shaped cameo.)

The period re-creations of Coney Island, Manhattan, and the Bronx are superb without being ostentatious — a rare virtue in contemporary movies. A convenient counterexample would be Driving Miss Daisy, set in Atlanta between the late 40s and the early 70s. Having seen both New York and Atlanta as a child in the early 50s, I can testify that there’s no question which of these two modestly budgeted pictures actually evokes its elected period and setting. Driving Miss Daisy’s sketchy stab at Atlanta strains visibly for accuracy and comes out feeling wrong; Enemies’s New York is precisely the place that I remember. The fact that the former was directed by an Australian while the latter was directed by a New Yorker — born in Brooklyn in 1930 — surely accounts for much of the difference.

A good deal of Simon and Mazursky’s adaptation goes beyond a simple translation of descriptions into images by condensing Singer’s world and time frame in a number of ways. The use of a Coney Island subway station where we often see Herman, with separate signs for trains going to Manhattan and the Bronx, graphically illustrates the pattern and dilemma of his life with an immediacy that is less available to prose. The decision to do without flashbacks and to minimize Herman’s dreams, memories, and fantasies about Nazis undoubtedly reduces our sense of the central characters and their pasts — with implications that I’ll get to shortly — although the film manages to be fairly resourceful, using aural or visual shorthand to suggest at least part of what it omits: the sound of barking dogs to represent Herman’s recurring memories and fear of Nazis, his fleeting fantasy of seeing Nazis in a subway car, a close-up of the serial number tattooed on Masha’s forearm that introduces us to her character (which comes at the beginning of a gracefully extended long take charting Herman’s arrival at her apartment).

The question of how to represent the holocaust in contemporary cinema can basically be addressed in two possible ways, which might be termed pre-Shoah and post-Shoah approaches. A major part of what makes Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah a watershed in relation to this issue is its assertion that the holocaust can’t be visualized — that is, represented literally. Lanzmann’s method was to convey through interviews as much concrete data as possible and to leave the visualization of the events up to the viewer’s imagination, furnishing only meditative views of the routes to the death camps and the sites of the camps today as figurative blackboards on which we must draw our own images.

A good example of pre-Shoah tactics is the way Costa-Gavras’s current Music Box bandies about telltale photographs of Nazi brutalities. On the other hand, when it shows its heroine contemplating the Danube and imagining the atrocities that occurred there — a contrived scene that actually works against any impulse on the part of the viewer to do the same thing — the film vulgarizes, sentimentalizes, and falsifies Lanzmann’s approach. By contrast, Enemies is post-Shoah insofar as the holocaust is resolutely kept offscreen (discounting Herman’s fleeting and wholly subjective nightmare and subway fantasy); it provides the subtext of most of what we see and the context of much of what we hear in the dialogue, but it’s not treated by the film as an event that can be objectively represented in visual terms.

The consequences of this reticence are fundamental to the film’s beauty and power because they amount to a form of respect for both the real victims of the holocaust and the viewer’s capacity to imagine their experiences. (An ironic form of the same respect is expressed in the first sentence of Singer’s author’s note preceding the novel: “Although I did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust, I have lived for years in New York with refugees from this ordeal.”)

On the other hand, Mazursky’s approach deprives us of certain important aspects of the characters found in the novel, such as Herman’s paranoid revenge fantasies and Tamara’s past as a political activist — specifically, as a communist and a Zionist. The pasts and personalities of Herman, Masha, Tamara, and Yadwiga become abbreviated through these omissions, and even though one can readily understand (if not condone) the filmmakers’ reasons for eliding this material, someone who reads the novel first is much likelier to have problems with the film.

More defensible, perhaps, are Mazursky’s efforts to broaden and embellish some of the novel’s farcical possibilities. When Herman and Masha are vacationing in the Catskills, the movie provides the comic complications of Tamara’s uncle and aunt (who know nothing about Masha) vacationing at the same resort — the sort of coincidence that is routine for a Mazursky comedy, if a mite less congruent with Singer’s own form of plotting. Similarly, Mazursky allows Alan King, as the rabbi Herman works for, to become needlessly hammy in his first scene, and stages a confrontation between Masha and Herman at the rabbi’s party as a raucous public event heard by all the guests, not the smaller private event that it is in the novel.

Obviously Mazursky isn’t Singer, and it seems reasonable enough that he should introduce some of his own shtick from time to time to make the movie more his own — although I’m grateful that he didn’t go overboard in this regard. (On the other hand, perhaps his most radical and important deviation from Singer consists of what he does to alter and dramatize the novel’s epilogue in his remarkable final scene, which to my mind improves on the original.) The marvel of Enemies, a Love Story is that he has managed to subdue most of his own worst habits and discipline his finer gifts to get as much as he can out of a luminous novel — which proves to be quite a bit, and plenty to be grateful for.

TV Films by Alexander Kluge

American TV watchers, eat your hearts out! These four selections from “Ten to Eleven”–a series of short, experimental “essay” films made for German television by the remarkable German filmmaker Alexander Kluge, to be shown here on video–are not always easy to follow in terms of tracing all their connections, but they’re the liveliest and most imaginative European TV shows I’ve seen since those of Ruiz and Godard. Densely constructed out of a very diverse selection of archival materials, which are manipulated (electronically and otherwise) in a number of unexpected ways, these historical meditations often suggest Max Ernst collages using the cultural flotsam of the last 100 years. Why Are You Crying, Antonio? relates fascism, opera, and domesticity; Articles of Advertising historicizes ads in a number of novel ways; Madame Butterfly Waits offers a compressed history of opera and its kitschy successors in pop culture; and the self-explanatory The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Woman makes use of comics, movies in the 1890s, a quote from Heidegger, and multiple images of the famous ape and tower. These are apparently fairly recent films. A Chicago premiere. (Randolph St. Gallery, 756 N. Milwaukee, Friday and Saturday, January 12 and 13, 8:00, 666-7737)

Inner Space

SOLARIS

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Written by Friedrich Gorenstein and Tarkovsky

With Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Yuri Jarvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Anatoly Solonitsin, and Sos Sarkissian.

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.” –scientist in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961)

It’s taken nearly two decades for Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s mind-boggling Soviet “reply” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to open in this country in its original form; but whatever doubts one might have about this beautiful film, I don’t think anyone could accuse it of being dated. Futuristic technology plays such a minimal role in Tarkovsky’s cosmology that state-of-the-art hardware and fancy special effects are virtually irrelevant to his vision. (One quaint example of the former is the videotapes employed in the film: they all have the shape and size of audiocassettes, but the images they project are in black and white and ‘Scope, and the video screens are correspondingly rectangular.) A handsome wide-screen spectacle set in a remote galaxy, the movie expresses plenty of awe and terror about imponderables, but what’s fundamentally at issue here is the state of man’s soul, not the physical state of the universe.

Having seen Solaris three times over the past 18 years but only in its complete 167-minute form, I can’t describe in any detail the differences between this version and the mutilated predecessors that have been circulating in the U.S. since 1976. I know that the original U.S. distributor hacked away 35 minutes without consulting Tarkovsky, and that subsequent prints that made the rounds of U.S. repertory theaters–partially dubbed, partially subtitled, and cobbled together out of separate versions–were even shorter. Given the film’s difficulties in its complete subtitled version, I have no doubt that its truncated forms must have been pretty incomprehensible.

Based on a Polish science fiction novel of the same title by Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky’s provocative head-scratcher can’t really be “explained” by using the original source material as one’s guide. A staunch nonbeliever in film genres (”I do not believe that the cinema has genres–the cinema is itself a genre,” he noted in a 1981 interview), Tarkovsky ironically regarded Solaris as the least successful of his films for the same reason that most people probably want to see it–because of its associations with science fiction. “Unfortunately the science fiction element in Solaris was too prominent and became a distraction,” he wrote in his fascinating (if maddening) book Sculpting in Time. “The rockets and space stations–required by Lem’s novel–were interesting to construct; but it seems to me now that the idea of the film would have stood out more vividly and boldly had we managed to dispense with these things altogether.”

Although portions of Tarkovsky’s film defy synopsis, it is certainly possible to describe the plot, such as it is. The film opens at the idyllic country home of Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), a psychologist, who lives there with his aging parents and his little boy. Unexplained incidents have been taking place on the planet Solaris, where a permanently orbiting space station was established many decades ago, and Kelvin has been asked to travel there alone to investigate, with the idea of closing down the space station after subjecting the planet’s oceanic surface to a final, exploratory burst of radiation.

Before Kelvin leaves, he is visited by Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), one of the original astronauts sent to explore the planet’s misty, swirling surface some 20 years earlier. Burton had gone out in search of Fechner, another one of the astronauts, who disappeared and was never found. With Burton and his parents, Kelvin watches a videotape of Burton’s report on the mission, in which he describes sighting a 13-foot-high naked male child in a garden on the planet’s surface. At this point in the report, Burton shows his own film of what he saw, but all that is visible are various cloud formations, and the scientific committee watching his report dismiss his account as a hallucination brought about by strain. Later, however, on his way back to the city, he calls back to the country house on a videophone to report that 20 years earlier, after the committee meeting, he had gone to visit Fechner’s family, and Fechner’s son, whom he saw for the first time, was the spitting image of the child he had glimpsed on Solaris.

When Kelvin arrives at the ramshackle Solaris space station, he finds it nearly deserted. The two remaining scientists, Snouth (Yuri Jarvet) and Sartorius (Anatoly Solonitsin), stay cooped up in their laboratories and are unresponsive to most of Kelvin’s questions; a third scientist, Gibarian (Sos Sarkissian), has committed suicide and left behind an enigmatic videotape addressed to Kelvin, which Kelvin plays back. (Much of this portion of the film is steeped in a haunted-house atmosphere: squeaks and other offscreen sounds and barely perceptible movements at the edges of the frame, along with the slow and suspenseful camera movements, all conjure up a sense of the uncanny without spelling it out.)

Eventually Kelvin discovers that the amorphous surface of Solaris is itself a living entity but not one that communicates directly; rather, it materializes human figures drawn from the guilt-ridden memories and fantasies of the astronauts on the space station so that each of them is literally accompanied by his own demon–a process that began after the astronauts first started to expose the planet’s surface to radiation. The demons accompanying the other astronauts are glimpsed so elliptically that we know next to nothing about them: Sartorius is accompanied in his own lab by a dwarf in pajamas; Gibarian is seen briefly on his videotape with a little girl (and the same girl is occasionally seen wandering about the space station, although Gibarian’s corpse is now in cold storage); Snouth’s demon appears to be an adult figure, although we perceive this figure so obliquely that we can’t even be sure of that.

Kelvin’s own demon appears in his cabin while he sleeps, and we see a great deal of her; it is his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), who committed suicide after the failure of their marriage. Initially he is so horrified by her reappearance that he sends her off in a rocket away from the space station, but she materializes before him again; later she attempts suicide again by drinking liquid oxygen, but within moments she comes back to life in a series of spastic jerks. These and other resurrections of Hari occupy most of the remainder of the film, during which time it becomes clear that her double is beginning to have an independent existence and feelings of her own, and Kelvin, who is now determined to remain on the space station, struggles to make amends for his former lack of commitment to her. Finally, however, she succeeds in destroying herself, and Kelvin begins to think again about returning to Earth.

Snouth notes that islands are forming on Solaris’s oceanic surface. On one of these islands, we see Kelvin back beside the pond near his country house. Greeted by his dog, he approaches the house and peers through a window where he makes eye contact with his elderly father; rain is inexplicably falling inside the house, splattering books and teacups–a scene that clearly rhymes with a sudden rainfall outside the country house in the film’s opening sequence–and mist rises from his father as the water falls. Kelvin meets his father at the back door of the house, kneels at his feet and embraces him, and the camera cranes upward, higher and higher until we see the house on an island in the middle of Solaris’s vast ocean.

In keeping with the film’s subjective emphasis on Kelvin–the narrator of Lem’s novel–the entire film focuses on Kelvin’s conscience and consciousness, and the objective side of the plot–everything that might be said to constitute the ingredients of a science fiction adventure–gradually comes to seem like nothing more than a pretext for telling Kelvin’s story. In the final analysis, whether or not we interpret the final scene as a dream sequence is irrelevant, because by this time the objective and subjective plots have become indistinguishable. The same ambiguity applies to certain sequences in which the living room of Kelvin’s country house merges with various parts of the space station to form an indissoluble whole.

Bearing this ambiguity in mind, it could be argued that Tarkovsky’s Solaris, unlike the Lem novel, qualifies more as anti-science fiction than as science fiction. In this respect, it bears a certain resemblance to some of the stories in Ray Bradbury’s very unscientific Martian Chronicles, in which space explorers on Mars hallucinate people from their childhoods. But a less obvious yet equally pertinent comparison can be made between Tarkovsky’s vision and a book I consider to be the greatest of all science fiction novels, Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker (1937)–which significantly has been cited by both Lem and Jorge Luis Borges with admiration, although it has never received much attention in hard-core SF circles.

A speculative account of the entire history and breadth of the cosmos, Star Maker has a canvas so vast that the entire span of mankind, the focus of Stapleton’s earlier Last and First Men (1930), figures here in the space of less than a paragraph, a mere drop in the bucket. The crucial paradox underlying the awesome sweep of the book is that the entire plot is framed by the mundane marital discord experienced by the human narrator. A rustic Englishman leaves his home in the midst of a quarrel to stand on a nearby hillside and gaze at the stars, where he experiences the entire narrative of the book in the form of a vision before returning to the mundanity of his modest life and problems. Just as important, Stapleton’s humdrum prose becomes the vehicle for his staggering sense of the cosmic. While the contradictory conceit of most science fiction writers trafficking in related subjects is that man can somehow think beyond the limitations of his consciousness in imagining the cosmos, Stapleton’s point of departure is precisely the reverse of this. Accepting the frailty and inadequacy of his vantage point at the outset, Stapleton proceeds to scale the heights like no other science fiction writer before or since, precisely because he knows how to use his limitations as an integral part of his descriptive technique.

Stapleton’s pronounced influence on Arthur C. Clarke can be detected in both Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey (which Clarke scripted with Stanley Kubrick). But 2001, which imagines an intelligence greater than man’s, ultimately loses sight of the everyday underpinnings essential to Stapleton’s vision. Tarkovsky’s view, on the other hand, which is ultimately a good deal more conservative and pessimistic than either Clarke’s or Stapleton’s, uses the everyday not as a springboard into the cosmic but as a sign of man’s inability to attain such reaches.

The fact that the only universe man can truly explore exists inside his own head is a key to Stapleton’s technique (which Clarke and Kubrick learned from), but not to his vision; in the case of Tarkovsky, it becomes the irreducible message. So it is perfectly logical that Tarkovsky came to regret the science fiction furnishings of Solaris, as provided by Lem, as a vehicle for his vision. Significantly, Lem’s novel is set exclusively on the space station; the action of the film is principally (if misleadingly) set there only so that Tarkovsky can ponder the significance of Kelvin’s country house and family.

Consequently, in place of interstellar space travel, we get very slow pans past underwater plants swaying to drifting currents in the pond near this country house, and a lengthy hypnotic sequence that follows a car speeding along a freeway, through several long tunnels, and into a city as night falls. (The city itself is sufficiently anonymous that it could be almost anywhere–Los Angeles, Moscow, Tokyo, Berlin; there are no legible street signs.) Later in the film, inside the space station, the camera drifts endlessly across various details in a reproduction of Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow, which is hanging in a stateroom along with the three other Brueghel paintings that make up “The Four Seasons.”

None of these meditative moments is motivated conventionally in narrative terms, although the first two are linked to narrative moments: Kelvin is brooding by the pond where the underwater plants are swaying, and Burton is returning from the country to the city with Kelvin’s son in a driverless car. (The selective survey of the painting is “placed” retrospectively by a shot that occurs at the end from a home movie showing Kelvin’s child in the snow.) To say that these moments effectively “replace” interstellar travel in the film is to suggest that they provide poetic rather than narrative substitutes–moments of seemingly endless drift that suspend the film’s narrative flow. All of these camera movements mystically imply a continuous movement toward a revelation that never actually arrives–a kind of spiritual tease. As in Stalker, perhaps Tarkovsky’s greatest film–another work adapted from a science fiction novel that uses the genre’s come-on, the notion and the promise of infinity, only to frustrate this expectation with an insistence on man’s finitude and the poverty of the human imagination–the external journey of the plot, which we see, proves to be secondary to the inner journey of the characters, which we don’t see. Bits of electronic music figure effectively in Eduard Artemev’s score for Solaris, but the essential theme is Bach’s F Minor Choral Prelude.

Another level of ambiguity is introduced by the film’s periodic shifts between color and black and white. As in most of Tarkovsky’s other features (apart from Andrej Roublev, which shifts to color only in its epilogue), few of these switches can be accounted for by any consistent thematic, formal, or atmospheric strategy. A joke used to circulate in Russia that Tarkovsky shifted from color to black and white whenever he ran out of money, and other Russian directors have by their own admission occasionally shifted to black and white in mid-film when they ran out of color stock. In the case of Solaris, some of these transitions occur in the middle of individual shots, which rules out any consistent economic motivation. Whether the reasons behind them are conceptual or arbitrary, they have the overall effect of intensifying the private and esoteric aspects of Tarkovsky’s style–aspects that are clearly related to his spirituality.

To me at least, the notion of spirituality in film has always been more than a little suspect. Filmmakers as diverse as Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Leo McCarey, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, and Michael Snow are frequently praised for their allegedly “transcendental” styles though it seems more appropriate to value them for qualities that suggest the opposites of spirituality and transcendence: the brute materiality of the worlds of Mizoguchi and Renoir, the physicality of McCarey and Ozu, the carnality in Bresson and Dreyer, the skepticism of Rossellini, the relentless mechanisms of Snow. If “pure” transcendence is what one is after, I’m afraid that even the more bogus spirituality of Disney, De Mille, and Spielberg may come closer to the mark.

I’m not trying to argue that a filmmaker’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to his or her art, but it does seem to me that none of the best filmmakers requires religious beliefs in order to be understood or appreciated. Bresson’s Jansenism may play some role in the selection and shaping of his plots, but divine providence is evident in neither the sounds nor the images of Au hasard Balthazar, and both Lancelot du lac and L’argent can easily be read as atheistic. Conversely, Dreyer’s Ordet and Rossellini’s Strangers (Viaggio in Italia) may both conclude with religious miracles, but this doesn’t mean that either Dreyer or Rossellini necessarily believes in them as religious miracles; both filmmakers, in fact, have made statements that suggest the contrary (and Dreyer, as we now know from Maurice Drouzy’s biography and other evidence, was not especially religious). John Huston’s remarkably precise film adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood is the work of a believer “translated” by a nonbeliever, and there is nothing in the film that suggests any obvious sort of betrayal.

But when we come to a spiritual filmmaker like Tarkovsky, the question of acceptance or rejection becomes a bit more complicated. I have to confess that, in his thinking about spiritual and holy matters, Tarkovsky often strikes me as pretentious, egocentric, and downright offensive; his sexual politics are Neanderthal (especially in Nostalghia and The Sacrifice), and his view of piety is generally neither attractive nor inspiring. Yet because he is a passionate, critical thinker about the world we live in and a poetic filmmaker whose images and sounds have the ring of truth, I find it impossible to dismiss him. Even when his films irritate or infuriate me, they teach me something in spite of my objections.

Several years ago, in American Film, critic J. Hoberman offered an intriguing three-way comparison of Tarkovsky, Stan Brakhage, and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg as conservative avant-gardists: “All are seers who see their art–and all of Art–as a quasi-religious calling; all three tend toward the solipsistic, invoking their parents, mates, and offspring as talismanic elements in their films. All three are natural surrealists, seemingly innocent of official surrealism’s radical social program. All three privilege childhood innocence . . . and all three are militantly provincial. Tarkovsky is as hopelessly Russian as Syberberg is terminally German and Brakhage totally American.”

Hoberman’s comparison is instructive, but I’d like to suggest for consideration another parallel figure whose formal originality and problematic ideology are equally relevant: David Lynch. This is not to suggest that the ideologies of Lynch and Tarkovsky are in any way equivalents: if Solaris can be considered a “humanistic” response to 2001, there is certainly nothing humanistic in the same way or to the same degree about Eraserhead, Dune, Blue Velvet, or even The Elephant Man. Yet virtually all of the attributes assigned by Hoberman to his trio–to which one might add the equally salient trait of male chauvinism–apply to Lynch as well.

I’m not claiming that Tarkovsky’s films “transcend” their sexism or their arrogance; these qualities remain, along with the films’ beauties and genuine profundities, and no sort of theory can shake them loose. But they are serious in a way and to a degree that is rare in contemporary movies, and their shortcomings are never a matter of aesthetic compromise or philosophical floundering–both of which can be found in some of the commercial features of Lynch, for instance.

It might be added that misogyny plays a less pronounced role in Solaris than in some of Tarkovsky’s other features, in part because of the strength and impact of Natalya Bondarchuk’s remarkably nuanced performance as Hari. Kelvin’s conscience may be the film’s subject, but it is Hari’s character that provides the film with its own conscience; next to her, all the male astronauts register as so many blocks of wood–even (or perhaps especially) when they are engaged in heated philosophical discussions, which is often.

Like HAL, the computer in 2001, Hari doesn’t qualify as “human” to the same degree as the other characters, but this doesn’t prevent her repeated deaths and resurrections from being highly affecting–tragic, disturbing, appalling–much as HAL’s death in 2001 winds up moving one more than any of the human deaths in that film. Hari may be, like HAL, nothing more than a human projection that has gained a certain lonely autonomy; but like HAL, she winds up providing us with a powerful lesson about what it means to be human, and what it means to die.