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 one of her most recent projects 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)

Hotel Monterey

This early experimental feature, slightly longer than an hour, by Chantal Akerman (1972), shot silently and brilliantly by Babette Mangolte, explores the corridors, lobby, elevators, and rooms of a cheap New York hotel. Occasionally the rooms’ solitary occupants are glimpsed, but this only increases the overall atmosphere of eerie isolation and quiet, and reveals perhaps more than any other Akerman film how central an influence Edward Hopper has had on her work. On the same program, two very early Akerman shorts: Saute ma ville! (1968) and Lachambre (1972). Saute ma ville!–Akerman’s first film, made when she was still a teenager–is a hilarious and appropriately claustrophobic forerunner of Jeanne Dielman, starring Akerman herself as a neurotic individual who creates apocalyptic havoc in her own kitchen. An illuminating and luminous program, not to be missed. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Monday through Thursday, January 15 through 18, 7:00, 281-4114)