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A Bluffer’s Guide to Bela Tarr

From the Chicago Reader (May 25, 1990). This is also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. — J.R.

ALMANAC OF FALL

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Bela Tarr

With Hedi Temessy, Erika Bodnar, Miklos B. Szekely, Pal Hetenyi, and Janos Derzsi.

1. Problems

One reason that Eastern European films often don’t get the attention they deserve in the West is that we lack the cultural and historical contexts for them. If Eastern Europe’s recent social and political upheavals took most of the world by surprise, this was because most of us have been denied the opportunity to see the continuity behind them: they seemed to spring out of nowhere. The best Eastern European films tend to catch us off guard in the same way, and for similar reasons.

My own knowledge of Hungarian cinema is spotty at best, despite the fact that, according to David Cook in A History of Narrative Film, the Hungarians “seem to have identified film as an art form before any other nationality in the world, including the French.” (One of the first major film theorists, Bela Balazs, was Hungarian, and a contemporary film studio in Budapest is named after him.) Among the pioneers were Mihaly Kertesz and Endre Toth, who emigrated to the U.S. and became known as Michael Curtiz and André de Toth. Paul Fejos (1897-1963) was one of the great filmmakers of the late silent and early sound periods, a shamefully neglected figure who made films all over the world — as a Hollywood director (Lonesome, The Last Performance, Broadway), as a restless European independent (Fantomas, Sonnenstrahl), and finally as an anthropologist in Madagascar, the East Indies, Siam (A Handful of Rice), and Peru. Yet only one of his Hungarian films, Tavaszi Zapor (1932), appears to have survived, and it can be seen only in Europe, although it is one of the supreme masterpieces of world cinema.

Otherwise, I have seen several pictures by Miklos Jancso (a major figure in the 60s and 70s for such films as The Red and the White and Red Psalm, but someone whose films are no longer distributed in the U.S.), and the odd film or two by Istvan Szabo (Confidence), Marta Meszaros (Nine Months), Gyula Gazdag (A Hungarian Fairy Tale), the team of Istvan Darday and Gyorgyu Szalai (The Documentator), and others.

Last year, I was bowled over by my first encounter with Bela Tarr when I saw Damnation (1987), his fifth feature. And now that I’ve seen Almanac of Fall (1984), his fourth (showing this week at Facets Multimedia Center), I want to see his earlier features — Family Nest (1977), The Outsider (1980), and The Prefab People (1982). The fact that I lack a comprehensive Hungarian context in which to situate these films doesn’t create any serious obstacles to the great deal of pleasure Tarr’s movies provide. But this lack of expertise does usher in a whole set of potential problems when it comes to writing about Tarr’s work, and if I’m breaking with conventional critical etiquette in admitting to this anxiety here, it’s only because I think a related form of anxiety dissuades a good many viewers from seeing films as exciting as Damnation and Almanac of Fall. I believe that these problems are less serious than we tend to make them out to be; rather than pretend that they don’t exist, it seems more honest and useful to acknowledge them — in the process of showing how and why they don’t matter much.

Three problems should be broached right away: (1) I have no idea what the title Almanac of Fall means, or how it relates to the film; (2) I no longer remember the film’s opening quote from Alexander Pushkin, the relevance of which was also unclear; and (3) I’m not sure I understood all the dialogue, because some of the subtitles here (and in Damnation) are grammatically and/or typographically slipshod. All three problems have to do with linguistic uncertainty. The fact that I’ve searched the indexes of Cahiers du       Cinéma and Sight and Sound in vain for any references to Tarr’s work creates an additional layer of uncertainty, although one that is surely connected to the linguistic and cultural uncertainties of French and English film critics confronting the same work, many of whom would rather not see or write about films over which they feel no mastery.

The one piece of data I have at my disposal about Bela Tarr is an entry in a Hungarian film directory — an entry worth quoting for the information it imparts, though it raises some of the same linguistic and cultural uncertainties cited above. After telling us that Tarr was born in 1955, the entry goes on to say, “He started making amateur films at the age of 16. In the meantime he was a laborer, the caretaker at a House for Culture and Recreation, and a free-lance intellectual. It was through his activities as an amateur film maker that he came into contact with the Bela Balazs Studio of which he became a member and that is where he made Family Nest for which he won the Grand Prix (shared) at the Mannheim Festival. Afterwards, in 1977, he became a student at the Academy for Theatre and Film Art. It was while he was still a student that he was given an opportunity to make his next film The Outsider which was also made with the methods of the ‘Budapest School’ as was his first film. He graduated in 1981 and made his film The Prefab People where the lead roles were played by film actors and actresses but the method was a repetition of his previous films.”

Apart from its awkward and vague English, this entry raises such questions as: What is a House for Culture and Recreation? What is a free-lance intellectual? What is the Budapest School, and what are its methods? And if the lead roles of his third feature were played by “film actors and actresses,” who played the lead roles in the first two? (We may deduce that Tarr went from using nonprofessional actors to professionals, but can we be absolutely sure?)

2. Solutions

The plot and characters of Almanac of Fall are crystal clear. All of the action takes place in the roomy apartment of Hedi (Hedi Temessy), an elderly woman who lives with her son Janos (Janos Derzsi) and her nurse Anna (Erika Bodnar). A recent addition to the household is Miklos (Miklos B. Szekely), Anna’s lover; another recent addition is Pal (Pal Hetenyi), Janos’s former and now unemployed schoolmaster, who moves in at Janos’s insistence.

The main issue for all five characters is money, which Hedi has and the other four characters want. The relations between them are often edgy and quarrelsome and at times even violent, although at the outset, Anna gets along quite well with Hedi, serving as a friend as well as a nurse. The action proceeds mainly through a series of dialogues between two characters at a time, in or between various rooms, during which they either form temporary alliances or engage in conflicts: Anna speaks to Miklos in their bedroom, Hedi and Janos quarrel about money in the living room, Anna in the kitchen addresses Hedi in the bathroom, and so on.

Over the course of the film, Anna sleeps with all three men, and Pal, desperate to pay back a loan, steals and pawns Hedi’s gold bracelet, an act that eventually unites the other four characters against him. Most of the time, each character seems to be acting on his or her own behalf, conspiring against the others; the emotional climate is Strindbergian, reflecting a continual series of power struggles, and it suggests at times the films of John Cassavetes in its intensity. The amount of time that passes over the course of the film is somewhat ambiguous; scenes usually follow one another abruptly, without much sense of how much time has passed between them.

The writing and acting are sufficiently controlled and effective to give this story a strong dramatic appeal, but what gives the film its greatest interest is Tarr’s elaborately choreographed mise en scène: he treats every scene as an individually shaped and sculpted set piece. This is also the case in Damnation, where the plot is much more minimal (a recluse in love with a singer gets her husband involved in a smuggling scheme so that he can spend time with her), and the mise en scène is more systematically blocked out and structured in lengthy takes. The two films are quite different in other respects. Damnation is in black and white and steeped in gloomy atmospherics (in exterior shots rain, fog, mud, and stray dogs, and in interiors lots of murk and decay). Almanac of Fall is in color and has the dramatic economy of a tightly scripted play. But the two films have one striking thing in common: the story and the mise en scène are constructed in counterpoint to one another, like the separate melodic lines in a fugue.

In Damnation, this sometimes has the effect of making the story seem an afterthought, or at least a secondary element. A very slow camera movement proceeds through a given setting for no apparent reason apart from conjuring up a mood and creating a powerful sensation of formal suspense, similar to the look and effect of such camera movements in Tarkovsky films like Solaris and Stalker; then, toward the end of the sequence, something will appear in the shot or on the sound track that will retroactively connect this scene with the preceding story. The mise en scène in Almanac of Fall, by contrast, is rarely used to suspend our perception of the plot; but it frequently has the effect of following a distinct agenda of its own. Another way of describing this process would be to say that in conventional movies, the action usually represents a precise congruence between what the characters do and what the camera does; in Damnation and Almanac of Fall, where the congruence is not precise, the “action” consists of what the characters and the camera do in relation to one another — creating a set of shifting power relationships every bit as intricate as the shifting power relationships between the characters.

One of the most beautiful aspects of Tarr’s mise en scène is a recurring lighting scheme: most areas in a given shot are divided between blue gray and orange red, isolating the characters from one another in the process. There doesn’t appear to be anything systematic or programmatic about the color coding of various characters and spaces; it differs from scene to scene (Bela Tarr is much more of an artist than Peter Greenaway), and its use is much too varied and expressive to register as a simple manneristic device. (Although the lighting is usually plotted in relation to the actors, the division of colors isn’t absolute; a character bathed in blue light might be outlined in orange, for instance.)

Some of the unorthodox camera angles, like those of Raul Ruiz, provide disturbingly uncanny and nonhuman vantage points on the action: in some scenes in the bathroom, the camera peers down at the characters from a point somewhere near the ceiling, and in one startling and violent scene in the kitchen, the wide-angle camera peers up at them through a transparent floor. (Because the camera is some distance below the floor, the characters seem to be floating eerily in midair, like astronauts frozen in free-fall.) More often, the camera frames the actors at eye level from a certain distance while moving slowly past or around them — glimpsing them from outside the apartment through a succession of windows, or gliding between them so that their relationships to each other and to the frame are in continual flux. Reflections in mirrors and in other kinds of glass are often ingeniously incorporated; a dialogue between Janos and Miklos is framed in such a way that, thanks to double reflections, they appear to be simultaneously facing and looking away from each other, so that we get the equivalent of both an angle and its reverse angle within the same shot.

Some of the elaborate staging helps alert us to the characters’ hidden agendas and duplicitous motives, almost as if the camera were whispering to us about the scene, adding to the overall paranoid and conspiratorial atmosphere. But at other times this mise en scène seems to express a certain detachment toward the characters that borders on contempt or indifference — it pursues a distracted path of its own that has little to do with them. This is especially true in the final sequence, when the camera, moving around a festive banquet to the strains of a Hungarian version of “Que sera, sera,” is only intermittently attentive to what the characters are doing.

Here, as in Damnation, Tarr’s approach ultimately becomes a set of strategies for creating or locating various kinds of movement within stasis, and freedom within confinement. Should his approach be read in political and allegorical terms, as a direct or indirect statement about the rigidity of life under Hungarian communism? Certainly it can be read that way — a veritable cottage industry has grown up out of interpreting the elaborate camera movements in Jancso’s films in an analogous fashion. But applying this interpretation to Damnation and Almanac of Fall as a literal skeleton key to their meanings seems both facile and needlessly simplistic. It’s part of these films’ beauty and fascination that they don’t have to be read this way in order for them to breathe, function, and speak to us. (All American films are about America — and a strict ideological reading might say that they’re all about capitalism, too — but it’s surely reductive to limit the range of their meanings to this notion.) With or without the Hungarian context, Almanac of Fall is a riveting experience.

Longtime Companion

Thankfully, the first commercial feature about AIDS doesn’t follow the obscene Reagan-Bush approach–saving all its tears for children, with the unmistakable implication that other AIDS victims don’t count. It follows a group of adult friends and acquaintances, including a few who work for television, who spend their vacations on Fire Island and who are all struck directly or indirectly by AIDS. Though it contains some useful information, this is not really a preachy film–it is simply a very human and compassionate one about a tragedy that affects us all. Written by Craig Lucas (author of the recent play Prelude to a Kiss) and directed by Norman Rene. With a good cast that includes Stephen Caffrey, Patrick Cassidy, Brian Cousins, Bruce Davison, John Dossett, Mark Lamos, Dermot Mulroney, Mary-Louise Parker, Michael Schoeffling, and Campbell Scott. (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, May 25 through 31)

The Life and File of an Anarchist Filmmaker

From the Chicago Reader (May 18, 1990). — J.R.

MR. HOOVER AND I

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Emile de Antonio.

1. “Born Pennsylvania U.S.A., in intellectual surroundings and coal mines. Went to Harvard. Became, and still is, a Marxist, without party or leader. Started making films at age of 40 after having avoided films most of his life. Favorite film is L’age d’or.” Emile de Antonio’s self-description was written around 1977 for a poll organized by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium and eventually published in book form as The Most Important and Misappreciated American Films. Under the category of most important American films, de Antonio listed, in order, The Birth of a Nation, It’s a Gift, A Night at the Opera, The Cure, The Immigrant, One A.M., The Kid, Big Business, The Navigator, and Foolish Wives, and added the following comment:

“Most American films were and are like Fords. They are made on assembly lines. John Ford is not an artist any more than Jerry Ford is a statesman. Harry Cohn said it all and the Capras jumped.

“Comedy was spared all that. Irreverence was possible because the booboisie didn’t know it was being laughed at.

“American films have been seen too often. I rarely go to the movies.”

Under the category of misappreciated American films, de Antonio listed five of his own: Point of Order (1963), In the Year of the Pig (1968), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), Rush to Judgment (1967), and Painters Painting (1973).

2. Before seeing Mr. Hoover and I (1989), my attitude toward the work of Emile de Antonio was always a bit confused and uncertain. I admired his first film, Point of Order — a remarkable reorganization and distillation of 188 hours of kinescopes of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings into about 90 minutes that reinvented the meaning of Joseph McCarthy for subsequent generations. But my spotty sense of de Antonio’s later work led me to view him as a courageous radical and intellectual who was more a polemicist and invaluable 60s gadfly than an artist. I knew that some of my non-American friends whose politics and aesthetics I highly respected regarded him as the greatest and noblest living American documentary filmmaker, but having seen only Point of Order, Millhouse, and Underground (directed with Haskell Wexler, 1975), I found it difficult to see precisely what they meant. Millhouse had the nerve to shower Nixon with abuse and scorn when he was at the height of his power as president — de Antonio was the only filmmaker on Nixon’s notorious “enemies” list — and Underground performed the valuable and audacious service of interviewing the Weather Underground at a time when they were the FBI’s most sought-after radical fugitives. But both of these films seemed more meaningful as potent contemporary gestures than as lasting works of art that genuinely explored the possibilities of the medium. Having lived abroad for almost eight years, I’d managed to miss such films as In the Year of the Pig, America Is Hard to See (1969), and Painters Painting, and after I returned, I hadn’t made it to In the King of Prussia (1982) either.

Seeing the fascinating and hugely entertaining Mr. Hoover and I at the Toronto film festival last fall, about three months before de Antonio died of a heart attack at age 70, made me seriously rethink my ideas about him. I’ve seen the film several times more recently, and encountered for the first time on tape some of the de Antonio films I had missed. In the Year of the Pig is the first and best of the major documentaries about Vietnam, infinitely superior to the better known Hearts and Minds – and perhaps the only one that’s truly about Vietnam, not this country’s national ego. I also saw the (to me) disappointing and relatively conventional Painters Painting. I can’t pretend to assess his career as a whole here because I’m still discovering or rediscovering parts of it, but I can at least say that Mr. Hoover and I, a singular and remarkable testament, has made me realize the importance of forming this acquaintance.

3. The issue for me in de Antonio’s work has never been intelligence — his films are nothing if not intelligent — but filmic intelligence. The editing of Point of Order certainly has this filmic intelligence, and so does the powerful beginning of In the Year of the Pig, but in both instances it was a matter of creatively manipulating archival material. When it comes to shooting material of his own, de Antonio seems to regard the camera as a mechanism for recording talking heads rather than as an expressive tool in its own right; that is, his intelligence figures mainly in his decisions on what to shoot and how to edit, not in how to shoot.

Mr. Hoover and I seizes on the talking-head principle even more nakedly and relentlessly than the other films, and because the talking head in this case is mainly de Antonio himself, one might assume this to be his least “cinematic” movie. In fact, because of the way that it’s conceived and executed — shot, spoken, and edited — it turns out to be his most cinematic movie, a film that calls attention to its own construction as a film in a way and to a degree that its predecessors do not. It is a work that declares de Antonio’s allegiance to the minimalism of his friends in the New York art world, such as John Cage and Andy Warhol, and as in their best work, it doesn’t adopt minimalism merely as an aesthetic pose but as a functional means to achieve clarity.

4. Back in the mid-60s, Susan Sontag wrote in praise of Point of Order that it “aestheticized a weighty public event.” Mr. Hoover and I aestheticizes a weighty private event — de Antonio encountering the tens of thousands of pages devoted to him in his FBI file. He aestheticizes it by juxtaposing the clarity of minimalism with the internal and external obfuscation practiced by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI bureaucracy. The film emerges as an autobiography that dialectically and persuasively defines itself as a sane countertext to the demented biography of de Antonio compiled by the FBI. (One hilarious example among many: Around the time that he was applying to flying school, de Antonio had lunch with a respectable friend who asked him, “Now, De, what are you really going to do when you grow up?” “I think I’d like to be an eggplant,” he replied, and roughly three decades later, he came across this statement solemnly recorded in his FBI dossier.)

Point of Order compelled us to study the aesthetic strategies of both Joseph McCarthy and his opponents; Mr. Hoover and I foregrounds the aesthetic strategies of Hoover and de Antonio. Both films, in the final analysis, teach us how to reach political conclusions in the act of carrying out our criticism of art.

5. For all its off-the-cuff appearance, Mr. Hoover and I had an unusually long gestation period. In an interview with Alan Rosenthal originally published in 1978, de Antonio alludes to “a fictional film I want to do about my own life. It began as an obsession and I started thinking about it before we did the Weather film [Underground]. It began with my suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act.” De Antonio then describes the experience of receiving the first installment, “almost 300 pages of documents collected by the FBI on my life up to my 24th year.” The file was “initiated by my applying for flying school and a commission” and went all the way back to the year he went away to prep school at the age of 12. De Antonio added that he was planning to tell this story “very dispassionately,” and that he was “doing it as a fiction because of the libel laws.”

Obviously the project went through significant changes over the next 15 years or so, including the elimination of a fictional form, but the root idea — de Antonio receiving his own FBI file — remained the same. In its final form, the film contains eight different kinds of documentary material:

(1 and 2) De Antonio addressing the camera on what appear to be two separate occasions in a neutral urban interior, probably his own New York apartment.

(3) De Antonio addressing a college audience and responding to questions after a screening of Point of Order; some references to the Iran-contra hearings make it clear that the date is 1987 or later.

(4) De Antonio asking John Cage about indeterminacy as an aesthetic concept and method in a kitchen while Cage is preparing bread. This material, one should note, was shot not by de Antonio but by the Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann (Comic Book Confidential, Imagine the Sound), and is an outtake from Mann’s 1985 documentary Poetry in Motion.

(5) De Antonio chatting with his wife at home while she gives him a haircut.

(6) A brief clip of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon at a ceremony in which Hoover presents President Nixon with a badge making him an honorary member of the FBI; joking allusions are made to Nixon’s unsuccessful job application to the FBI in 1937.

(7) Still photographs of Hoover.

(8) Shots of various portions of FBI documents.

The first through fifth types are autonomous blocks of material intercut with one another throughout the film. The sixth, the only archival footage, appears as a separate chunk somewhere in the middle (followed by a commentary from de Antonio). And the seventh and eighth are used sparingly to illustrate and punctuate de Antonio’s commentary (a photograph of Hoover as a child, however, is the first thing we see in the film).

Isolating these separate blocks is important because a central part of the film’s method is to make us aware of their distinctness from one another. At the same time, de Antonio freely cuts both within and between them in order to follow a single line of argument — a line that begins with the subject of himself and Hoover and then branches out to explore separate facets of each — and he doesn’t always respect the chronological progression of each sequence. Very long takes predominate at the beginning of the film; by the end, the cuts have become much more frequent.

6. After the title, de Antonio, in a sweater and jacket, says to the camera, “If I were asked to choose a villain from the history of this country, it would not be Benedict Arnold, nor would it be communist conspirators, nor would it be spies for the Nazis — because, except for Arnold, most of these people were fairly impotent, did not have power to do anything. But Hoover, because he had power for such a long period of time, because it was wantonly exercised, because it was exercised with spite, without a touch of judgment or any sense of justice, because it was willful and capricious, because it made a mockery of our Constitution . . .” His sentence is broken off by a jump cut, followed by de Antonio saying, “Don’t cut. We’ve cut by saying that, of course. We’re running?” An offscreen voice says “Yeah,” and de Antonio starts a new sentence about Hoover.

A bit later we get another disruptive cut, to John Cage putting corn oil and then bread in a pan while he describes the various things he is doing. Only toward the end of this sequence does the camera move around to reveal that Cage is addressing de Antonio on the other side of the counter, and only after that does de Antonio bring up the fact that they’re supposed to be talking about indeterminacy — at which point there is a cut back to de Antonio in his jacket and sweater talking about Hoover.

A little further on, after de Antonio, in the college auditorium, has been comparing the Army-McCarthy hearings to the Iran-contra hearings, there is a cut to de Antonio saying, while we hear the mechanical sound of the camera, “This film, although it probably won’t be seen by many people, is an attempt at subversion. This film is a film about position. I’m glad we’re hearing the sound. Why should the process of any art not be included in whatever that art is?”

All three of these disruptive cuts function as slight pivots and digressions in the discussion rather than as irrelevant interruptions. In the first and third, we’re alerted to the filmmaking process, a modernist gesture that prepares us in turn for the introduction to Cage, who like Warhol can be described as one of the last of the modernists. (Minimalism — from Beckett to Cage and Warhol — can be described as the last gasp of modernism, before postmodernism took over.)

7. The spectacle of Cage preparing bread, which constitutes the second apparent interruption, eventually becomes part of the discussion about the uses of indeterminacy in art, a discussion that’s pursued by Cage and de Antonio in later portions of the same kitchen dialogue. Cage’s cooking functions not merely as a counterpoint to the conversation but, at certain points, as an unwitting illustration of the nature of artistic choices, Cage’s as well as de Antonio’s. For example, when Cage is carefully sweeping cracked wheat off the counter into a container while discussing indeterminacy, he sprinkles a few leftover bits over the bread he has just prepared.

De Antonio does not employ in Mr. Hoover and I the chance operations used by Cage in determining certain aspects of composition and performance — as de Antonio himself emphatically pointed out to me and others when he discussed the film at various venues last fall. He never said how such operations did relate to what he was doing. Cage’s meaning and function in the film are both mysterious and subtle, but I would argue that they are not simply ineffable. Cage’s role as friend and educator to de Antonio is recounted in one of de Antonio’s monologues, along with a beautiful Zen koan that Cage told him, circa 1953. De Antonio says this koan was as important to him as anything he learned from Marx, Hobbes, Plato, or Schopenhauer, but I won’t attempt to repeat it here — de Antonio does a much better job of it than I possibly could. Still, I think it has as much bearing on the structure and meaning of the film as Cage’s work in composition and performance had.

Broadly speaking, Cage’s artistic principles are founded on the notion of removing the artist’s volition at certain stages and allowing a sort of dialogue with “nature” or “the universe” or “fate” that is brought about through the introduction of chance operations. (At one point in the discussion, while talking about intervals, Cage describes his use of astronomical maps in relating musical notes to stars; it might be added that this film does make frequent use of the notion of intervals, if not indeterminacy.) The only way in which de Antonio might be said to duplicate or imitate Cage’s methods is his use of Ron Mann’s footage.

But it might also be argued that life itself exercised this indeterminacy over de Antonio’s own rather haphazard career — a career that can be regarded as itself an intricate struggle between chance and control. Before he became a filmmaker, de Antonio worked at various times as a longshoreman, barge captain, peddler, war surplus broker, book editor, and college philosophy teacher. As a political activist concerned with injustice, he had to mold his life and career in relation to the events, people, and issues that he encountered and cared about — which is another way of saying that this political artist worked exclusively with “found” material, whether it was Joseph McCarthy, the Kennedy assassination, various forms of leftist dissent, New York painters, Nixon, Hoover, or in the final analysis — and shortly before his death — himself. “I am the ultimate document,” de Antonio says in the film on two separate occasions, and chance as well as control have clearly played major roles in Hoover’s and his own compilations.

Cage, of course, is not the only exemplary figure cited by de Antonio, nor is his koan the only text, and it becomes much easier to grasp his significance in the film if one sees it as part of a larger mosaic or constellation. De Antonio also cites as models Pull My Daisy (a ground-breaking American independent short) and Cinda Firestone’s Attica, reads a powerful and influential statement by Jean-Paul Sartre (about man as an absolute value in his own time) that he first encountered in 1945, quotes Karl Jaspers on the subject of censorship (”Anything can be said as long as it signifies nothing”), and discusses the FBI’s enraged responses to Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys.

De Antonio talks about Hoover’s victims — Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Jean Seberg, and John Dillinger (as well as FBI agent Purvis, who gunned Dillinger down). He discusses Hoover’s cohorts — Clyde Colson, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Nixon — and the fact that Cinda Firestone had fond personal memories of Hoover as a little girl. Also figuring in the discussion are all of his own major films and two media concoctions controlled by Hoover — his book Masters of Deceit, ghostwritten by many hands at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars, and a TV show called The F.B.I., which ran for nine years (de Antonio says 14) and which Hoover helped to produce.

8. “The film is not an attack on McCarthy,” de Antonio said of Point of Order in his 1978 interview with Rosenthal. “The film is an attack on the American government. My feeling is that if you look at the film carefully, Welch comes off as badly as McCarthy. He comes off as a rather brilliant, sinister, clever lawyer who used McCarthy’s techniques to destroy McCarthy. . . . Don’t misunderstand me. I wanted McCarthy gored to death but I also wanted the whole system to be exposed, and the only people who saw that were a few Marxists.”

By the same token, Mr. Hoover and I is not merely an attack on Hoover’s FBI but a statement of independence from all bureaucracies, governmental and otherwise. (De Antonio also gets in some licks against the CIA. In News From Afar, a fascinating short film made by Shu Lea Cheang just before de Antonio’s death, he seriously proposes — in the course of discussing recent events in eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Central America — that Bush abolish the CIA: “We don’t need the CIA any more than we need wings to fly.”)

A self-described anarchist, de Antonio believed most of all in the value of plain talk — in trusting his viewers not only to think, but to think for themselves. That is why he insisted on doing without narration in Point of Order — there was no need to explain what was happening and what the film’s relationship was to these events — and why he followed the same principle in In the Year of the Pig. Paradoxically, Mr. Hoover and I could be described from a certain point of view as consisting of little but narration — de Antonio telling us what he thinks. Yet the film is brave and lucid enough to be saying a lot more than what de Antonio is saying, and even doing more than he is doing. Its dialectical construction and de Antonio’s treatment of his own discourse as artistic “material” rather than as simple dogma liberate us as spectators, and compel us to engage with the film as we would with another person in a dialogue; the subject is not merely Hoover and de Antonio, but what they represent in relation to ourselves.

This is only one of the ways in which Mr. Hoover and I can be profitably compared to Roger and Me, a film that elicits a good deal less thought and reflection. (Significantly, de Antonio originally planned to call his film Mr. Hoover and Me, until he learned about the title that Michael Moore was giving to his film — a film, incidentally, of which he was highly critical.) It’s a pity that de Antonio’s film hasn’t been picked up by a major studio, or reviewed in Time or Newsweek or on any of the network TV shows, as Moore’s was, and that most people in this country will never even hear about it, much less see it. But at the same time, it isn’t very surprising, because the kind of integrity and power that de Antonio had as a filmmaker have almost nothing to do with the qualities that the media routinely reward. (Maybe if he’d lived another 20 years, he would have been inadvertently turned into an institution, as I.F. Stone was.) Fortunately, Mr. Hoover and I is as exciting and as lasting a legacy as anyone could wish; and it is there to be seen and learned from — for anyone who wants to encounter it.

15th Annual Festival of Illinois Film and Video

Prizewinning film and video shorts in four categories–experimental, animation, documentary, narrative. Because I was one of the five judges in this year’s competition, I’ve seen them all, and they’re certainly a far ranging bunch. The first-prize winners are Francois Miron’s visually intoxicating What Ignites Me, Extinguishes Me (experimental), Ian Fowler’s intriguing In Passing (animation, although the film features live action as well), Thomas Almada’s moving and powerful Chicago House: A Community Together (the first AIDS documentary I’ve seen that dares to be positive and upbeat), and Josef Steiff’s highly original and evocative narrative film Borders. The honorable mentions include two narrative films (James Chia-Min Liu’s A Scent of Incense and Steiff’s Catching Fire), two documentaries (Peter Kuttner and Kartemquin Films’ talking-head video Power to the People about the Black Panthers, and Wing Ko’s totally different Surfaces, a lyrical piece about skateboarding), and Susan Anderson’s witty and cerebral experimental film Lusitania, which recalls the work of Werner Schroeter. (Music Box, Friday and Saturday, May 18 and 19)

Too Horrible [LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN]

From the Chicago Reader (May 11, 1990). — J.R.

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Uli Edel

Written by Desmond Nakano

With Stephen Lang, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Burt Young, Peter Dobson, Jerry Orbach, and Alexis Arquette.

After making the rounds of Europe late last year, this West German feature, an adaptation in English of Hubert Selby Jr.’s famous short-story collection of 1964, has finally reached our shores, and it proves to be at least as much of a mixed blessing as the book itself was a quarter of a century ago. Although shot on location in Brooklyn’s Red Hook district, adapted by an American (Desmond Nakano, who scripted Boulevard Nights about a decade ago), and featuring an all-American cast, this is very much a European picture in style and ambience, with more emphasis on mood and atmosphere than on plot and action.

Uli Edel, the director, whose best-known previous effort in the U.S. is Christiane F. (1980), and who has been interested in adapting this book since the early 70s, employs a somewhat distanced theatrical style in lighting, production design, and staging that registers a bit like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s did, though without the political irony that gave Fassbinder’s style its edge. The relative distance from which Edel views the action is welcome, in any case, because given the horrific nature of Selby’s universe, the film would be unbearable without it.

Back in the 60s, I read only one of the six stories in Selby’s book– “Tralala,” which is about a teenaged hooker and which occasioned a celebrated obscenity trial when the Provincetown Review published it in 1961 — and I was dissuaded from reading farther. As powerful as this story was, its sledgehammer aesthetics were more brutalizing than sensitizing, and while it had all the authenticity of a personally conducted tour of hell, it left me feeling bruised but not wiser. In comparison to, say, James T. Farrell’s heartbreaking short story “The Scarecrow,” which deals with a related subject, “Tralala” has the effect of a bludgeon.

Written in a vernacular, beat-influenced, run-on style — closer to Allen Ginsberg than to Jack Kerouac or William S. Burroughs, but personal enough to have a pace and rhythm of its own — “Tralala” relates the brutal career of a hooker named Tralala in a single unbroken paragraph. The story is a catalog of cruelties — cruelties that are initially inflicted by the heroine (who rolls drunk soldiers and seamen or sets them up to be rolled) and at the end are inflicted upon her. We know nothing about her family or her psychology (apart from her nihilistic avarice and her pride in her “big tits”), and, to Selby’s credit, there is no pseudomoralistic implication that her own eventual suffering represents comeuppance: the tone of moral ugliness and meaningless suffering remains pretty much the same throughout.

In one episode, for instance, Tralala knocks a soldier with a wounded leg unconscious. Angry and impatient that he has wanted to spend a whole hour talking to her, she pockets his cash and throws away his wallet. When he turns up later at the bar where he initially picked her up, begging for his ID card, she and a couple of hoods stuff his bloody handkerchief into his mouth and beat him to a pulp. “Before they left Tralala stomped on his face until both eyes were bleeding and his nose was split and broken and kicked him a few times in the balls”; when they later hear that he might go blind in one eye, they all enjoy a good laugh. About 15 pages later, in a single sentence that extends for about four pages, Tralala is gang-raped, tortured, mutilated, and possibly killed in a vacant lot; four of her acquaintances look at her broken body and roar with laughter.

I’m fully aware that Selby’s prose is by design and in principle a cry of rage and horror against such nastiness, but in practice it seems to come much closer to a masochistic celebration of it, which is not all that far off from what is branded simple fascism in the work of someone like Mickey Spillane. As critic Tony Tanner puts it, “The comparative absence of stylistic resistance to such hellish conditions makes Selby’s book rather demoralizing.”

Consequently, I have to confess that I’m more grateful than indignant that the filmmakers have decided to tone down the “Tralala” section considerably, even leavening it with some improbable sentimentality at the end, although it remains disturbing. (Whether its toned-down form makes any more sense is a separate question.)

Combining half a dozen stories with only a few overlaps in characters can’t have been a simple task, and while Nakano’s script isn’t completely coherent, it generally does a good job of unifying the material. What emerges are several distinct but parallel plot lines that merge occasionally. Though the time frame of the original stories stretches from World War II to the early or middle 50s, the film is set in 1952, and all the events take place within a relatively short period of time.

Apart from Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the other major characters include her pimp, Vinnie (Peter Dobson); a male drug addict named Georgette (Alexis Arquette) who is attracted to Vinnie; Harry Black (Stephen Lang), a shop steward with a wife and baby who becomes interested in a gold-digging homosexual during a steel strike; Boyce (Jerry Orbach), the union leader; Big Joe (Burt Young), one of the strikers; Big Joe’s pregnant daughter Donna (Ricki Lake) and his coworker Tommy (John Costelloe), who may have caused Donna’s pregnancy and who is persuaded to marry her; and to round out the circle, Big Joe’s son Spook (Cameron Johann), who has a schoolboy crush on Tralala.

The steel strike is the subject of the longest story in the book, “Strike,” and although Nakano has done a good job of connecting it with the other plot strands, he hasn’t managed to make the strike very meaningful in its own right. (We never get much sense of what issues are at stake or how they get resolved, so this portion of the film doesn’t have much focus.) Tralala has been made into a figure resembling Marilyn Monroe, and although Jennifer Jason Leigh does a decent enough job of playing her, the script doesn’t give her much to work with. (Her role as a Florida hooker in Miami Blues is a lot more substantial.) Similarly, Stephen Lang does a creditable job as Harry Black, and if the screenplay eventually pushes him into the pretentious role of a crucified Christ figure — after he sexually molests a 10-year-old boy, some of the neighborhood punks stomp him to smithereens, hang him on the crossbars behind a billboard, and beat him some more — this is a meaning that can be traced directly back to Selby’s original. (We’re spared, however, Harry’s overripe last words to himself in the story, which are not, “O God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” but “GOD . . . GOD . . . YOU SUCK COCK.”)

Some of what remains is grimy slum humor: Big Joe, unable to get into the bathroom to relieve himself, pisses out the window, and winds up splattering a baby; Donna’s water breaks while she’s being fitted with her wedding dress. But most of the rest is pure unalleviated horror, such as the moment when Georgette, stumbling out of a heroin stupor, is struck and killed by a speeding car. The only irony in this is a grim little detail in the casting, which seems to make a relevant observation about Last Exit to Brooklyn as a whole: the driver of the speeding car, who is horrified by what he has done, is played by Selby himself.