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His Master’s Vice [WHITE DOG]

From the Chicago Reader (November 29, 1991). — J.R.

WHITE DOG **** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Samuel Fuller

Written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson

With Kristy McNichol, Paul Winfield, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, Lynne Moody, and Marshall Thompson.

The best American movie released so far this year, made by the greatest living American filmmaker, was actually made ten years ago, and so far its venues have been restricted to single theaters in New York and Chicago; but late is a lot better than never, and two cities are certainly better than none. Why it’s taken a decade for Samuel Fuller’s White Dog to reach us is not an easy question to answer; it was shown widely in Europe in the early 80s and well-received critically. For the past few years it has turned up sporadically on cable, principally the Lifetime channel, but it has never come out here on video. White Dog started out as an article by Romain Gary published in Life magazine, and was later expanded into a book. The accounts I’ve read describe the book as autobiographical, mainly about the author’s relationship with Jean Seberg. Gary and Seberg were living in Los Angeles when they found a “white” dog who had been trained to attack blacks; they tried without success to have the dog retrained, and eventually had to kill it. Gary’s book also deals with Seberg’s involvement with the Black Panthers and the FBI’s subsequent persecution of her, which eventually led to her suicide; Gary himself committed suicide some time afterward, and Fuller’s film is dedicated to him.

The rights to White Dog were purchased by Paramount in the mid-70s, and Roman Polanski briefly planned to make a film derived from it after Chinatown. But eventually Don Simpson, in charge of production at Paramount in the early 80s, inherited it; he put together a group of film projects that were designed to be made cheaply (the most commercially successful of which proved to be An Officer and a Gentleman), and White Dog was among them. The project went through several phases; at one point Top Gun’s Tony Scott was set to direct it, and at another it was planned as a vehicle for Jodie Foster. At least one of the various plans conceived of the film as a sensationalist venture, and when gossip about it leaked out the NAACP lodged a protest, believing — perhaps with some justification — that the film could foster racist violence by inspiring rednecks to train “white dogs.” That protest tarnished Fuller’s masterpiece when it finally came to be made, despite the fact that it remained unseen by its accusers and is anything but racist or incendiary.

When people over the years have alluded to the film as being “controversial,” they more than likely have been sharing and perpetrating this misunderstanding. When Jon Davison, the producer of Airplane!, was first assigned to the project, he reportedly didn’t want any part of it. Then he had the brilliant idea of assigning Fuller to the project. Fuller completely rewrote the script with Curtis Hanson, a friend of his who had already worked on one of the earliest drafts; apart from some of the characteristics of the dog Gary described and the white man who ran the animal training compound, all of the Gary book was jettisoned. Instead, the story focused on a white actress who finds the dog and a black animal trainer who tries to recondition him. After the film was completed, it was briefly test-marketed, tampered with a bit but not significantly altered by the studio, released overseas, and then essentially shelved. Not long afterward Fuller moved to Europe, where he has lived and worked ever since. The move was understandable considering the studio treatment accorded his last two American pictures: four-hour and two-hour cuts of The Big Red One (1980), his magnum opus about his World War II experiences, were both discarded in favor of a drastically reworked version that wound up pleasing no one (although it is full of extraordinary and beautiful moments even in this form), while White Dog was never released domestically at all. Since Fuller’s move to Paris, apart from writing several novels and appearing in several films, he has written and directed three more features and one short film — a Patricia Highsmith adaptation for French TV that I haven’t seen — none of which has opened in the U.S.

He is currently 79, and his chances of working again for an American studio are extremely slim, though he still harbors hopes that his original four-hour cut of The Big Red One might be restored, even if only for a French miniseries. In Paris he’s still a celebrity; many of his novels have appeared in translation (most recently The Big Red One, though it retains its English title) and his movies are regularly revived in theaters. In this country, very few people under 30 seem to know he exists, even though he’s as American as apple pie and the uncontested godfather of filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, and Peter Bogdanovich. (A few examples of his influence: Fuller collaborated on the story of Bogdanovich’s first film, Targets. He appears in Godard’s Pierrot le fou, Spielberg’s 1941, and three Wenders features. There’s a clip from his Pickup on South Street in Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, and extended hommages to other Fuller films in Godard’s Breathless and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.) Given his eclecticism, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll ever get an Oscar or an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award; in spite of his major importance, his name has never really registered in the American mainstream. As a novelist and screenwriter, he’s unabashedly pulpy, a street prole who writes in short, lurid sentences. On the other hand, he’s too full of didactic notions, most of them historical or political, to make it into the current postmodernist pantheon shared by writers like Jim Thompson. Bursting with goofy and exaggerated ideas, his pictures are frontal assaults of explosive conceptual energy that can rarely be rationalized on a naturalistic level. (His brilliant Shock Corridor, set in an insane asylum, tells us less than nothing about the mentally ill but practically everything about what’s wrong with America in 1963.)

A master at depicting violent action, Fuller has a particular flair with both close-ups and long takes, a formal brilliance he exhibited a full decade and a half before any American critic besides Manny Farber recognized the presence of such methods in either Fuller’s cheap genre pictures or anyone else’s. The brutish and loutish heroes of most of his pictures tend to be too unromantic to serve as identification figures, but they don’t fall into predictable antihero slots, either. (His films are seldom devoid of tenderness, but nearly all of it in his earlier pictures is accorded to children and other victims of adult corruptions.) After critics inaccurately typecast Fuller as a primitive cold warrior and red-baiter — mainly on the basis of the spy thriller Pickup on South Street (which incidentally won the Bronze Lion at the 1953 Venice film festival with the full support of Luchino Visconti, a communist who headed the jury) — they found it increasingly difficult to deal with or even recognize the radical social critiques of American life present in his work. Even in The Steel Helmet, the first Korean-war film, made three years before Pickup, the best ideological points are scored by a Korean communist who lectures a black American GI about segregation on buses and a Japanese American GI about the American concentration camps during World War II — two matters that no other American filmmaker was dealing with in 1950. The Korean communist may be a “villain,” but in contrast to the thuggish and racist American “hero,” who eventually goes completely haywire, he’s positively charismatic. Where Fuller differs most strikingly from his acolytes is that he lived the equivalent of two entire lives before he ever got around to making movies–one as a crime reporter and one as a much-decorated war hero. (He directed his first feature, I Shot Jesse James, in his mid-30s.) He has a lot to say about both subjects — about war in The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets, Hell and High Water, China Gate, Verboten!, Merrill’s Marauders, Shock Corridor, and The Big Red One, and about crime in Pickup on South Street, House of Bamboo, Underworld, U.S.A., and The Naked Kiss. But this list hardly exhausts the range of his street smarts. Forty Guns is one of the wildest westerns ever made, and Park Row is the giddiest celebration of American journalism after Citizen Kane. Fuller films as diverse as The Steel Helmet, Run of the Arrow, China Gate, The Crimson Kimono, Shock Corridor, and White Dog are arguably the most trenchant — and in some cases the most prescient — treatments of racism in the American cinema. Is it possible to remove hatred from the world? If racism is a form of conditioned hatred, is it possible to eradicate it through reconditioning? Does reconditioning itself entail a kind of violence that threatens sanity and emotional equilibrium? These are some of the questions addressed by White Dog, and while the conditioning and reconditioning in this case is done to a German shepherd, Fuller never lets us forget that it’s humans, not animals, who are at issue. As in the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine, the hero of Fuller’s parable may be a dog, but the subject is the human race. The nameless title hero of the film is a dog trained to attack blacks, and then retrained during the film to overcome this conditioning by a black man named Keys (Paul Winfield) who’s a professional animal trainer. The dog is a tragic scapegoat, neither racist nor antiracist in any human sense. He certainly inspires us to reflect on how conditioning can foster racism, but his own “racism” is purely man-made. We’re told how the conditioning of white dogs is usually carried out: a black wino or junkie is paid by the dog’s owner to beat the dog mercilessly and repeatedly as a puppy, and a proclivity for attacking blacks grows out of the resulting trauma.

Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol), a young actress who lives in the Hollywood Hills surviving on bit parts, accidentally injures the dog one night in her car, takes him to a vet, and then brings him home, hoping she can locate the owner. After no owner materializes and she gradually becomes aware that he’s an attack dog, she takes him to a compound called Noah’s Ark, where animals are trained for movies and commercials, in the hopes that the dog can be deprogrammed. While the co-owner of the compound (Burl Ives) sadly informs her “Can’t nobody unlearn a dog” and advises her to have him killed, Keys agrees to do his utmost to reverse the dog’s training, and the remainder of the film is devoted to the intense and heartbreaking drama of this process.

We see the dog’s original owner only once in the film — very briefly toward the end — and Fuller takes special care not to depict him as a stereotypical villain. To all appearances he’s a kindly grandfather, accompanied by his two young granddaughters, one of whom is played by Fuller’s own daughter. The point of making this figure look kindly certainly isn’t to excuse or forgive what he’s done — it wouldn’t occur to Fuller, an Old Testament moralist, to think that way, and the rage expressed by Julie toward this character is clearly Fuller’s own — but to give him a human rather than a mythological dimension. There are real people who train dogs to attack blacks, and Fuller wants to impress us with this fact. Unlike the usual cliched movie iconography, which insists that evil is committed by evil-looking characters — Robert De Niro in Cape Fear is the most recent example — Fuller suggests that it can be committed by kindly-looking grandfathers as well. Another example of Fuller’s boldness occurs in an earlier sequence, when the dog breaks loose from his cage in the compound and, shortly afterward, chases a black man into the sanctuary of a church and kills him; the camera then cuts to a nearby stained-glass window of Saint Francis of Assisi. (What follows reveals some idiotic studio tampering in the version being shown here, involving redubbed lines as well as cuts in footage. Keys and Julie both turn up at the church; Keys incapacitates the dog with a knockout drug and then enters the sanctuary. In the original, shown on cable, Keys says to Julie when he emerges, “He killed a man — in a church! . . . I’m sure it’s not the first black man he’s killed.” In the release version, this line has been redubbed as “He attacked a black man. He’ll live. He’ll live.” Apparently the notion of a black man dying inside a church was deemed “too controversial” for the American public.) Part of what makes White Dog so powerful is Fuller’s acute and sensitive camera strategy. Close-ups and subjective camera movements repeatedly place us in intimate proximity with the physical world as the dog perceives it, so that he’s not merely “a four-legged time bomb” (as Julie’s boyfriend puts it, in characteristic Fuller-ese) but also an animal whose perceptions we’re invited to share. (Although several dogs were used to portray the German shepherd, what emerges has the miraculous continuity of a single performance and character.) As critic Tom Milne wrote when the film opened in England, “What makes White Dog so moving, finally, is the naked simplicity, worthy of Griffith, with which Fuller deploys emotion: in the repeated close-ups of eyes as man and animal stare at each other in a futile attempt at mutual comprehension, in the sudden rushes of deep and playful affection, in the use of slow-motion to capture the mingled beauty and menace of the canine movements.” The plaintiveness of Ennio Morricone’s score and the measured musicality of Fuller’s tracks and cranes have the same simplicity and directness. We wind up feeling a lot for this dog because, very much like the donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar — a film that Fuller told me he has never seen — he becomes the embodiment of mankind’s mark on the world through everything he’s submitted to: the love as well as the hate, the tenderness as well as the brutality. He’s the litmus test for everything that’s best and worst about us, but in his ultimate innocence and helplessness he’s far from being the same as us. Like the children in Fuller’s war films, he’s the ultimate metaphor for the world we engender and nourish and ruin and try to redeem, a cause for some hope as well as despair. In Fuller’s marvelously fluid and tragically resonant story telling, the scope, limits, and consequences of our choices, our efforts, are indelibly clear.

Beauty and the Beast

Although there are times when the narrative seems excessively streamlined, this is the best Disney animated feature to come along in years (not that it even mildly threatens Jean Cocteau’s luminous version of the same fairy tale). Full of charm and humor, it seems to benefit from the benign influence of Pee-wee’s Playhouse (anthropomorphized household objects that manage the Beast’s castle like enlightened domestics), as well as the filmmakers’ fond memories of Busby Berkeley production numbers and the village night scenes in Frankenstein. The most fascinating buried textual references, however, seem to be to another recent Disney picture, Pretty Woman, which this cartoon trashes in very agreeable ways: both the heroine, Belle, and the handsome-prince version of the Beast seem modeled after Julia Roberts, while her suitor, the insufferably vain and boorish Gaston, a dead ringer for Richard Gere, hopes to convert Belle into a gratefully kept woman; the Beast, by contrast, is a ferocious spoiled brat who is eventually ennobled by love. (There’s also some pleasant propaganda on behalf of books–Belle is an avid reader–though it’s here that one wishes the movie had indulged in more flights of fancy.) Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton, and featuring the voices of Robby Benson, Paige O’Hara, Richard White, Angela Lansbury, and Jerry Orbach. (Ford City, Harlem-Cermak, Evanston, Hyde Park, Webster Place, Bricktown Square, Lincoln Village, Water Tower)

Bag of Tics [the 1991 CAPE FEAR]

From the Chicago Reader (November 22, 1991). — J.R.

CAPE FEAR

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Wesley Strick

With Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker, Illeana Douglas, Fred Dalton Thompson, and Robert Mitchum.

I have nothing against pornography when it’s good, clean sex, but I don’t enjoy watching a cat play with a mouse, and I got no pleasure from seeing Mr. Mitchum — huge, brawny and sweatily bare-chested — toy first with the frantically terrified ten-year-old daughter and then move on to conquer her shrinking, pleading mother. — Dwight Macdonald

Cape Fear is heavy on Spanish moss and sick behavior, a classic demonstration of the differences between rich and poor; to say nothing of the typical good ol’ Southern boy’s view of women. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of ‘em have very much good to say. You won’t forget this movie, especially if you’re a Yankee Jew. — Barry Gifford

These remarks come from reviews of the original Cape Fear. Macdonald’s was written the same year the movie came out, 1962, and Gifford’s a couple of decades later; together, they help to show how we’ve increasingly come to view nastiness as a form of high art. Macdonald’s reason for reviewing the movie was strictly polemical: New York state had just banned Shirley Clarke’s film version of The Connection because of its frequent use of the word “shit,” mainly as a synonym for heroin, and Macdonald wanted to know why Cape Fear could be seen “by anyone tall enough to shove his or her dollar through the ticket window” while The Connection couldn’t be seen even by adults in New York. Gifford, on the other hand, clearly regarded the film as some sort of noir classic, and went on to use the fictitious “Cape Fear” as a location in his novel Wild at Heart; David Lynch retained the name when he made his film version.

A few weeks ago I watched the original Cape Fear on video. (Or I tried to watch it; Universal Pictures had encoded the video with something called Copyguard, meant to prevent people from dubbing it, but it had the unfortunate effect of changing the lighting in every shot from dark to light and sometimes back again.) The movie is pretty awful in most respects — its script formulaic (James R. Webb, adapting John D. MacDonald’s novel The Executioners), its direction plodding (the lumbering J. Lee Thompson), its lead performances wooden (Gregory Peck, Polly Bergen, Lori Martin). But it’s exceptional in two respects: Robert Mitchum turns in a truly creepy performance as a psycho just out of prison (even Dwight Macdonald conceded how good he was), second only to his even creepier part as the homicidal preacher in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. And Bernard Herrmann created a taut and evocative score. Otherwise, pace Barry Gifford, this movie is entirely forgettable. As we all know, nastiness is a deeply revered quality in the American cinema of the 90s — consider all the raves conferred on Silence of the Lambs – but not even Mitchum at his near-best and Herrmann at his second-best could make me like this 60s version.

So why did Martin Scorsese, the most respected American film director alive, want to remake this dubious piece of schlock? For months we’ve been reading about how he wanted to do a genre piece, how he accepted it as a challenge, how he needed another hit (an excuse already used for The Color of Money), how Robert De Niro suggested the project. Or could it be that Scorsese was aiming to please some of his most enthusiastic admirers, the ones who reserve their highest praise for his nastiest movies — Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull? Such critics praise him not only for his nastiness but for his flashy technique, his arsenal of film-buff references, his religious obsessions, and his romantically doomed antisocial heroes — and I think Scorsese has given this critical cheering section exactly what it wants: an anthology of Scorsesean themes and stylistic quirks, perfect fodder for a term paper. All that’s missing, really, is a setting and reason for all these supposed virtues.

It’s not that Scorsese isn’t talented and important, but he needs a decent script for his talent to become important — as I think it does above all in The King of Comedy, where most of the “virtues” cited above are conspicuously absent or held in check, and to a lesser extent in the best parts of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (when his talents aren’t too burdened with crybaby narcissistic conceits). But thanks to rampant auteurism he’s been praised almost exclusively for his stylistic tics, while the stories (often by others anyway) that make them meaningful are usually ignored.

As a piece of cinema, Scorsese’s Cape Fear is superior to the original — at least if one discounts the importance of Mitchum’s original performance and excuses Scorsese’s self-conscious stylistic showboating. Shooting for the first time in a wide-screen ‘Scope format, Scorsese devises many fancy ways of filling his rectangular frames; he has hired Saul Bass to furnish the movie with some tasteful, arty credits, goes in and out of negative (both black-and-white and color), and even employs red and yellow fade-outs a couple of times. He’s worked out some jolting ways of cutting elliptically between scenes, which speeds his narrative along with admirable dispatch, and he’s gotten Elmer Bernstein to reorchestrate the original Herrmann score, which is nearly as effective as it was the first time around.

Scorsese and screenwriter Wesley Strick have altered the original story in a lot of potentially intriguing ways. But since none of the adult leads is either very believable or very interesting — and since most of the main story lines are every bit as stupid as they were in the original — none of this razzle-dazzle counts for much (and little of it, incidentally, razzles or dazzles much either). When the movie comes out on video, if standard practice is followed a third of Scorsese’s frames will be lost; and if Copyguard is used, the lighting may be sabotaged as well. We’ll still be stuck with what this movie has to say — which, all things considered, is precious little.

In both versions of Cape Fear, a sadistic ex-con (Mitchum/De Niro) turns up in a small North Carolina town where an attorney (Peck/Nick Nolte) partly responsible for the con’s long prison term lives with his wife (Bergen/Jessica Lange) and daughter (Martin/Juliette Lewis). In the original the daughter is 10; in the new version she’s 15 — definitely an improvement, because she’s the only character in the story with any believability or depth. (She also appears to be the sole character with whom Scorsese identifies — an only child alienated from her parents who’s both tantalized and frightened by the ex-con’s charisma.)

In both versions the villain was convicted many years ago of rape and assault; in the original the lawyer was an eyewitness, while in the Scorsese version he was the criminal’s attorney and deliberately suppressed a piece of evidence — the victim’s promiscuity — that probably would have gotten the criminal a shorter sentence. In both versions the villain is interested in taking revenge on the lawyer in as many ways as he can devise — poisoning the family dog and raping and brutalizing a woman friend and colleague for starters, then moving on to the wife and daughter — and the lawyer is increasingly prevented from defending himself and his household by various legalities, a situation exacerbated by the legal expertise the villain has picked up in prison.

The biggest change in the villain is that Scorsese and Strick have turned him into a Pentecostal Christian who has tattooed much of his body with religious symbols and quotes from Scripture. I can think of three possible inspirations for this, the last two of which seem in conflict with each other: (1) The Night of the Hunter, where Mitchum had the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles, (2) Scorsese’s own well-advertised obsession with religion, and (3) a personal joke on Scorsese’s part, ridiculing the fundamentalists who picketed his film The Last Temptation of Christ.

If these were Scorsese’s inspirations, the first two seem extravagantly misapplied and the third at the very least distracts from the material rather than enhances it. Mitchum’s performance in The Night of the Hunter is a daring, angular piece of expressionism — not only quite unlike his more naturalistic acting in Cape Fear but fundamentally incompatible with it. Scorsese has apparently directed De Niro to blend Mitchum’s naturalism in Cape Fear with his expressionism in The Night of the Hunter (at one climactic point, De Niro even speaks in tongues). But what he and De Niro come up with is the least convincing De Niro performance I’ve seen — a patchwork of isolated good and bad ideas, all of them extremely studied, that never add up to one solid human being. Admittedly Scorsese often uses the character more as an irrational metaphysical force — usually some version of the Devil — than as a comprehensible human being, but his ex-con generally ends up more silly than frightening.

Scorsese’s religious concerns seem equally misapplied because they fail to fit either the ex-con (as defined in the original film) or the story; they seem virtually painted on, rather than natural outgrowths of the material. When these concerns become most pronounced, in the film’s final sequence, they register as a pretentious form of nudging — strident signals of higher meanings that have been neither earned nor developed.

What’s so chilling about Mitchum’s preacher in The Night of the Hunter (a character also fully present in Davis Grubb’s Faulkner-inspired novel) is that his fundamentalism, his misogyny, his puritanism, and his murderous psychosis are all interlocking facets of the same personality; as the movie unfolds it’s virtually impossible to isolate any one of these strands from any other. In Cape Fear the misogyny and fundamentalism of De Niro’s character simply exist side by side, barely on speaking terms with one another; they seem isolated stock attributes rather than integral parts of a continuous, logical character. The ex-con seems to believe the Bible literally, yet he’s also a big Henry Miller fan who reads Nietzsche in his spare time, and nothing in the film either acknowledges this apparent contradiction or tries to make anything out of it. And when it comes to Nolte’s character — he reads the Bible, too — the religious references at the end seem even more forced; Scorsese delivers them like recipes to a robot chef, and Nolte just dishes them out instead of making them express facets of his own personality.

One can see that Scorsese has worked hard to make his characters more interesting than they were in the original, and if working were having, he might have produced an interesting picture. (He’s probably been hampered by his lack of familiarity with the south. With the exception of Mitchum — who turns up briefly here as a police lieutenant, exuding reality and conviction from every pore — the local color is all hand-me-down stuff, dimly remembered from other bad movies.) Because of Scorsese’s attention to character, the internal tensions in the family promise a great deal, but nothing gets delivered; the telegraphic leaps of the narrative never give these people a chance to grow or reveal themselves beyond the plot points they’re designed to articulate. One can admire in theory Scorsese’s decision to make all the adult characters unsympathetic, but in practice this means that one can’t care much what happens to any of them. Nor can I go along with the defense of a friend and fellow critic who argues that this is a movie about archetypes rather than a movie about characters; maybe it is, but so are most of the worst movies ever made.

The movie shows some indications that Scorsese became so alienated from the story that for his own amusement he settled on playing formalist games and inserting obscure film references. Perhaps the most gifted member of his generation, he shares with most of the others (like De Palma and Lucas) the pattern of starting out making movies about the subjects he knows best – Mean Streets is an obvious example — and then turning for inspiration to other movies, the subject that perhaps he knows second best.

As a menacing thriller, the movie succeeds at best only fitfully, and then mainly through some applied Hitchcockery. The most startling single moment is an indirect steal from Psycho, and the matching camera movements that build up to it are equally Hitchcockian. The climax on a riverboat — where the family have idiotically fled, as they did in the original, for no apparent reason other than to provide us with a set piece — has its moments, but they aren’t cumulative. The fact that all the characters are still lamentably underdeveloped robs the sequence of any emotional continuity: every fresh character trait revealed here merely interrupts the action rather than develops it.

Palombella Rosa

Perhaps the wildest comedy yet from Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti, a European cult favorite here starring as a water-polo player and Communist politician suffering from amnesia. Interspersing clips from a TV screening of Doctor Zhivago and Moretti’s own Super-8 work from the 70s as well as cameo appearances by Raul Ruiz as a metaphysical priest, Moretti concocts a dreamy satire about the ambiguous status of the Communist Party in contemporary Italy, with water polo serving as a ruling metaphor (the title refers to a goal-scoring technique); journalism and advertising are singled out for particular comic abuse. Even if you don’t get all the jokes, you’ll get plenty of insight into Italy in the 80s as well as a look at one of the most original film talents now working there (1989). You won’t have any trouble getting the jokes in Luc Moullet’s hilarious Barres, the accompanying short about ways to sneak onto the Paris metro–a delightfully structured piece that evokes Wile E. Coyote as well as Jacques Tati. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, November 22, 8:00, and Sunday, November 24, 4:00, 443-3737)

Girl With a Camera

This appeared in the November 15, 1991 issue of the Chicago Reader. –J.R.

VIDEOS BY SADIE BENNING

“I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of the caméra-stylo [camera-pen],” Alexandre Astruc wrote prophetically in 1948 in the journal Écran français. “This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and as subtle as written language . . .

“It must be understood that up to now the cinema has been nothing more than a show. This is due to the basic fact that all films are projected in an auditorium. But with the development of 16-millimeter and television, the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector, will go to the local bookstore and hire films written on any subject, of any form, from literary criticism and novels to mathematics, history, and general science. From that moment on, it will no longer be possible to speak of the cinema. There will be several cinemas just as today there are several literatures, for the cinema, like literature, is not so much a particular art as a language which can express any sphere of thought.”

Astruc may have faltered in a few particulars — citing television rather than videotape, projectors rather than VCRs, and bookstores rather than video-rental outlets — but in many important ways he got it right. Forty-three years later, the age of the caméra-stylo has certainly arrived, although whether we fully realize it is quite another matter. Because Hollywood still dictates a good 85 percent or more of what most people regard as “the cinema,” whether they see it at home or in a theater, the notion of video as “a means of writing just as flexible and as subtle”–and almost as universally available–”as written language” exists more as an exciting possibility than as an everyday reality.

The reason may be other cultural developments that Astruc couldn’t foresee. For one thing, written language has itself suffered a precipitous decline over the same 43-year period. (The corresponding decline in literacy is apparent to anyone who has ever read student papers.) For another, new technologies by no means guarantee new aesthetics or ideologies; on the contrary, despite an avalanche of economically motivated hype telling us the sky’s the limit, to date new technologies have mainly meant either a brutal reinforcement of old Hollywood codes and models or the foreclosure of certain options (such as the use of black and white). Maybe in theory the sky is the limit; but in practice and in the broader marketplace, the menu of choices is conceivably narrower now than it’s ever been.

Back in the 60s, the development of portable, lightweight 16-millimeter cameras and sound equipment was heralded by many as the realization of Astruc’s dream — and so it was, to some extent, for certain documentary and experimental filmmakers. Something similar happened in the early 80s, after the cheaper form of Super-8 became available. More recently the development of portable, lightweight, and relatively inexpensive camcorders has stirred up similar hopes of realizing new possibilities, but the results so far have mainly been practical or kitschy rather than aesthetic. (The videotape of Los Angeles cops brutally beating a motorist and national broadcasts of home videos are the examples that spring to mind.)

Many film people in the 60s and 70s thought that a media revolution would come about once teenagers got hold of cheap equipment. More recently, thanks to camcorders, speculation has been renewed that young people will revolutionize the media. But until I saw the videos of Sadie Benning — showing this Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers as part of the Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival — I hadn’t seen any evidence that these expectations were being fulfilled.

It would be incorrect at this point to call the work of 18-year-old Sadie Benning a bolt from the blue. Several of her videos, made over the last couple of years, have had screenings in alternative spaces in New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee (where she lives), as well as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Rotterdam, among others. Chicago’s Video Data Bank, which distributes her work, reports that she’s had about a dozen and a half shows to date. (She’s also made one short film in color, Welcome to Normal, which won’t be part of this weekend’s program.)

Benning is the daughter of experimental independent filmmaker James Benning, whose best-known works include 11 x 14 (1976), One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), Grand Opera (1979), and Landscape Suicide (1987). She made her first video, New Year, when she was 15, with a cheap plastic video camera — a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 — that her father gave her for Christmas; all her subsequent videos have been made with this same toy camera, in her working-class, racially mixed neighborhood. I’m told that both her father and Eric Saks (Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord) have also done some video work with the same kind of camera, but her work bears very little resemblance to the films by James Benning and Saks I’ve seen. (The Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera — which cost about $100 and used audiotape instead of videotape — has since been taken off the market. So much for the enlarged freedoms that new technologies are supposed to bestow automatically, like gifts from heaven.)

The most striking visual effect produced by this camera –apart from a very rough-grained look, the opposite of high-definition television — is the clearly demarcated rectangular image framed by black on all sides. It doesn’t have the curved, less defined frame boundaries of other video images (including most movies shown on video, unless they’re “letterboxed” — surrounded by black borders). This creates an unusually intimate effect, almost like a peep show. This intimacy and the grainy look bring one back to qualities found in some of the earliest movies, made around the turn of the century — especially to the sense that images are emerging out of a primordial darkness and chaos.

I’d like to consider Sadie Benning’s work chronologically, because her intimate, diaristic films trace a process of empowerment, of self-discovery and self-realization. It’s almost as if the individual videos were episodes in a serial.

A New Year (1989) shows Benning simultaneously testing out her equipment by surveying some of the contents of her room and home (TV, desk, window shades, sink, lawn, glass paperweight, dog) and defining a mode of self-expression. Significantly this includes shooting written language as a “found” object among her diverse subjects — complete with the misspellings one would expect (especially nowadays) from someone her age; usually these texts point to the world outside her home. The frequent misspellings may make one smile, but they also have some of the hard authenticity of street graffiti; like her images, her words seem conjured up out of darkness.

She begins by taping a bit of a TV program — the end of a commercial for Raisin Bran followed by two fragments of a frenetic game show. Abruptly the image freezes; her camera moves back and forth across a “New York” pennant on a wall, then scans two lines of a written text that we can’t make out and, to the accompaniment of rock music, several headlines from a tabloid newspaper, zooming in briefly on the word “super-nerd.”

Then her use of written language begins in earnest, with a poetic device that is to continue throughout her work: moving her camera slowly over a line of written text (”A girl I know got hit by a drunk driver”), cutting to something else (she pans past various objects in her room), and then moving over a second line of text (”her leg was broken & twisted like puddy”). Other equally chilling little messages appear in this five-minute film, like diary entries scattered amid various settings: “IT WOULD BE SO EASY TO DIE”; “A friend got raped by a black man,” followed by a shot of scrubbing a sink with Comet, and then “now she’s a Racist Nazi Skinhead”; “Your easily trapped when you have an exscuse”; and finally a four-line message interspersed with many other shots, “my neighboor is selling crack / as my neighbrohood dies / but our nation is addicted to a / more harmful drug [. . .] money.” Statements of this kind are like messages sent out in bottles, seemingly addressed to Benning herself and to strangers; in her next video, Benning admits she has only one friend.

Apart from a close-up of one of her eyes and a shot of her hand petting her dog, Benning keeps herself out of New Year. But self-images proliferate in her next piece, Living Inside (1989), made after she turned 16 and a week after she dropped out of high school. (”Everybody [there] called each other ‘fag’ and ‘queer,’” she told Ellen Spiro in an interview published in the Advocate earlier this year, “and the teachers would joke about gay people. I just didn’t want to be put through that abuse. I was in a really fragile stage, and I knew that if anybody knew I was gay, I would totally get tormented. School was really difficult. To be that age anyway is tough, but to be gay is just hell.”) She’s much more present in her work beginning with Living Inside, but nearly always in elliptical close-ups that either focus on isolated parts of her face or show her entire face from oblique angles. The effect is of a kind of narcissism-in-hiding, a paradoxical retreat through exposure that precisely matches the emotional tone of these tapes, which continually seek to strike an uneasy balance between secrecy and candor, shyness and angry assertion.

It’s only in her third video, Me and Rubyfruit (1989), inspired by Rita Mae Brown’s novel Rubyfruit Jungle, that she “comes out.” She deals with the fact of being a lesbian mainly through a dialogue with herself, set up between written and spoken messages, about marriage and stolen kisses; the messages are interspersed with snatches of Alberta Hunter singing, glimpses of a doll and various female models, and shots of herself. Once she arrives at lesbianism as a subject, her work gains in structure, focus, and eloquence without ever shrinking into monotony or obsession. Her color film Welcome to Normal (1990), which comes next, deals at some length with little kids, the physical landscape of her neighborhood, and home movies, apparently of herself; if lesbian desire informs most of the written and spoken messages - “What’s the sence in life if you can’t be who you are” is the first one we see — it also acts as the starting point for broader questions about identity and social molding. “I wonder how many lesbians were born today,” she muses at the end, over some of the home movies, “how many died, never knowing who they were, how many sit married, feeling empty and wondering why. I can’t say how many but that doesn’t matter, because one identity robbed is one too many.” In fact the loveliest sustained visual passage in the film occurs just before this, when her hand traces abstract patterns in a puddle of spilt milk — a metaphor that suggests desire and lost innocence as well as molding.

Her three most recent tapes — If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), Jollies (1990), and A Place Called Lovely (1991) — show an increasing grace in handling both her camera and her environment poetically, with a fluidity that suggests she’s now able to sing as well as speak and write with her camera-stylo. Some of the anger persists, to be sure, and with good reason. But when, in Jollies, she begins to delve into her own past — including accounts of early sexual feelings and experiences both gay and straight — she seems to take a more balanced view of her life. It may be significant that A Place Called Lovely, the most lyrical and wide-ranging of all her works to date, doesn’t address lesbianism directly. It is full of related ruminations about gender and childhood, however, as well as thoughts about violence and pain — all the things she freely admits scare or trouble her, from the act of putting on lipstick to the shower murder in Psycho, from gun ads in a tabloid to a fiery car accident she witnessed.

“Last week I almost laughed,” she says in If Every Girl Had a Diary. “It’s only been a year ago that I crawled the walls. . . . You know, I’ve been waiting for the day to come when I could walk the streets. People would look at me and say, ‘That’s a dyke.’ And if they didn’t like it, they’d fall into the center of the earth and deal with themselves. Maybe they’d return, but they’d respect me.”