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The Choice Between Art and Life (LA BELLE NOISEUSE)

From the January 31, 1992 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

LA BELLE NOISEUSE

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Jacques Rivette

Written by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette

With Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Beart, Jane Birkin, David Bursztein, Gilles Arbona, Marianne Denicourt, and the hand of Bernard Dufour.

Considering how rarely the achievements of art match up with the achievements of commerce, it’s a pleasure to note that Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since 1976 (the end of his most fertile and exciting period, which began in 1968) — winner of the grand prix at last year’s Cannes film festival — also turns out to be the first commercial hit of his career. A few wags have been quick to point out that this is because the beautiful lead actress, Emmanuelle Béart (best known in this country for her part as Manon in Claude Berri’s Manon of the Spring), is nude, posing as a painter’s model, for about half of the film. Maybe they’re partially right, but it also seems to me that, without compromising or diluting his artistry, Rivette has finally hit on a subject — the collective and individual struggles that produce art and the prices that have to be paid for that art — that speaks to a wide audience.

The fact that La belle noiseuse is four hours long makes this even more of an achievement — and, incidentally, confirms that in spite of some disapproving guff over the years about Rivette’s long running times being overly self-indulgent, his best films, with very few exceptions, are his longest. Duration and process are central to what his movies are about, and the longer they run the more disciplined and purposeful they usually turn out to be. As it happens, Rivette has also edited a two-hour version of La belle noiseuse for French TV, using completely different takes, and I’m not surprised to hear that there’s been no stateside interest in distributing it. In the two other cases where authorized shorter versions of Rivette films exist — Out 1 (cut from 12 hours to 4 hours) and Love on the Ground (cut from three hours to two) — the superiority of the longer version is indisputable.

For spectators unfamiliar with Rivette, La belle noiseuse provides an ideal introduction, requiring no pointers or background material. But it’s also an unusually personal and autobiographical work — even a testament of sorts — from a man whose life is so hermetic that it scarcely seems to exist at all apart from his activities as a filmgoer and filmmaker. In Claire Denis’ excellent two-hour documentary about Rivette made for French TV a couple of years ago, Bulle Ogier, the actress he has worked with most often (in 7 features out of 14) is asked at one point if Rivette regards her as a friend. She replies, quite plausibly, that Rivette has no friends, at least in any ordinary sense. Having met Rivette on numerous occasions — at screenings, festivals, and during the shooting of two of his features — I can only assume she’s right; while one can speak to him for hours about film and other arts, his timidity and his monastic air are so absolute that he calls to mind the ravaged, semimad poet Antonin Artaud.

Now in his mid-60s, Rivette seems to have mellowed since the wilder forays of his earlier work as a founding member of the French New Wave, much of which teetered on the edge of madness. The four-hour L’amour fou (1968) alternates between scenes of a theater company rehearsing Racine’s Andromache and glimpses at the tragic relationship between the play’s director and his alienated wife (Ogier), who drops out of the production in the first sequence and begins a gradual descent into madness as she festers in isolation. Like La belle noiseuse, it’s a film about the struggles and choices that have to be made between art and life.

Theater and paranoia, insiders and outsiders are also at the roots of Out 1. But in the subsequent Duelle (1975) and Norôit (1976), two parts of an uncompleted fantasy quartet, the madness might be said to be incorporated into the plots and mise en scène — that is to say, into Rivette’s visions of rival goddesses (in Duelle) and warring female pirates (in Norôit), and into imaginary universes that are more psychoanalytical projections than worlds with social or historical referents. After suffering a nervous collapse a few days into the shooting of the third feature in the quartet, Rivette resumed his career a little further down on the scale of risk and intensity, at a degree he has maintained ever since.

A sort of remake of L’amour fou, but with an alternate ending and with painting employed as a substitute for theater, La belle noiseuse might be said to recapitulate as well as reflect upon the personal history described above. In freely adapting a novella by Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, that I haven’t been able to locate (apparently an English translation is currently available only in England), Rivette once again ponders the choice between life and art. But where in L’amour fou it’s basically art that wins out, this film comes down squarely — if a little sadly — on the side of life. (This apparent philosophical shift is also reflected in the only significant change Rivette made in Out 1 when he recently and belatedly edited the 12-hour version into a serial for French TV: omitting a terrifying and climactic ten-minute take of Jean-Pierre Léaud, alone in his room, going to pieces.)

La belle noiseuse begins, as it ends, like a bantering 18th-century French comedy, something along the lines of Marivaux. At a village inn in the south of France, near Montpellier, a young painter (David Bursztein) sits sketching a couple of English tourists at a nearby table. A young woman (Béart) sneaks out of an upstairs room to snap his picture, and then sits down at his table and demands 10,000 francs for the photograph. It soon emerges that they’re lovers, Nicolas and Marianne, playfully pretending to be strangers. They’re awaiting the arrival of Porbus (Gilles Arbona), an art dealer who is about to introduce them to Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), a once-famous and long-inactive painter whom Nicolas admires and who lives nearby with his wife and former model Liz (Jane Birkin) in a rambling 18th-century chateau.

After the visiting trio are welcomed by Liz, Frenhofer emerges, unshaven and unprepared for guests (”I completely forgot”), and shows everyone around his studio — a windowless former barn that reminds Marianne of a church (a significant comparison that she expands upon later). As the visitors poke around some of his old canvases, Liz alludes to his unfinished painting La belle noiseuse – his last attempt at a masterpiece, which she modeled for, abandoned a decade ago. (The title, archaic slang for “the beautiful nutty woman,” refers to Catherine Lescault, a 17th-century courtesan; in contemporary Canadian French, “noiseuse” means a woman who drives men to distraction and causes pain.) Agitated by Liz’s remarks, Frenhofer insists that the painting doesn’t exist. But later that evening, after Porbus suggests that Frenhofer use Marianne as a model and Nicolas gives his assent — Marianne is off with Liz at the time, discussing her career as a writer — he decides to make another stab at the work and asks Marianne to come back the next morning. (Porbus, who has left by this time, has already agreed to buy the painting if Frenhofer finishes it.)

Furious with Nicolas for committing her to this project without her consent (”You sold my ass”), Marianne nevertheless keeps the appointment. After an enormous amount of puttering around in his studio –rearranging diverse objects, adjusting his worktable — Frenhofer asks her to sit down and opens his sketchbook.

Throughout this leisurely opening, which takes up the film’s first hour, the sense of time and place is palpable; one can almost taste the sunlight and foliage outside and feel the dampness and darkness of the studio. Piccoli’s convincing portrait of an artist in hiding from himself, gradually nudged by himself and others into action, is little short of amazing; his comic prevarications in the studio and evasive conversational manner, showing remarkable powers of observation and synthesis, suggest the weight and complexity of an entire life behind the isolated gestures.

For most of the film’s second hour, Frenhofer executes a series of tentative sketches using both pen and brushes. Here’s where Rivette’s focus on duration and process comes in, making all the essential facts of the artist’s work — the scratch of pen against paper, the hesitations and decisions of hand and brush, the progress and revision of a design taking shape — as palpable as the sense of time and place was during the first hour. (Here and throughout the remainder of the film, the hand we see in close-up belongs to a real artist, Bernard Dufour, but the matching is done so well that the effect never looks contrived. One quite sophisticated critic, who missed the reference to Dufour in the credits, was fooled completely and assumed all of the drawing and painting was done by Piccoli.) While Rivette employs real time whenever it’s appropriate to his design, it would be quite wrong to assume that he simply lets the camera run on in the manner of Warhol; jump cuts are as essential to his sense of rhythm as long takes, and he uses both with equal judiciousness.

But more than just the artist’s work is being observed and charted. Almost an equal amount of attention is paid to the work of Marianne — tensely holding a pose, changing positions at Frenhofer’s request, improvising certain readjustments (at one point she uses a paintbrush to put back her hair), negotiating her physical discomforts in a variety of ways, and dealing emotionally with the fact that she’s being looked at constantly. After Frenhofer directs her to a dressing gown and she begins posing in the nude, the tensions of their collaboration — and the film constantly makes it clear that it is a collaboration — undergo a quantum leap. Over the course of the film, their sessions become increasingly charged with pain and passion, and it’s clear that Rivette is working from the complex interactions involved in his own art — between screenwriters, cinematographers, other crew members, and, above all, actors. (Much later in the film, a beautiful sequence is created out of Frenhofer’s efforts to find “the right angle” for viewing Marianne as she assumes “the right pose.”)

Meanwhile, Nicolas pays a visit to Liz, engaged in her own work in a separate part of the chateau, stuffing birds. She tries to assuage his worries about Marianne by assuring him that her husband is a gentleman, and he remarks that while Marianne was the one who initially needed him when they met three years ago, now he realizes that it’s he who needs her. As painter and model continue their work, Rivette cunningly keeps shifting the film’s emphasis so that sometimes we’re immersed in the sketch in progress and other times the work itself becomes a mere backdrop to the emotional state of Marianne.

At the end of the first day, we see both the older and younger couples together: Frenhofer and Liz are quite affectionate, but Marianne and Nicolas are still at loggerheads. By the time Frenhofer starts working with paint on canvas the next day, his conversations with Marianne have become much more intimate and charged — though not so intense that an affair between them seems imminent — and the stakes of this work in progress have become much higher for both of them.

For Marianne, an internal struggle has arisen between remaining a slave to Frenhofer’s vision by assuming the contorted positions he requests and striking out on her own. “Let me find my own place, my own way of moving,” she insists somewhat later, during the third hour, but her spirit of rebellion is there virtually from the beginning. Frenhofer’s struggle is a matter of differentiating will from necessity: “When I was a kid, I used to pull my toys to pieces,” he comments after placing her into a particularly difficult pose. But after he declares a little later, “I want the invisible,” he quickly corrects himself: “No, that’s not it. It’s not I who wants it, it’s the work.” Finally, he settles on a kind of mystic compromise: “It’s the line, the stroke. Nobody knows what a stroke is. And I’m after it.”

“Before the next pose, a five-minute intermission,” reads a printed title halfway through the film.

It would be imprudent to reveal much more of the plot, but a few generalities are worth bringing up:

(1) Critics who have faulted the film because they don’t find Frenhofer’s painting sufficiently accomplished or trendy seem to be confusing an overall verisimilitude about artistic process with realism. The film has a great deal to say about the real world — particularly about the roles played by art and life in relationship to one another — but very little to say about “real” painting. We never see all of Frenhofer’s masterpiece in its finished state, but we catch a brief glimpse of its bright red lower portion, enough to know that it “has blood,” as Liz remarked of one of its earlier and unfinished incarnations in which she was the model. We also see the masterpiece in an unfinished state, when it’s already clear that Frenhofer has effected some emotional bloodletting in both his wife and himself by painting Marianne over portions of another unfinished canvas of Liz in order to arrive at a “bloody” synthesis. The idea that real art hurts — and hurts not only its makers but its spectators — is central to the film. Much of the work favored by the art market — which includes critics and spectators as well as dealers and gallery owners — entails little if any pain for the artist or for anyone else, and the film points out that art that is painful usually isn’t popular. (Indeed, most of Rivette’s own career bears this out; Norôit, perhaps his most daring film, has never received a commercial run anywhere in the world.)

(2) Over the course of the film, the identity of every major character becomes redefined by the masterpiece in progress. The only one left out of this process is Nicolas’ sister Julienne (Marianne Denicourt), a character who turns up at the eleventh hour, not, apparently, to effect any significant change in the action but to give Nicolas and Marianne someone besides each other to speak to. If the film has a flaw, it would be the distracting intrusion of Julienne — though she, like each of the other five characters, is an important part of the roundelay of exchanges that concludes the film.

(3) The best scene in the film features neither nudity nor painting but a confrontational dialogue between Liz and Frenhofer in their adjoining bedrooms and on a connecting terrace in the early hours of the morning. (The terrace, perhaps not coincidentally, recalls the ramparts where life-and-death struggles are waged in Norôit.) Rivette’s musical sense of mise en scène has never been more masterful or functional in charting both the literal movements of a couple and the various stations of their “passion” (in both the carnal and Christian senses of the word). This is the scene that establishes the reasons for Frenhofer’s choice of life over art. The equivalent scene in L’amour fou showed the theater director fully entering into the madness of his wife by collaborating with her in destroying their apartment — an act conceived and executed as a 60s “art gesture,” and an emblem of the artist despairingly choosing art over life.

(4) When I suggested above that Frenhofer and Marianne collaborated in the making of his painting, I didn’t mean to imply that they were the only ones involved. Porbus, who symbolizes the art market (and specifically commissions the work); Nicolas, the disciple (and the one who offers Marianne as model); and Liz, the initial inspiration and literal background are equally instrumental, not only in generating the masterpiece but also in determining its eventual fate. (Only Julienne, the sixth cog in a five-cog machine, seems extraneous to both activities.) “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved,” Freud once wrote in a letter. Similarly, it would be fair to say that Rivette regards the process of making art as one in which many more people are involved than simply artist and model. That idea corresponds, in any case, to his profoundly collaborative notion of his own art. And the playful comic charades that frame Rivette’s dark meditation suggest that the life he is opting for is merely a form of protection and survival — giggles to hold back the maelstrom of nightmarish possibilities that masterpieces, including this one, unleash.

The Comedy of Narcissus

Written for Cinema Narcissus, a collection put together for the Rotterdam International Film Festival in early 1992. — J.R

The total film-maker is a man who gives of himself through emulsion, which in turn acts as a mirror. What he gives he gets back. — Jerry Lewis

It was Jerry Lewis who first had the idea of installing a video monitor on a soundstage while shooting a picture. The feature in question was THE LADIES MAN (1961), most of which was shot on a single set, a four-storey, open-faced building that stretched across two soundstages on the Paramount lot. The reason for this video monitor? To allow Lewis to see what a particular camera setup looked like at the same time that he was acting in the shot.

Directing and acting at the same time in comedies is a practice that can be traced back at least as far as the beginning of the 20th century. The earliest example that comes to mind is Georges Melies’s L’HOMME-ORCHESTRE, made in 1900, a double-exposure short in which Melies himself appears as seven different people within the same frame.

The point at which this gesture of self-regard becomes modernist is harder to determine, because it is much more open to interpretation. Does it happen when the director starts to examine himself or herself self-consciously, ironically, or self-critically? Or is the modernist aspect of looking at one’s self already there from the beginning, when Melies replicated himself in front of the camera? When we speak of Chaplin using himself autobiographically, do we trace this process back to his earliest shorts as a director, or do we begin with such complex exercises in self-scrutiny as MONSIEUR VERDOUX, LIMELIGHT, and A KING IN NEW YORK? As a comically demonic self-portrait of neurosis, is Chantal Akerman’s MAN WITH A SUITCASE any more profound than SAUTE MA VILLE!, her very first film?

Minimal in budget as well as in style, form, and content — the entire production is said to have cost a mere $10,000 — A LITTLE STIFF (1991), a black and white 16mm tragicomedy, was shot by two UCLA film students, Caveh Zahedi and Greg Watkins, chiefly in and around their own campus. Both filmmakers play themselves in the movie, as do all the other characters. The slender plot is a literal regurgitation and restaging of events that actually happened, with everyone playing his or her original part. The minimal subject — Caveh Zahedi’s unrequited love for or infatuation with with Erin McKim over the space of what appears to be two or three months — is the focus of practically every scene and shot. And part of what makes the film so minimalist is not merely the limited number of settings, camera angles, characters, and dramatic situations, but also the limited number of emotions and behavioral patterns available to these characters.

The advantages to be found from this concentration are both comic and analytical, and they never stray from the recognizable and the lifelike. The multiple repetitions that the film employs point to both the monotony of romantic obsession and the monotony of a life-style that simultaneously supports and thwarts such an obsession. As a sort of objective correlative to this syndrome, Caveh’s experimental film-within-the-film, which he shows to Erin at one point, consists of endlessly repeated loops of “falls”: an emaciated concentration camp corpse being dumped into an open grave, a plane nosediving, a prizefighter punching out an opponent, and a silent slapstick comic taking a pratfall, followed by animated drawings of the same actions; all these loops are accompanied by the same musical fragments And the second film-in-the-film of Caveh’s that we see — this time in production as well as in finished form — is nothing less than a staged repetition of the first encounter with Erin in the elevator, another instance of his repetition compulsion that in this case represents a miniature version of A LITTLE STIFF itself. Given this overall obsessiveness, it is hardly surprising that when Caveh receives a “climactic” phone message from Erin asking him to call back, he replays her message twice before he even thinks about complying.

According to legend, when a technician once reported to Chaplin that tracks were visible in one of his shots, he said, “It doesn’t matter — as long as I’m on the screen, people won’t notice.” Even if he didn’t say it, the perception is certainly a correct one. In the famous conclusion of CITY LIGHTS, containing perhaps the most famous close-ups in the history of cinema, the scene cuts between Chaplin in close-up nibbling on a flower stem to reverse angles of Chaplin in medium-shot holding the same flower at least a foot or so lower, against his torso. The final sequence of MODERN TIMES contains a comparable editing “mistake” or mismatch. But no one apart from especially alert film analysts ever notices these flaws. The point of their invisibility is that Chaplin’s power as an actor is the basic fact of his direction, and everything else becomes secondary in importance. (It is worth pointing out that the films of Yasujiro Ozu abound in similar editing “flaws,” but the power of the separate compositions encourage us — much as they undoubtedly encouraged Ozu — to overlook them.) We should therefore conclude either that Chaplin’s physical presence precludes and ultimately overcomes his independent powers as a writer and director or that, at the very least, his writing and directing exist mainly in order to place his physical presence.

Part of what is so complex and exciting about MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947) is that it shows Chaplin, perhaps for the first time in his career, using his writing and directing to question his acting. Or, if not quite that, at least to put quotation marks on both sides of his charisma, to present a potentially dark meaning to his charm. Known to the world at large as a “ladykiller” because of his amorous offscreen exploits at the time he made VERDOUX, Chaplin dared to link his own appeal as a movie star to both capitalism and murder, and then to examine in some detail what ironies and contradictions arose from these linkages.

Significantly, the idea for VERDOUX was first proposed by another ambiguous screen narcissist, Orson Welles, who wanted to write and direct the picture himself, with Chaplin as star. Accounts differ as to how much of the conception originally stemmed from Welles. Chaplin claimed that Welles never wrote a script while Chaplin claims that he did (which he called, incidentally, Ladykiller). Both agree, however, that much of the final result came from Chaplin, who updated the plot to encompass World War II to draw parallels between Verdoux’s exploits and the Holocaust.

In A KING IN NEW YORK (1957), Chaplin is working in a more directly autobiographical mode depicting himself literally as a deposed king living in exile, and casting his own son Michael as a “communist” malcontent youth whom the King takes under his wing. Made in England after Chaplin was forcibly barred from re-entering the United States, the film remains one of his most controversial works, carrying such a naked power of embarrassment and assault that one can readily see why many critics and other spectators have recoiled from it. Chaplin himself avoided any mention of it in the text of his autobiography. Most reports refer to it as a shameful debacle and even such an indefatigable Chaplin enthusiast as Andre Bazin virtually threw in the towel. So far as I can gather, only Roberto Rossellini, seconded by some of his wilder disciples at Cahiers du Cinema, had the perspicacity in 1957 to call it the film of a free man. Clearly he objections cannot be traced back to any failures of expression: how many films are more expressive than Chaplin’s, this one included? The discomfort, on the contrary, seems to be with the things that are expressed, more candid and personal in their revelations than anything we are ordinarily accustomed to; and without this reading, the film is almost meaningless.

In other words, Chaplin’s letter of spite and sorrow to America asserts personal indignation — perhaps the least palatable form to an audience because it is the most honest, consequently the most apt. In place of generalized invective, we largely get Chaplin’s own experience, which includes his complex and ambivalent implication in the American Dream: the King’s own silliness and randiness in the presence of Dawn Addams, for example. But the horrible taste of the plastic surgery episodes, which immediately derive from this, is not only Chaplin’s transgression but America’s as well; and the charge that much of the film is not very funny should be met with the reply that, as at the end of THE GREAT DICTATOR and throughout much of MONSIEUR VERDOUX, there are times when laughter is beside the point.

As satire, however, the film carries an unusual potency today by focusing on not only all of the American excesses that a 1950s comic director like Frank Tashlin reveled in (THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT, WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?), but also on some of the insanities that Tashlin left out, the McCarthyite witch hunts in  particular. And the free form of expression is such that one can find Godard’s 1960s manner of filming already present in embryo: the King’s visit to the progressive school, for examples, anticipates much of the “newsreel” format of a film like MASCULINE FEMININE.

As satire, however, the film carries an unusual potency today by focusing on not only all of the American excesses that a 1950s comic director like Frank Tashlin revelled in (THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT, WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?), but also on some of the insanities that Tashlin left out, the McCarthyite witch hunts in particular. And the free form of expression is such that one can find Godard’s 1960s manner of filming already present in embryo: the King’s visit to the progressive school, for example, anticipates much of the “newsreel” format of a film like MASCULINE FEMININE.

If Picasso’s separate periods as an artist are often defined by separate colors, Jean-Luc Godard’s periods might be linked to different styles and attitudes of self-portraiture. Broadly speaking, from the beginning of BREATHLESS (1960) to the “fin de cinema” title concluding WEEKEND (1967), it was Godard the film critic and the all-purpose sage.  Godard #2, who lasted roughly from May 1968 through the mid-1970s, was a polemical/theoretical rebuke to his predecessor, working principally in 16mm and in collaboration with others. NUMERO DEUX (1975), made in 35mm and video, and JEAN-LUC (1976), made in video, come at the tail end of this period. Godard #3, who began around the same time Godard moved back to his native Switzerland, also marked a return to more commercial considerations (i.e. stars and stories — which #2 had mainly abandoned) and a more concerted move toward placing himself in his work — either literally, as an actor, or autobiographically, as in SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE) or PASSION [see photo below], where actors stand in for him.

Properly speaking, as an actor Godard #3 has A and B versions: the abrasive, crochety, boorish Godard who figures in PRENOM: CARMEN, MEETIN’ WA (his taped 1985 interview with Woody Allen), and KING LEAR [see two photos below]; and the more benign, elder statesman persona who appears in SOIGNE TA DROITE and some of his more recent interviews and TV appearances (such as his dialogue with Marguerite Duras for French television). Just as the theme of prostitution has cropped up frequently in his work — but only when he shoots in 35mm (implying that Godard’s involvements with big-time producers entail a kind of prostitution on his own part) — Godard the curmudgeon seems likelier to emerge when he has to share space with bankable stars. From this vantage point, MEETIN’ WA poses itself as a sort of stand-off confrontation like KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, with each sour comic positioned in a separate corner.

To some extent Luc Moullet can be regarded as a sort of child of Godard, perhaps the last of the Cahiers critics to emerge as a significant actor in his own films. ANATOMIE D’UN RAPPORT (1975), sometimes known in English as FARTHER THAN SEX, is a collaborative film, coscripted and codirected by Antoinetta Pizzorno, although I don’t see it as contradicting Moullet’s earlier work. As Jean-Pierre Oudart said of LES CONTREBANDIERES (1967), “Moullet’s film doesn’t speak to us about the world, it is the world that speaks there; and he mechanism of subversion to which it submits itself functions without an auteur.” Yet insofar as it can be called half a Moullet film, I would call it his SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE — that is, a practical, modest work, not a breast-beating declaration of self-important anguish. Pizzorno and Moullet simply made an apparently straightforward movie about their relationship, with the glamor of neither Bergman’s suffering nor their own,  just the mundane sorrows and clumsy embarrassments of sexual problems as they’re lived, re-enacted, wrestled with. (Moullet: “I feel like I’m taking an exam.” Pizzorno: “I’ll whisper the answers.”) Christine Herbert plays Pizzorno and Moullert plays himself, but this doesn’t become fully clear until Pizzorno herself appears in the final scene to demand another ending, and Moullet mutters resentfully that “A guy’s gotta make a movie in order to fuck the way he wants.“

It should be added that ANATOMIE D’UN RAPPORT comes from a period in Moullet’s work in which anti-technique is brandished as a kind of substitute for technique — a period also represented by such features as LES CONTREBANDIERES and UNE AVENTURE DE BILLY LE KID (1970). Since then he has honed and refined his comic techniques, both as a director and as a performer, to the point where he has developed a form of proletarian comedy that makes him a director of economy in every sense of the word — of physical, mental, monetary, and existential expenditure — devoted to epics of the everyday that are polemically writ small. While I have not yet seen MA PREMIERE BRASSE, his 1970s documentary about teaching himself how to swim, his hilarious shorts BARRES (1983) and ESSAI D’OUVERTURE (1987) are masterpieces of post-Tati cinema.

Jacques Tati, one should recall, is an especially ambiguous figure in the comedy of Narcissus, because he increasingly regarded his most famous character, Monsieur Hulot, as a commercial necessity rather than as a personal requirement for his comic features. In PLAY TIME he tried to do away with Hulot by multiplying him into infinity, creating a number of “false Hulots” on the theory that everyone was equally funny. He reduced his own role in the plot to that of a catalyst and emissary.

And paradoxically, even a writer-director-actor as theatrical as Orson Welles harbored similar dreams of disappearing into the fabric and texture of his own work, dreams that were fully realized only in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (where he still figures as offscreen narrator) and his still unreleased THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, where he makes no visual or vocal appearance at all. His F FOR FAKE (1973) indirectly partakes of the same ambition through a series of elaborate ruses: despite the fact that Welles remains omnipresent throughout the work, both as visual presence and as narrator, he can also be said to be hiding, concealing himself behind a panoply of masks.

Concealment through exposure is a key theme throughout Welles’ work, evident in everything from CITIZEN KANE to TOUCH OF EVIL, from CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT to FILMING OTHELLO. But F FOR FAKE foregrounds this theme in an especially striking way through the constant theme of counterfeiting and fakery. Welles himself expressed some of this paradox in an interview published in the December 9, 1983 issue of the International Herald Tribune: “In F FOR FAKE I said I was a charlatan and didn’t mean it…because I didn’t want to sound superior to [art forger] Elmyr [de Hory], so I emphasized that I was a magician and called it a charlatan, which isn’t the same thing. So I was faking it even then. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t.” A good example of this principle at work in F FOR FAKE is the late scene set in Orly airport in which Oja Kodar becomes Picasso and Welles becomes Kodar’s grandfather, simply by virtue of the fact that the film has persuaded us to accept these actors speaking for these characters.

F FOR FAKE remains one of Welles’s most controversial works insofar as for many spectators, including some Welles enthusiasts, it is not really a “Welles film” at all. There has even, ironically enough, been some confusion regarding the film’s authorship. Simply because Welles refused to include what are generally thought to be “typically Wellesian” shots — a deliberate ploy, one learns from his extended interview with Bill Krohn in Cahiers du Cinema, and a strategy that can also be found somewhat less systematically in THE IMMORTAL STORY and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND — viewers who insist that they know who Welles is better than Welles does himself wind up feeling that they’ve been had. The legend of Welles has always had much more potency for many people than the reality, and in more ways than one F FOR FAKE appears to have been both inspired by this paradox and structured around it.

Properly speaking, the Cinema of Narcissus permits all sorts of variations and combinations when it comes to self-scrutiny: self-aggrandizement, autocritique, dialectical inquiry, playful self-representation (as in parts of Jan Oxenberg’s THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT), self-exploration through displacement (as in Barbara Loden’s 1971 WANDA [see two photos above]), stylistic reinforcement, concealment, disguise, confession. If, as Jerry Lewis points out, the emulsion functions as a mirror for the filmmaker, there are many ways that it can and should function as a mirror for the spectator as well.

The Inner Circle

Ever since he moved to the West, filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky has been an invaluable presence not only for his considerable talent but also for his capacity to translate Russian dramatic forms into American entertainments. Returning to Russia to film (in English) the story, partly based on fact, of Joseph Stalin’s personal projectionist, he broaches a disturbing and important reality about Russian history that our own culture has tended to ignore: an overwhelming majority of simple, ordinary Russians not only kowtowed to Stalin but genuinely loved and revered him. The projectionist (Tom Hulce), a simpleton from the provinces, loves Stalin more than he loves his own wife (effectively played by Lolita Davidovich); unfortunately, Hulce’s performance is often gratingly hammy and occasionally undercut by lines of dialogue indicating more awareness than the character otherwise shows. Still, as Murray Kempton has suggested, the lack of complexity in Konchalovsky’s characters may diminish the film’s overall accomplishment but shouldn’t be allowed to serve as an excuse to overlook it; as he puts it, the film’s “intention is nonetheless heroic, and its achievement admirable.” Coscripted by Anatoli Usov; with Bob Hoskins, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., and, in the part of Stalin, Alexandre Zbruev. (McClurg Court)

Local Color: Five American Touchstones

This was commissioned by and written for the Rotterdam International Film Festival — specifically for a booklet of essays entitled Grandeur Locale that they published in late January 1992. — J.R.

1. “We acknowledge with gratitude and admiration the spirit of cooperation of the 25,000 citizens of Phenix City, Alabama,” reads a title after the credits of Phil Karlson’s remarkable film noir, THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955), shot on location less than a year after the events it describes took place. “…To the Mayors and the City Commissioners, the Chiefs of Police, and the many thousand citizens of Columbus, Georgia, and Phenix City, Alabama, who contributed immeasurably to the making of this picture…our sincerest thanks.” For once, the standard courtesy of such an acknowledgement becomes the literal truth. In many prints of the film, we meet four of ther local, real-life participants in the story we’e about to see even befoe the credits come on. The singuklar accents and speech patterns of these people are literally the sound of my own childhood: I was thirteen years old and had lived all my life in Alabama when the film was released, and to see the film in 1955 was to experience some of the truth of my hiome state on the screen for the very first time. Thirty-seven years later, that same truth remains, in contrast to the falsity of a tissue of Hollywood lies and distortions like MISSISSIPPI BURNING (1988) – a movie handicapped by its clumsy attempt to reprtesent Mississippi in 1964, with scant attention to local customs, accents, speech patterns, and oyher forms of regional behavior, not to mention the facts of the civil rights movement and the specific conditions that provoked it. Alhough MISSISSIPPI BURNING was shot in Mississippi and Alabama, its ignorance about both the region and its histiory is evident in almost every frame. (Two examples out of many: When Willem Dagoe and Gene Hackman enter a luncheonette and Dafor insists on joining the black men seated at a segregated counter, the filmmakers ignore the fact that, because of local segregation laws, no such seating arrangement was possible in Mississippi in 1964, where blacks were not allowed as customers anywhere inside of white restaurants. And the fact that these characters, both FBI agents, are the heroes of the film is an insult to the civil rights movement, which triumphed more in spite of the FBI than because of it.)

I don’t mean to suggest by the above that THE PHENIX CITY STORY is a documentary, even if it starts like one and is informed throughout – even when it veers into hysterical melodrama like MISSISSIPPI BURNING—by documentary truths. The film’s form is clearly docudrama, and it is interesting to note how the signifiers of documentary are used after the credits as part of the transition into the drama. We begin with an ‘impersonal’ voice-off describing Phenix City and Columbus that shortly becomes ‘personal’ when we realize that the voice belongs to the film’s hero, John Patterson (Richard Kiley). Something similar occurs at the very end of the film, when we see this character, now the Attorney General of Alabama, seated behind his office desk addressing the camera, as if he were the ‘real’ John Patterson speaking to us and not an actor. Yet in the film’s genuinely documentary prologue, we have already met Patterson’s real-life mother – a figure we are implicitly invited to weigh against the actress who later portrays her — and director Phil Karlson similarly mixes professionals with non-professionals and locals with non-locals throughout the film, in a manner that encourages everyone – actors, extras, and even spectators – to become critical analysts of authenticity. The film’s writing credits  – assigned to both  Crane Wilbur working in Phenix City and Daniel Mainwaring (the screenriter of OUT OF THE PAST, THE TALL TARGET, and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS) working in Hollywood – suggests a dialectic analagous to the one between trained actors and local extras. And in a related obsession with verisimiltude that recalls Erich von Styroheim, Karlson even dressed John McIntire – who plays Albert Patterson, the film’s principal murder victim – in the same clothes worn by the dead man when he was killed.

A comparable sense of fidelity to southern folkways (if not to recent history) can be found only a year later in Tennessee Williams’ and Elia Kazan’s black comedy BABY DOLL (1956) , filmed on location in Mississippi. Kazan took the trouble to hire a voice coach who trained the actors to speak with the correct accents, and his use of locals in bit parts is no less inspired. (It’s worth recalling that Kazan had already familiarized himself somwhat with the Deep South in 1937, when he made his very first film, the documentary short THE PEOPLE OF THE CUMBERLANDS, in Tennessee.)

2. Kazan can ideed be considered a pioneer in regional location shoots for Hollywood features – a trend that started with his third feature, BOOMERANG (1947), and continued with PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950) and ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) before he got around to BABY DOLL later on came such on-location features as A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957), WILD RIVER (1960), AMERICA, AMERICA (1963), and THE VISITORS (1972).

Undoubtedly part of the credit for this trend is due to the producer Louis de Rochemont, one of the original creators of the documentary shorts THE MARCH OF TIME in 1934, who, after he joined 20th Century-Fox in 1943, encouraged location shooting in such Henry Hathaway thrillers as THE HOUSE ON 92ND STREET (1945) as well as BOOMERANG. Other Hollywood pioneers in this tendency – which included Jules Dassin (BRUTE FORCE, THE NAKED CITY, and THIEVES’ HIGHWAY), Otto Preminger (THE THIRTEENTH LETTER, ANATOMY OF A MURDER ), and Cy Endfield (TRY AND GET ME!), among many others – seemed to find it easier to shoot thrillers on location than other kinds of  films with contemporary settings. (The aforementioned Phil Karlson, who also belongs to this trend, returned to it with less happy results in his profitable 1973 docudrama feature WALKING TALL – a near remake of THE PHENIX CITY STORY, also shot on location in the South, where the cryptofascist endorsement of violent revenge already implicit in THE PHENIX CITY STORY is allowed to dominate.)

3. Local shooting in which real places and/or their inhabitants play an integral role has of course many separate histories in the United States, ranging from the earliest turn-of-the-century travelogues to the recent egional productions of George Romero (Pittsburgh) and John Waters (Baltimore). But we can conveniently start wuth Stroheim’s GREED (1923-24), a touchstone of the silent era that was shoit exclusively in the California locations where the story unfolds – chiefly the gold mining country in Placer county, San Francisco, and Oakland (most of the shooting), and Death Valley. While it clearly wasn’t the first Hollywood on-location feature, it is certainly one of the few that made such an impact on the industry that it remains a key reference point even today.

To the best of my knowledge, Stroheim was not especially interested in casting locals in GREED except as extras. Although there are undoubtedly exceptions to this rule in silent films shot on location, it appears that the desire to use locals as actors increases substantially after sound comes in and regiional accents become an issue. It’s worth adding, however, that Stroheim’s fanatical efforts to reproduce the `real’ led him into certain contradictions regarding his use of locations. In an unpublished interview with Kevin Brownlow, William Daniels has remarked that Stroheim’s passion for crowding naturalistic details into shots, and his refusal to compromise on camera placements once particular setups had been decided upon, occasionally led him to have walls torn down in his `natural’ locations in order to make room for the camera. Inevitably, this procedure – and the absence of reverse angles that it necessitated — led, willy-nilly, to the artificially missing `fourth wall’ of ther stage, and there are moments throughout GREED when tgheatrical, proscenium-arch framing becomes one of Stroheim’s resources for articulating his ‘documentary’ realism.

4. An interesting example of how a sense of locality and even `local color’ can be artificially created rather than found is John Ford’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (1941). The illusion that the film was shot in Wales rather than in Hollywood is as striking as the fixed age of its narrator hero Huw Morgan. As he is about to leave his Welsh mining valley at the age of fifty, Huw Morgan recounts his childood there for the remainder of the film, and while many years pass during these childhood memories, this character – as played by Roddy Macdowell, in contrast to the other characters – is never seen to age at all. Indeed, as Ford’s biographer and critic Tag Gallagher has pointed out, this `conventional stage fiction’ is used by Ford as a symnbol of the stasis of both this character and the culture he inhabits, locked into inflexible habits and traditions that eventually turn his green valley into a slagheap.

Considering the importance of a fixed locality in this movie, it is interesting to speculate what it would have been like if Ford and producer Darryl F. Zanuck had actually managed to shoot this adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s best selling novel on location rather than in the Malibu hills and on 20th Century-Fox sound stages. To quote the film’s screenwriter, the recebtly deceased Philip Dunne:

In 1940, momentous events in Europe were directly affecting our movie, Zanuck, one of whose most endearing characteristics was his ability to inspiure enthusiasm in his apostles, had projected for me a colossal HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, which would have been our answering to the reigning colossus, GONE WITH THE WIND. I was to write a four-hour picture, which would be shot in glorious Technicolor on location in Wales with an all-star cast.

In August, one bubble burst with the beginning of the Battle of Britain. South Wales, Britain’s principal source of coal, was a primary target for Hitler’s Lutwaffe, and all plans to be shot on location there had to be scrapped. A location the hills behind Malibu was suggested by the art department. I flew over it in a light plane to inspect it. I immediately realized that the dull olive chaparral of arid Southern California could never substitute for the vivid green of rainswept Cwm Rhondda, and wrote Zanuck a memo regretfully suggesting that the idea of shooting in color should also be scrapped. Back came in red ink word that the decision to scrap it had already been made. All this had some effect on my screenplay: scenes that I had planned for the Welsh location were rewritten to play in our village street set or on sound stages. (“No Fence Ariund Time,” introductory essay to Dunne’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY screenplay, Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Teresa Press, 1990)

5. All my examples so far have been Hollywood releases, including those pictures (such as ANATOMY OF A MURDER) that were produced independently. When it comers to independent filmmakers, on the other hand, location shooting and the casting of locals is the rule rather than the exception – a rule that applies to everything from John Cassavetes’ SHADOWS to Michael Snow’s WAVELENGTH (a Canadian film, but one shot in New York), to Mark Rappaport’s appropriately titled LOCAL COLOR to the features of Jon Jost. (Exceptions to this rule tend to be independent productions with relatively high budgets such as Sally Potter’s THE GOLD DIGGERS, filmed in Iceland, and Jim Jarmusch’s MYSTERY TRAIN, shot in memohis, Tennessee, bioth shot with non-locals.)

Jost’s BELL DIAMOND (1987), shot for $25,000 in Butte, Montana, could be described as the first feature shot by Jost in his `second manner’ – a method subsequently followe din his REMBRANDT LAUGHING (1989), ALL THE VERMEERS IN NEW YORK (1990), and SURE FIRE (1990), as well as his more recent work. This consists of settling down in a particular locale for several weeks or months – Butte in BELL DIAMOND, San Francisco in REMBRANDT, Manhattan in ALL TH VERMEERS, rural Utah in SURE FIRE – and gradually putting together a story with the help of his actors, many of therm locals who improvise their dialogue. An earlier version of this technique was employed in SLOW MOVES (1983), although significant portions of the film took place on the road after beginning in the San Francisco area.

Both SLOW MOVES and BELL DIAMOND employ the same lead actor, Marshall Gaddis. In the latter film, Gaddis plays a Viuetnam war veteran and TV addict whose wife leaves him. Although, like SLOW MOVES and SURE FIRE, BELL DIAMOND has a single central character (Gaddis), it also anticipates REMBRANDT and ALL THE VERMEERS in showing us a circle of friends and acquaintances, describing the edges of what might be called a community, and it is the only film in this series that situates this community within a small town. With a wandering, leisurely plot that suggests European cinema more often than Hollywood – and which manages to makie room for some archival footage shot in Butte around 1920, a 360-degree pan across a crowd of locals looking directly into the camera – BELL DIAMOND proposes a kind of home-grown cinema that takes root in specific, home-grown circumstances, miles away from the standardized urban and suburban settings that comprise most Hollywood cinema.

Vietnam, the Theme Park [HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE ]

From the Chicago Reader (January 24, 1992). — J.R.

HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Coppola

Written by Bahr and Hickenlooper.

A little over a decade ago in an English film magazine I made a rather foolish prediction: “Perhaps by the 90s a sufficient time gap will have elapsed to allow [American] filmmakers to approach the subject of Vietnam in a more detached, balanced, and analytical manner.” Cockeyed optimist that I was, I reasoned that some historical distance would allow certain blank spots in our knowledge and understanding of Vietnam to be filled — not doused in amber and framed in gold while remaining blank spots. I took to heart Ernest Hemingway’s famous declaration in a Paris Review interview: “If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.” I reasoned that the gaping holes in our Vietnam cover story would finally reduce that protective garment to tatters and permit some light to shine through.

Little did I know that the holes themselves would come to be defined as points of illumination — a bit like George Bush’s “thousand points of light” — and would decorate our consciousness like Christmas trees. I offer as exhibit A Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a compulsively watchable, fairly entertaining, and superficially informative documentary about the making of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979); it premiered on cable late last year, wound up on a few critics’ ten-best lists, and is currently showing at the Fine Arts. A great deal of the film is drawn from location footage shot by Coppola’s wife Eleanor, as well as from some tape recordings she made of private conversations with her husband during the same period. This material is buttressed with recent interviews of many participants and observers — among them Francis and Eleanor Coppola; writer John Milius; actors Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Sam Bottoms, Larry Fishburne, and Dennis Hopper; producers Tom Sternberg and Fred Roos; production designer Dean Tavoularis; and George Lucas, who was originally set to direct the picture around 1969, before the project was shelved for lack of interest from the major studios.

Like much of Coppola’s best work – The Conversation, the Godfather trilogy – Apocalypse Now teeters on the edge of greatness, and perhaps it wouldn’t teeter at all if greatness weren’t so palpably what it was lusting after. To my mind it functions best as a series of superbly realized set pieces bracketed by a certain amount of pretentious guff, some of which might be traced back to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, the movie’s point of departure. (”Is anything,” asked critic F.R. Leavis, “added to the oppressive mysteriousness of the Congo by such sentences as: ‘It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention — ‘?”) But much of the guff, I’d wager, stems from the fact that Coppola never quite worked out what he wanted to say, a fact he often acknowledged at the time and for which there’s plenty of evidence in Hearts of Darkness. Indeed, Coppola’s continuing doubt and verbal self-laceration — at one point he calls the film “The Idiodyssey” — is a major element of the saga being celebrated here: the Passion of the Artist writ large, made to seem far more important than the mere suffering and deaths of a few hundred thousand nameless and faceless peasants (and American soldiers) across the South China Sea.

My point is that this documentary only compounds and intensifies a refusal to deal with Vietnam that existed in embryo even in Coppola’s film. The only chance Apocalypse Now had to succeed commercially was if it pleased everyone — hawks, doves, and everybody in between. Somehow it achieved that, not merely confirming everyone’s prejudices about the war simultaneously but also convincing members of each faction that it was speaking only to them. At the time journalist Deirdre English compared Apocalypse Now to the unabashedly racist The Deer Hunter, pointing out that each film “takes a fabricated act of Vietnamese terror” — the ultrasadistic Russian roulette game of The Deer Hunter, the hacking off of inoculated children’s arms (recounted in a climactic monologue by Marlon Brando) in Apocalypse – “and elevates it to become the central metaphor of the war.” Both fabrications undoubtedly grew out of tall tales told by returning American soldiers — I assume they’re fabrications because I’ve yet to see any documentary evidence of either — and they play a central ideological role in both films by furnishing a myth and metaphor to plug up the gaping hole in our understanding of what that war and that country were all about.

The opening lines of Hearts of Darkness, spoken by Francis Coppola at the 1979 Cannes film festival, are characteristic of the overall thrust of the documentary and of the rhetoric surrounding Apocalypse Now from its inception: “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like — it was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”

Coppola’s movie is a nice late-70s liberal statement about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the excess it entailed — and I don’t intend “nice” or “late-70s liberal” to be condescending. For all its failings and shortcomings, Apocalypse Now was probably the best big-budget, big-statement American movie about the Vietnam war that we had in the 70s, and it’s questionable whether we’ve seen much improvement in this subgenre since. Platoon clearly is more authentic, and Full Metal Jacket at its best may conjure up more profound ideas about warfare, but neither film comes close to the total experience of spaced-out insanity and sensory overload that Coppola’s Cannes statement suggests and that his movie amply furnishes.

But consider what Coppola actually says: his movie is Vietnam, and by Vietnam he means “us,” not “them”; Americans, not Vietnamese. Milius put together his hawkish script out of his own imagination and tales told him by returning soldiers; he himself had no firsthand experience. Coppola had no such experience either, though he viewed U.S. involvement more skeptically. He shot the entire film in the Philippines, selected for its reputed topographical similarity to Vietnam. Only after all the footage was shot did he hire Michael Herr — the author of a first-rate book of reportage about Americans fighting in Vietnam, Dispatches – to write the film’s very effective offscreen commentary, delivered by the hero, Willard (Sheen).

Curiously, though Herr is the only creative member of the Apocalypse Now team who had firsthand knowledge of Vietnam, he isn’t interviewed or even mentioned in Hearts of Darkness. Of course Herr’s view of the war is considerably to the left of Milius’s “Conan the Barbarian” outlook. (Usually when we see Milius in this film, he’s chortling with enjoyment over his favorite instances of macho piggishness, including a favorable humorous comparison of Coppola with Hitler and himself with Gerd von Rundstedt.) Political views are not supposed to matter, however, because the facts of the war are seen as piffling next to the glorious spectacle of an American director shooting a movie in Southeast Asia. As a press release puts it, “Hearts of Darkness is an examination of Francis Coppola — a director who, at the height of his political and creative powers, placed himself, his family and his crew in a set of dangerous circumstances to discover the truths in Conrad’s story and inside himself.” Or as his wife puts it at one point, “He’d gone to the threshold of his sanity . . . or something.”

Whatever that “something” is, Vietnam isn’t within light-years of it, though it’s supposed to be the subject of the film — sort of. When Eleanor Coppola arrives in the Philippines with her three children in March 1976, she approvingly quotes her daughter’s remark: “It looks like the Disneyland jungle tour.” In the first year, deals are made with Ferdinand Marcos for a fleet of helicopters (some of them later called away in the middle of a take to fight a civil war in the south), 600 or so natives are hired at a dollar a day to build a temple set, typhoons and monsoons destroy the sets, the lead actor is replaced (Sheen for Harvey Keitel) after a week’s shooting, and Sheen’s major heart attack causes further delays. More than a year after her arrival, Eleanor Coppola films a local Philippine ritual that involves drinking, dancing, and the slaughter of pigs and chickens; profoundly moved, she drags her husband to the next ceremony, the slaughter of a carabao. The carabao is then eaten at a festival, and as a gesture of respect the mayor gives Francis Coppola the “best part,” the heart. Much later, when Coppola is shooting the final scene of Apocalypse Now, he shows the sacrificial killing of a carabao at the same time that Willard emerges from the primordial slime of the river to keep his date with destiny and murder Kurtz (Brando), the mad officer he’s been ordered to “terminate with extreme prejudice.”

What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with Vietnam? Of course the Philippines and Vietnam are both in Southeast Asia. But let’s suppose that North Vietnam had invaded the United States in the midst of a civil war. How would we feel if a Vietnamese filmmaker proceeded to Mexico to make a film about our war and wound up shooting a bullfight he happened to visit as a potent example of the activities of typical U.S. savages? And what if he then declared to the press, “My film is not about the United States. It is the United States. It’s what it was really like . . . it was crazy”?

“What it was really like” means, of course, what it was like for Americans in Vietnam — Herr’s subject in Dispatches — not what it was like for Vietnamese. And the main poetic insight of Apocalypse Now — which borrows more than just a page or two from Herr — is that, for Americans at least, Vietnam was just like a movie. In Hearts of Darkness Coppola remarks at one point, “A film director is one of the last dictatorial posts left in a world getting more and more democratic.” Clearly Coppola is likening himself to Kurtz, and similar comments crop up frequently in the documentary — as well they should, because above all else Apocalypse Now is a movie about being a movie director. The key sequence, the one everyone remembers, is Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Duvall) of the Ninth Air Cavalry attacking a Vietcong beachhead with Wagner blaring from the helicopters and soldiers surfing ecstatically behind the boats. (The character of Kilgore, modeled mainly on George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, offers a comic preview of Kurtz.) We don’t need Hearts of Darkness to tell us that Kilgore’s “achievement” in this attack parallels Coppola’s achievement in setting up and executing the sequence.

To my mind, Willard functions best as first-person narrator and observer, and Kurtz functions best as his and our narrative destination (we encounter him only toward the end of the story, as we do in the Conrad novella). As characters they’re both pompous, boring macho types who seem to spend much of their time shadowboxing, quoting T.S. Eliot, or sucking on pieces of exotic fruit. (Another inspiration for Apocalypse Now may be Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, which links the fanaticism of a mad conquistador with that of the film director. But in Herzog’s film we don’t have to wait for the madman to make a grand entrance; he’s there and raving from the beginning.) The true meaning of Conrad’s story comes from what the narrator encounters on his trip down the river en route to Kurtz, and the same could be said for Coppola’s movie; these encounters are like clues to a mystery, but they’re much more suggestive and interesting when they remain clues, like the encounter with Kilgore.

It’s entirely to the credit of Hearts of Darkness that it traces Apocalypse Now back to Orson Welles’s adaptations of Conrad’s novella. Welles’s first half-hour adaptation for radio, with Ray Collins as Marlow and himself as Kurtz, aired on November 6, 1938, exactly one week after his famous War of the Worlds broadcast. In 1939 Welles developed an ambitious screenplay (never produced) that updated the story to make it reflect the rise of totalitarianism in western Europe — as well as colonialist ventures in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere in Africa — and that was constructed around an extremely daring use of the first-person camera, which took the place of Marlow. Welles’s second (and much better) radio adaptation, with Welles playing both Marlow and Kurtz, derived some of its ideas from the screenplay and was broadcast on March 13, 1945. The documentary cites only the first two adaptations and plays several excerpts from Welles’s radio narration, but unless my ears were playing tricks on me, these snippets come from both radio shows, not just the first.

The Welles connection is worth bearing in mind, in any case, because Apocalypse Now reeks of his influence: not only the portentous offscreen narration, first-person camera angles, and juicy larger-than-life character acting, but much of the chiaroscuro and other lighting effects of Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. Even the opening shot — a close-up of Willard’s face shown upside down — seems a direct steal of the opening shots from two Welles films, Othello and The Trial. It’s also worth pointing out that if Welles’s screenplay had been filmed, it would almost certainly have had a much more pointed contemporary relevance than Coppola’s version of the story.

It’s also to the credit of Hearts of Darkness that in most of the clips from Apocalypse Now the original ‘Scope format is preserved rather than cut down to the usual video-screen ratio. Moreover, many of the participants interviewed in the film show a sophisticated awareness of the ambiguity of their enterprise. (We’re told a lot about the massive drug consumption; Frederic Forrest remarks at one point, “We felt like we really weren’t there,” and Sam Bottoms admits to using pot, LSD, speed, and alcohol between as well as during various takes. Indeed, the communal high may have been the crew and cast’s closest spiritual link to American soldiers in Vietnam, and this registers all the way through the picture.)

Missing from this production story are the scenes shot with Harvey Keitel as Willard, as well as the voice tracks of the heated script conferences between Coppola and Brando, some of which we briefly see. (We do, however, see Brando blow a couple of takes, in one case by announcing he’s just swallowed a bug.) But the biggest absence in Hearts of Darkness is not Vietnam itself but the shadow of any awareness that it’s missing. Like Willard and Coppola, we’re still journeying into ourselves — and still coming up with the same old nonanswers. In effect we’ve been triumphantly brought to the same level of understanding experienced by Coppola’s daughter when she observed: “It looks like the Disneyland jungle tour.”