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Talking Back to the Screen (Toronto 1992)

From Film Comment, November-December 1992. I’m not sure which of the stills directly below is printed backwards, so I’m including both of them.– J.R.

My 13th year at the Toronto Festival of Festivals reconfirmed my feeling that it’s large enough to satisfy many disparate and even contradictory viewing agendas. But even with a reported 320 films this year, it can’t be said to accommodate every taste. That is, one can generally count these days on the festival showing every new film by Paul Cox, Manoel de Oliveira, Henry Jaglom, Stanley Kwan, and Monika Treut, but not every new feature by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Raul Ruiz, or Trinh T. Minh-ha (whose latest offerings were all absent this year) — or any work at all by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Harun Farocki, or Leslie Thornton. Certain thresholds are maintained regarding difficulty, and while Toronto audiences are possibly the most polite and appreciative that I know of anywhere, the programmers don’t seem eager to test their limits. After the screening of his delightful and significantly titled Careful, Winnipeg weirdo Guy Maddin pointedly observed that if a Canadian sees a great movie, he or she says it’s pretty good, and if a Canadian sees a terrible movie, he or she says it’s pretty good. Going with the flow, I found all the movies I saw in Toronto this year pretty good.

At least one of them, however, was flat-out great — the best Hong Kong film I’ve ever seen, and one that whets my appetite for something I previously had no contact with, the silent Chinese cinema. Known as Ruan Ling Yu in Mandarin, Center Stage (or Centre Stage) when it showed in Berlin, and now Actress, Stanley Kwan’s feature about Ruan Ling Yu (1910-1935) — the silent tragedienne of the Shanghai film studios, known as the Chinese Garbo — is an awesome object lesson in how to treat both history and film history so that they grow rather than recede in our psyches. Coscripted by Chiao Hsiung-Ping [better known in the West as Peggy Chiao], the polemical and prolific Taiwanese film critic (she published nine books last year, and is closely identified with the Taiwanese New Wave) and Qiu Gangjian (the eclectic director of Ming Ghost, who has translated Jean Genet into Mandarin), Actress intercuts documentary research with both archival evidence and fictional re-creations so that all three become part of a complex weave, while Kwan’s beautiful mise en scène integrates painted black-and-white backdrops (both on and off simulated Shanghai soundstages) with three-dimensional color sets behind worshipful framings of Maggie Cheung as Ruan to create similarly ambigous perspectives in the heart and mind. Cheung was the last-minute replacement for the less “lightweight” Mainland actress Anita Mui. but imagining Actress without Cheung’s classy poise and incandescent presence is tantamount to visualizing Gertrud in color (as Dreyer originally conceived it).

Our usual sense of how movies should treat the past seems to follow the model of Disneyland’s “Main Street, U..S.A.,” where every brick and shingle is five-eighths the original size so we don’t feel overwhelmed by the world of our ancestors. This movie, by contrast, is so open-ended and speculative about both the Thirties and why its heroine committed suicide (something that we’ll never truly have the final story on, although gossip-mongering in the press probably played an important role) that it becomes infinitely vaster than the present. It’s a film that refuses closure and never ceases to blossom in one’s imagination over its spellbinding 146 minutes. Indeed, the superiority of past to present is even a function of the films’ form, not merely an expression of its content. Interview with surviving witnesses and superficial chats about Ruan between Kwan and Cheung in black-and-white super-8 and video are easily surpassed in depth and resonance by re-creations of the past in color, but these gorgeous re-creations are exceeded in turn by clips from Ruan’s ravishing silent pictures. It could be argued that the relative flatness and superficiality of the present here, as in Kwan’s Rouge (1988), is not necessarily part of the filmmaker’s conscious design, but frankly I couldn’t care less: as with Gilda, it’s the results that count, and the luminosity of this film’s relationship with the past is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in movies all year. (By contrast, the most that a stateside masterpiece like Unforgiven can do is reconcile us to our own awfulness as compulsive self-deceivers — useful work, but not exactly energizing on the same level.)

Actress has not fared well in Hong Kong because, as with Wong Kar-wai‘s Days of Being Wild (1990), there is no place — yet — for art films in that populist movie culture. I don’t know about the fate of Li Shaohong’s Family Portrait in mainland China, but most of my Western and Asian friends who’ve seen it like it less than I do, perhaps because there is no place yet for comic soap opera in their arthouse view of “Fifth Generation” Chinese cinema. For me, quite apart from the director [see photo below]’s adroit and McCarey-like handling of her actors, this movie is already fascinating for its glimpses of contemporary life in Beijing — everything from the everyday censorship in the photojournalist hero’s session with a magazine editor to a scene of outdoor social dancing, to a police raid of a black-market labor pool.

The plot itself seems quintessentially Chinese: an urban photographer discovers that his first wife –a peasant he married when he was sent to the country during the Maoist period — has died, leaving behind a young son whom he unknowingly fathered. Bringing this boy to the city, the hero parks him at his darkroom and proceeds to dither, not knowing how to break the news to his second wife and son, especially after he learns his wife is pregnant again and has to go for an abortion. Comically matter-of-fact and intermittently critical of all its characters, Family Portrait coveys a directness and freshness that has not been apparent in the artier 5G work I’ve seen (including the same director’s previous feature, Bloody Dawn, a rather abstruse adaptation of García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But, sad to say, curiosity about how ordinary people in the world’s largest country currently live — as opposed to the consumerist male fantasy of what it might be like to have three wives and a château in Raise the Red Lantern — is apparently not wide enough to get this film a U.S. distributor.

***

Beautifully assured in its economical, elliptical storytelling and its selective uses of both color and sound, Dana Rotberg’s corrosive, Bressonian, and Mexican second feature Angel of Fear follows the embittered progress of a 13-year-old circus performer from her impregnation by her dying father (a clown) to her adoption by a religious fanatic who runs a traveling puppet show with her two sons. Though the harshness of the impoverished milieu and the violence of the plot make this sound like a shocker (”Jodorowsky meets Tennessee Williams,” a New York colleague said approvingly), what’s more impressive about this tale of hatred and revenge is the steely calm and quiet control with which Rotberg tells it.

Much more popular was Sally Potter’s sumptuous, painless,and politically correct adaptation of Virgina Woolf’s Orlando, with an adept star turn by Tilda Swinton — pleasurable to the eye and (thanks to Potter’s composing and singing talents) the ear, though a mite simple and academic in its dogged efforts to provide the ultimate mainstreaming of Seventies Screen theory. As a longtime fan of Potter’s unheralded previous feature, The Gold Diggers (1983) — which I find wittier, stranger, and more beautiful (with Babette Mangolte’s best black-and-white cinematography to date) — I can readily understand her decision to aim for the upscale Greenaway market after nine years in purgatory, but my strongest hope for Orlando is that it will stimulate enough interest in the earlier movie to make a long-delayed video release feasible. [2010 postscript: Another 18 years would pass before this happened, when a DVD was finally released by the BFI earlier this year.]

English-language independent features in Toronto seemed to fall into two general categories: screaming Italians à la Scorsese (Laws of Gravity [see above], Mac, Reservoir Dogs) and quaint cultural-ethnic interfacing à la Jarmusch (Autumn Moon [see above], In the Soup, Zebrahead). Quentin Tarantino’s grisly Reservoir Dogs, which won Toronto’s first International Critics’ Prize for best first feature, was probably the best of this lot, though the direction of actors in Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity was also quite impressive.

Less marketable but more trailblazing that either were two dirt-cheap, hour-long videos transferred to 16mm by New York filmmakers looking for a way out of current budget crunches. Michael Almereyda’s Another Girl, Another Planet, shot with a $40 PXL-vision camera in a few claustrophobic locations, may be a monetary step down from his Kansas comedy Twister (1989), but for me it’s a step up in poetic ambience, actorly funk, and French New Wave charm, with funnier dialogue to boot. The only drawback is that its intimacy is better served by video than by film, but without a film transfer it couldn’t have shown at the festival. Armond White has already written in these pages about Mark Rappaport’s deceptively comic and ultimately tragic Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (July-August), so let me simply add here that its brilliant uses of thematic and gestural indexing suggest a fascinating new direction for film criticism — not a form of criticism amenable to print, but certainly one that’s available to anyone with two VCRs and some time and thought to spare. Given the almost total passivity of the audience as it’s currently constituted, which the industry uses to validate its escalating abuses, Rappaport’s critique offers a profound utopian alternative: a means of talking back to the screen that potentially could (and should) spark a media revolution.

My only serious criticism of Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography – a superb documentary by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, and Stuart Samuels, coproduced by the American Film Institute — is its subtitle. Notwithstanding a few token clips and talking heads that are awkwardly called upon to represent everything that this survey routinely factors out, the insertion of “American” and/or “Hollywood” before “Cinematography” would be more honest and accurate. Otherwise, this conventionally but impeccably made sound-bite and image-bite account of movie cinematographers benefits not only from the correct aspect-ratio clips but also from the erudition, intelligence, and ideas of the artists themselves. Whether it’s Ernest Dickerson recalling his childhood responses to Guy Green’s work on the 1948 Oliver Twist or the late Nestor Almendros comparing the respective light sources of lanterns in Murnau’s Sunrise and Malick’s Days of Heaven, the strongest thing about the commentaries here is that they deal with specifics: Gordon Willis explaining how his lighting on The Godfather was largely dictated by Brando’s makeup, Vittorio Storaro recounting the intricate symbolic color coding he had in mind for The Last Emperor.

Though hardly major, Manoel de Oliveira’s The Day of Despair is still a marked improvement over his Divine Comedy of last year, and at 76 minutes it provides a kind of piquant afterthought to the four-hour Doomed Love (1978) and the nearly three-hour Francisca (1981), perhaps his two greatest works. The first of these adapts a famous work by the 19th century Portuguese novelist Camilo Castelo Branco; the second adapts a novel about Castelo Braco; and The Day of Despair — based on Castelo Branco’s correspondence towards the end of his life, when his encroaching blindness drove him to suicide — completes the trilogy. Castelo Branco died at 65; Oliveira is about to turn 84. What continues to inspire awe about the prolific late flowering of this Portuguese Dreyer is how varied yet homogeneous his garden of works has become. No two Oliveira films are alike, yet in its obsession with the full measure of the romantic spirit this modernist epistolary film provides a haunting commentary on many of the others.

– Film Comment, November-December 1992; tweaked February 11, 2010

Cornucoppola [BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA]

From the Chicago Reader (November 27, 1992). — J.R.

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Written by James V. Hart

With Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Sadie Frost, Tom Waits, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Bill Campbell.

Geographical spread accounts for some of the major differences between the film culture in this country and the various film cultures in Europe. While overseas the principal film-production centers and intellectual centers are usually located in the same cities — Paris, Rome, London, Madrid, Lisbon, Stockholm, Budapest, Prague — most of the United States stretches between our main film-production center, Hollywood and environs, and our main intellectual center, New York. The practical consequence is that our left hand hasn’t the faintest idea what our right hand is doing.

So much for the geographical split. What might be called the institutional gap is even worse. I’m referring to the profound lack of communication between the film industry (including most movie reviewers) and academic film studies (including intellectuals in adjacent or related fields). You want examples? Look at the collected reviews of Pauline Kael since the early 70s, when academic film study in the U.S. was just getting started, and you’ll be hard put to find a shred of evidence in more than two decades of energetic writing that such studies existed at all. Look at the reviews of nearly all her journalistic colleagues during the same period and the same absence is painfully apparent.

Consider that major European academics such as Umberto Eco and the late Roland Barthes have written about movies for popular newspapers and magazines, but their U.S. counterparts are considered much too esoteric for such exposure — which doesn’t mean that American readers are dumber, only that American editors (and perhaps writers) are more restrictive. Or consider that European TV stations think nothing of routinely programming series devoted to key Hollywood directors such as Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger, and Douglas Sirk, but the very idea of Cinemax or the Movie Channel or American Movie Classics making such a highbrow gesture more than once in a blue moon would send shock waves through the industry. (I can’t imagine it bothering viewers; European TV watchers certainly haven’t been bothered, which is why these directors are much better known over there than here.) Similarly, when TV channels abroad show ‘Scope films in their original formats, a process known as letterboxing, the reasons are usually artistic. Here, the selection by cable channels of what to letterbox seems almost totally arbitrary (Pillow Talk but not The Tarnished Angels, for instance); this Sunday TNT is presenting a whole day of letterboxed movies, but the titles selected suggest that artistic considerations had little or nothing to do with the choices. Finally, while English movie reviewers on TV and in national newspapers periodically acknowledge the existence of academic film theory — almost exclusively, I should add, in order to jeer at it — here the possibility of it even being attacked in the national press seems well beyond the pale.

These reflections are inspired in part by some curious critical responses to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by far Francis Coppola’s most European-influenced movie to date. These responses testify to the fact that we still have two autonomous film cultures that are barely on speaking terms. (As someone who has often tried to work in both worlds and occasionally served as an interpreter between them, I would add that the noncommunication goes both ways; some film professors are every bit as indifferent to the industry and to mainstream critics as these critics and the industry are to them.)

I could be wrong, but I’ll bet academic critics will have a field day with Coppola’s swarming, overpacked horror extravaganza once they have a chance to digest it. (I’d give them about half a year to nine months —  roughly the time it takes for the movie to come out on video.) For one thing, it’s a movie that would benefit from excerpting and repeated viewings, two classroom standbys. For another, it seizes on all sorts of ideas that were kicking around certain film departments 10 or 15 years ago, such as the notion that movies and psychoanalysis got started around the same time (which makes Stoker’s 1897 novel contemporaneous with both), and concepts involving female desire, sexual hysteria, and hypnosis that were related to some of Freud’s early cases. (It may not be irrelevant that these ideas were au courant around the time Coppola’s Zoetrope studio in San Francisco was giving free office space to Camera Obscura, “A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory” that still comes out fairly regularly.)

Yet despite all this academic ripeness — and probably more concepts and allusions per square inch than any Coppola movie since Apocalypse Now – most mainstream reviewers have been suggesting that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is dull and bereft of ideas, or, in the case of Vincent Canby in the New York Times, celebrating it as a triumph of style with little meaning. On Siskel and Ebert’s TV show, where Ebert somewhat apologetically gave it a “thumbs up” because of how it looked, Siskel raked him over the coals for being so indulgent with such a boring and empty movie.

Boring? Empty? These adjectives accurately describe most Hollywood pictures I see week after week, all of which have easily definable heroes, plots, conflicts, and resolutions, and as few ideas of any kind as possible — visual, thematic, stylistic, or otherwise. If anything, Bram Stoker’s Dracula suffers from a surfeit of such ideas, not to mention a surfeit of characters and action. If you require your entertainments to be easy to follow and to synopsize or review afterward, you’d be better off heading for Aladdin.

Here’s a partial list of what you get in this postmodernist stew:

(1) Several alternating narrators, creating a somewhat dispersed narrative that eventually comes together only in relation to the love story (see number ten below).

(2) Subtitled Romanian dialogue. Along with the heavily accented voices of various narrators and characters, this goes a long way toward making this the most “Europeanized” of Coppola’s pictures. When an American character turns up — a quasi-comic Texan named Quincey P. Morris (Bill Campbell), one of the suitors of Lucy (Sadie Frost) — we’re certainly not encouraged to regard him as the hippest guy around, as we would in a “normal” American picture.

(3) Musings on early models of 20th-century technologies (including the typewriter and phonograph as well as the “cinematograph”) and on the relation of venereal diseases to culture (”syphilisation” is a key pun). Some reviewers have mentioned AIDS as an implicit thematic concern; maybe so, but I don’t see it, and I certainly don’t see the movie contributing any insights on the topic.

(4) Reflections on the purchase of real estate. “Why ten houses in such precise locations in London?” Jonathan Harker asks Dracula after he goes to Transylvania to visit him. “Is it to raise the market value?”

(5) Diverse blood rituals, spectacles, and allegories relating to Catholicism. A wedding is intercut with a bestial sexual ravishment, recalling the juxtapositions of baptism with murder in The Godfather; elsewhere, a vampire is repelled by a wafer used in the mass.

(6) Many fancy and often lovely superimpositions and various baroque visual transitions drawn from silent movies.

(7) Monsters that go through so many incarnations that at times it’s hard to be sure whether they’re the same characters — an ambiguity that increases the dispersed narrative effect. Dracula obviously holds the record in this regard, but other vampires in the movie are put through a significant number of changes as well.

(8) Multiple evocations of decadent European art in diverse forms, from turn-of-the-century writers Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde and artists Gustav Klimt and Aubrey Beardsley to present-day filmmakers Werner Schroeter (evoked especially in an arbor in Lucy’s garden that seems straight out of The Death of Maria Malibran) and Raul Ruiz (recalled in a few striking deep-focus, diptych compositions featuring letters and journals in the foreground and other details in the background).

(9) Countless borrowings from diverse examples of either German or German-influenced movie expressionism. This includes malignant city maps and eyes in the sky from early Fritz Lang, shadows from Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows, multiple images from Murnau’s Faust (including rising rings of fire, rapid, subjectively framed nocturnal flights recalling the flight of Mephistopheles, and at least one of the demonic incarnations of Mephistopheles himself), silhouetted dancers behind frosted glass that seem straight out of Vampyr, an ingenue in a glass coffin from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a set of dreamlike opening images clearly drawn from Citizen Kane’s prologue, a woman rising erotically out of a poollike bed that might well have been suggested by Eraserhead, and Wagnerian vistas and cameos that occasionally suggest Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

(10) Finally, smack dab in the middle of all this, a florid, romantic love story between Dracula (Gary Oldman) and Mina (Winona Ryder), complete with an orchestral theme evoking the movie scores of Miklos Rozsa. One should add that while the treatment of female sexuality as predatory (making all the female characters with the possible exception of Mina erotically interchangeable) is conventionally Victorian and therefore sexist, the generally positive treatment accorded to Mina’s sexuality, even when it intersects with vampiristic blood lust, might deserve the adjective “feminist.”

Of course it’s all too much — which makes one wonder why some reviewers are implying it isn’t nearly enough. One reason is that “too much” can be read as a symptom of too little when it comes to ideas. (The references to The Golden Bough and “The Hollow Men” in the pretentious final sequence of Apocalypse Now suggest, among other things, that Coppola was stuck for an ending.) Another is that an unwanted busyness and complexity can easily produce boredom, a lazy refusal to participate in the various games a screenwriter and director are proposing.

Perhaps the most important of these games is reverting to the four separate narrators of Bram Stoker’s novel rather than following the “objective” narration of the corny American stage adaptation of Hamilton Deane and John Balderston, which premiered 30 years after the novel’s publication and was the source of all the major film versions of Dracula, at least in English. (Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart’s predecessor in this respect is Orson Welles, whose highly inventive 1938 radio adaptation of the novel, cowritten with John Houseman, was the first of his weekly hour-long Mercury shows, broadcast 17 weeks before The War of the Worlds.)

The relative difficulty of Bram Stoker’s Dracula provides an interesting riposte to the dubious evolutionary theory that claims art keeps getting more sophisticated and complex. While Jean-Luc Godard has pointedly remarked (I quote from memory) that we speak of seeing “old Griffith films” but not of reading “old” Dickens novels, the fact remains that Stoker’s story-telling method of using the letters, journals, and diary entries of four major characters and several minor ones — accessible enough to make his book a best-seller in 1897  – is still too difficult for some people in a movie 95 years later, even though Hart and Coppola offer a highly simplified version of his method. The main reason for this difficulty may be the absurd simplifications of most contemporary Hollywood movies, which generally depend on single identification figures and fairly unambiguous story lines, and therefore do nothing to prepare us for polyphonic movies like this.

I don’t mean to exclude myself from this problem, as I often have more than a little trouble following the idiot plots of “normal” movies. Thanks to what seemed like narrative overload the first time around, I was periodically disengaged from Bram Stoker’s Dracula as plot before getting pulled back again. But when I returned to the movie a couple of days later, I found nearly all of it easy to follow and realized how much of my difficulty came from the movie’s refusal to stick with a single protagonist and identification figure all the way through. I suspect that many of my colleagues grew impatient because Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), who starts off like the hero in the first long sequence, becomes passive, then quite secondary to the narrative for increasingly long stretches, and by the end virtually irrelevant.

A triumph of studio filmmaking, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is so much a matter of lovely details (some isolated, some orchestrated) that it can certainly be accused of runaway formalism at times. Sometimes these details are loving re-creations — an evocation of jerky 1897 filmmaking in a bustling London street scene where Mina and Dracula first meet (and where a sandwich board advertises a Hamlet at the Lyceum with the famous actor Henry Irving, Stoker’s real-life employer and the principal model for Dracula). Sometimes they’re careful lab effects (a match dissolve from two teeth marks to pinpoints of light in a wolf’s eyes), and sometimes they’re beautifully crafted special effects (Dracula’s fangs at one point seem to grow before our eyes). As in Coppola’s Rumble Fish, images are indulged to the point where they often overtake their narrative pretexts; each patch of plot seems to be regarded as a canvas for visual improvisation and elaboration rather than thematic elucidation.

What you don’t get, by and large, are the narrative cohesion and continuity of a vampire classic like George Romero’s neglected Martin or even the chills most horror movies aim for. There are a few disturbing or at least offbeat details — Dracula shaving Harker’s neck from behind is a priceless eerie moment, and there are others nearly as good — but hardly any genuinely scary ones. The Count’s first Transylvanian appearance –with his hair in a double bun that’s the same general shape as Mickey Mouse’s ears, and his accent too reminiscent of Bela Lugosi’s — is so camplike that we can’t be seriously frightened by him afterward. Even when he offers his three erotic vampire brides a newborn baby to devour instead of Harker, one essentially feels he’s holding up his end of the bargain rather than cowing us with his ruthlessness. For spectators hoping to be frightened out of their wits, this is surely a flaw. But the film finds so many other ways of entertaining and provoking us that it’s forgivable, even in a vampire picture.

Simple Men

The third feature by Hal Hartley (The Unbelievble Truth, Trust) stars Robert Burke as a small-time computer criminal who’s just been betrayed by his girlfriend. He teams up with his younger brother (William Sage) to look for their runaway father, a radical activist, and in the course of their search they meet a couple of unusual women, the proprietress of an oyster bar (Karen Sillas) and an epileptic Romanian (Elina Lowensohn). Closer in spirit to the Godardian mannerism of Hartley’s shorts than to his more naturalistic previous features–though with the same impulse toward the manic (and mantric) repetitions of both–this has his best and funniest dialogue to date. It’s not entirely clear where this movie winds up, but it’s a provocative journey. With Martin Donovan and Mark Chandler Bailey. (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, November 27 through December 3)

Samantha

Martha Plimpton stars as the title heroine–a classical musician who discovers on her 21st birthday that she’s adopted and undergoes an extreme identity crisis. It’s a quirky enough premise to build a whimsical comedy on, and first-time director Stephen La Rocque, who wrote this with John Golden, sees the situation and the unstereotypical characters with such freshness that he keeps one interested and amused. The other cast members certainly help–Hector Elizondo and Mary Kay Place as the adoptive parents, Dermot Mulroney as a childhood friend and fellow musician, Ione Skye as his huffy girlfriend–and the integral use of chamber music, with Mulroney actually playing his own cello parts, is often delightful. (Pipers Alley)

Rock Criticism

From the November 20, 1992 Chicago Reader. –J.R.

ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Mark Rappaport

With Rock Hudson and Eric Farr.

In the creation of art, the verb is there to authenticate the subject with the same name.

To paint is the act of painting. . . . To write becomes the act of writing and of the writer. To film, that is, to record a sight and project it, is the act of cinema and of the makers of films . . .

Only television has no creative act or verb to authenticate it. That’s because the act of television both falls short of communication and goes beyond it. It doesn’t create any goods, in fact, what is worse, it distributes them without their ever having been created. To program is the only verb of television. That implies suffering rather than release. — Jean-Luc Godard

You were a great star, Mr. Hudson — one of the biggest. Sorry it all had to end like this. — director Mark Rappaport’s voice in Rock Hudson’s Home Movies

The precipitous decline in the quality of American movies since the 1970s can be attributed to several factors, but three interconnected changes in U.S. film culture seem especially relevant: (1) the near disappearance of serious film criticism and the enormous growth of film publicity, which has effectively replaced criticism; (2) the gutting and political muzzling of an already minuscule program of state funding for independent filmmakers, a key means of survival for artistic filmmaking elsewhere in the world; and (3) the proliferation of VCRs and the simultaneous decline of communal public spaces for filmgoing.

The first two changes are to my mind unambiguous disasters that have effectively handed over the future of American cinema to stupid, tasteless merchandisers with none of the old studio heads’ savvy. The current moguls, without imagination or vision, have no compunction whatever about forcing their demographic conclusions on audiences, both developing and exploiting the spectator’s passivity in relation to the film industry and eliminating most options outside it. The third change, on the other hand, despite the overall damage it’s done to the social and theatrical aspects of moviegoing, also carries a new, radical potential: spectators can become active, critical, creative, and selective — not only more discerning in what they choose to see but producers in their own right.

When I purchased my first VCR, in the early 80s, I spent the first few days creating impromptu montages of films showing on separate channels. I could “cut,” say, from a reaction shot of a frightened Ingrid Thulin in Bergman’s arty The Silence to a shot of Rod Steiger as the villain in Oklahoma!, implying it was Steiger’s “poor Judd” who was upsetting Bergman’s neurotic heroine. A few months later I heard about “scratch videos,” a short-lived English art movement that grew out of comparable play with VCRs (the machines first became widespread in England a year or so before they did in the United States). I never actually saw a scratch video, but I know that experimental film critic Michael O’Pray curated a whole show of them about a decade ago.

Unfortunately, neither my own form of play nor scratch videos remained a creative outlet for many people; the purely passive recording of the creative works of others took over. But in 1989 Jean-Luc Godard broadcast the first two parts of a projected ten-part TV series still in progress, Histoire(s) du cinéma; essentially this series raises the art of scratch videos to the complex polyphonic level of symphonic fugues and Finnegans Wake. (After many screenings at European festivals, these two parts recently premiered in New York at the Museum of Modern Art’s Godard retrospective; whether they will be shown more widely is still unclear — it’s virtually impossible to subtitle them.)

And now Mark Rappaport — one of our finest independent filmmakers, a writer-director essentially forced into silence by the evaporation of state funding until he discovered video, in his 1990 Postcards — has created the first major American video in this genre. A work of revolutionary implications, it both addresses and works within the parameters of all three basic changes in movie culture listed above. (Happily, Rappaport is already at work on more videos involving film clips, and it would be nice to see other filmmakers strapped for cash trying this form on for size.)

A work of radical historiography that seeks to convert us from passive to active spectators, the 63-minute Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, playing at the Film Center this weekend and next, begins with a movie clip of Rock Hudson writing while his voice says offscreen, “In the interest of truth and justice, I have set down the unvarnished facts of my life — my own story in my own words.” Another voice, actor Eric Farr’s, briefly takes over: “And especially in the images of the movies I was in.” Then Hudson’s voice resumes: “Let people judge for themselves.”

Then, while we hear Doris Day sing the title song of Pillow Talk, we see a color still of Hudson looking out an autumnal, windswept window in Written on the Wind; over this appear the words “Rock Hudson,” followed by the remainder of the video’s title, so it reads “Rock Hudson’s HOME MOVIES.” Hudson’s name remains on the screen to become part of two other configurations: “by Rock Hudson and MARK RAPPAPORT” and “starring Rock Hudson and ERIC FARR.”

Hudson’s and Farr’s voices at the beginning, the emblems appropriated from two Hudson movies, and the two kinds of lettering in the credits all point to troubling and unresolved issues about who Rock Hudson was and is in relation to his audience –  artistically, socially, and historically. Such issues even relate to the ways I’ve chosen to represent the script and cast credits in the heading of this review. The video does make some use of Hudson’s own (reported) statements in interviews as well as his movie dialogue (though that was written by others), so it might be argued that the video was “written” by Hudson as well as Rappaport; but I’ve chosen to equate Rappaport’s editorial control with his authorship. On the other hand, it’s surely appropriate to say that the video “stars” Hudson as well as Farr (an actor hired to represent Hudson discussing his own life) despite the fact that Hudson made no decision to appear in it.

The fact that Farr “represents” rather than “plays” Hudson has led some reviewers to criticize his performance, Rappaport’s direction of it, or both. But it seems to me that an accurate impersonation of the star is not at all what this video needs, considering its exploration throughout of a “bifocal” vision that juxtaposes one fiction against another rather than a “real” Hudson against an imagined one.

The emotional register of much of Rappaport’s work has a similar uncomfortable duality: often peppered with clever wisecracks that suggest the urbanity of a Joseph L. Mankiewicz, it’s also suffused with melancholic moods and desperate observations that border on the tragic and the nightmarish. To criticize this duality as failed or strained jokes — a common misreading of Rappaport — is tantamount to rejecting the work’s challenge and complexity and opting for something altogether safer, such as a typical Rock Hudson movie. To accept it is to emerge from a good many laughs and a fair number of winces feeling bereft, sad, and more than a little wiser.

If we raise the ethical question of whether Rappaport has the right to “cast” Rock Hudson without his consent, then surely that question also needs to be raised — and indeed is raised by the video — about the Hollywood movies in which Hudson appeared. Here it’s not a matter of legal agreements but of how little Hudson was in control of these films’ meanings, how much he himself was a text written by Universal Pictures, director Douglas Sirk, various screenwriters, the whims of his public, and so on.

By assigning Hudson a hypothetical voice in this matter Rappaport opens up a fissure in the Rock Hudson text that no amount of studio hype and industry gush can close. For as the video repeatedly shows, the countless movies in which Hudson appeared, always in stereotypical heterosexual roles, were not so much indifferent to Hudson’s homosexuality as they were hyperaware of it, with the grotesque consequence that double entendres and innuendos about Hudson’s sexuality abound. Some of these allusions were undoubtedly accidental, though they’re certainly ready to be unpacked as Freudian slips — “the return of the repressed” in all its fury. Hudson’s apparently passive and compliant response to this constant humiliation becomes equivalent in certain ways to the spectator’s passive and ultimately alienating relationship to Hudson’s false roles and postures, a relationship held in place by the same ideology. Whatever the source of these Freudian slips, it’s impossible to imagine that Hudson was unaware of most of them, and the bulk of Rappaport’s video explores this disquieting fact, outlining a lost chapter in film history that can be perceived today only speculatively, through a fictional gay Hudson we can now juxtapose with the fictional straight one.

But Rock Hudson’s Home Movies is even more a work of film criticism than of film history, though this is criticism couched in the form of pseudoautobiography. It begins with Hudson (Farr) telling us what first made him want to be a movie star: at the age of 12 he saw Jon Hall dive from a ship’s mast in long shot in John Ford’s 1937 The Hurricane (a clip we contemplate more than once). Years later Hudson met the stuntman who made the actual dive and realized he’d been fooled into thinking it was Hall. Hudson’s deception about that film mirrors ours later about Hudson himself, a deception terminated only when Hudson was dying of AIDS in 1985 and, uncharacteristically, decided to reveal this information. Public knowledge of his gayness effectively became universal though Universal had concealed it for years. (The studio kept him under contract for most of the 50s and arranged a brief marriage of convenience for him during that decade to keep the scandal sheets quiet.)

Occasionally drawing on some of the “blue screen” special effects with perspective he employed so strikingly in Postcards, Rappaport places the “real” Rock Hudson (in film clips) and the newly shot fictional Rock Hudson (played by Farr) side by side; at one point Farr even stands slightly behind Hudson with his arm around him. The two Rocks are often dressed almost identically, and the juxtaposition of these two fictional versions of the same mythological figure creates a multifaceted critical perspective on the one we remember from such films as Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Giant, Written on the Wind, A Farewell to Arms, The Tarnished Angels, Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Man’s Favorite Sport?, Send Me No Flowers, Seconds, and Pretty Maids All in a Row – to cite only a few of the many dealt with here. In a brilliant move Barbara Scharres, director of the Film Center, has programmed two of the most interesting of these — Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966) — with the Rappaport video, thereby allowing it to function more effectively as criticism.

The most persuasive critical tool Rappaport uses, and one that would never work as well in print, can best be described as indexing: piling up examples of behavioral or thematic motifs from different films that immediately and fully demonstrate whatever generalization is being made. Early in the video, for example, we’re asked to ponder the frequency and meaning of interrupted kisses in Hudson’s movies, then treated to five of them in a row, followed by a couple of Hudson’s sustained “scorchers” for contrast. Finally we see the most memorable and disturbing of all the interrupted kisses — when a figure in a skeleton costume bursts in on Hudson and Dorothy Malone during the New Orleans Mardi Gras in The Tarnished Angels. This clip not only serves as a climax to the index entry (which one might call “Kisses, interrupted”), but offers the beginning of another entry (”Death, premonitions of”) that’s picked up much later in the video. (If sexuality is the video’s major subject, death is just as surely its minor theme, often calling to mind Jean Cocteau’s observation that “the cinema films death at work.”)

The most staggering number of index entries undoubtedly are the clips of men cruising one another in Hudson’s movies; by my count, there are five dozen examples in the video, and their cumulative impact is both devastating and hilarious. These instances of male flirtation are presented in various subcategories (such as the male cruising in Douglas Sirk movies and what Rappaport calls “pedagogical eros”) and even certain sub-subcategories (such as the moments of physical contact between Hudson and Otto Kruger, the teacher figure in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, and moments of lustful eye contact between Hudson and Tony Randall in the 60s Doris Day trilogy of Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, and Send Me No Flowers). We’re also given samples of Hudson’s apparent on-screen flirtations with Kirk Douglas, Burl Ives, John Wayne (”putting the make on Duke”), Earl Holliman, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Vittorio De Sica, among others. Rappaport clearly does not feel obliged to limit his observations to Hudson movies, showing us the same suggestive dialogue between male buddies in two versions of A Farewell to Arms filmed a quarter of a century apart — one between Adolphe Menjou and Gary Cooper, the other between De Sica and Hudson.

Although a few die-hard auteurists have had trouble with Rock Hudson’s Home Movies because it emphasizes societal lies and ideological tics over “timeless” personal visions, Rappaport is much too astute to ignore how relevant such directors as Sirk and Howard Hawks are to his arguments. Rappaport links Sirk, who virtually discovered and trained Hudson as a star, to the mentor Kruger plays in Magnificent Obsession without implying that Sirk was gay. (”Pedagogical eros” obviously refers to a lot more besides what some men may do in bed with one another.)

In Hawks’s Man’s Favorite Sport?, Rappaport reads Hudson’s role as “a fishing expert who can’t fish” and “can’t stand the smell of fish” as a mockery of the actor’s sexual orientation and interprets his humiliation as the butt of various physical gags as Hawks’s revenge against Hudson for his closet homosexuality. One may not fully agree with this analysis — it’s not quite as convincing as the commentary on Sirk — but Rappaport does an excellent job of showing how Hawks subjected Cary Grant (for whom the Hudson part in Man’s Favorite Sport? was originally written) to comparable sexual embarrassments in Bringing Up Baby and I Was a Male War Bride without ever signifying the same things in the process. (What he leaves out, I would argue, is crucial: the fact that Grant was a remarkably skilled and graceful actor while Hudson in most cases was wooden and awkward. To hear Hudson attempt southern accents in a couple of the film clips here is to observe star acting at its near worst.)

Other index entries might be the “swishy or effeminate [minor] characters” in the Hudson-Day-Randall trilogy, feminizations of Hudson throughout his career, Hudson’s behavior in macho doctor roles (nine examples), grim forecasts of his later illness and death, and displays of his vulnerability with older women. (Thanks to Jane Wyman, Rappaport is able to call Ronald Reagan Hudson’s “boyfriend-in-law,” just as Angie Dickinson’s affair with John F. Kennedy meant that Hudson’s tryst with her in Pretty Maids All in a Row placed him only “a kiss away from the President.”)

In his indispensable book Stars critic Richard Dyer argues that some stars are popular because they appear to resolve certain contradictions while they also mask them. (Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, simultaneously conniving and innocent, is one of his clearest examples.) The contradictory butch/femme roles mapped out for Hudson seem at times to partake of this duality, and it might be argued that at least part of the seemingly compulsive exploitation of sexual uncertainties in Hudson’s movies revolves around this complex star function. (That exploitation may also be a crude and cruel commentary on Hudson’s offscreen sexual behavior, but I’m not sure this is quite as programmatic as Rappaport’s video makes it out to be.)

Rappaport plays his new brand of film criticism like a grand organ, periodically freezing and unfreezing the images, whether to concentrate on certain visual details or allow the spoken commentary to dominate. With a great deal of acuteness and dexterity–he’s especially adept in the editing — he begins to show some of the exciting possibilities inherent in this new form. Showing us a way to talk back to the movie mythologies that influence and often corrupt us, even to the point of poisoning our dreams, he suggests that we don’t have to be millionaires or commandeer a television network to enter into a dialogue with the crushing Hollywood machine. At the bare minimum all we need is a will, two VCRs to play with, and something trenchant to say.