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Not the Same Old Song and Dance

• From the Chicago Reader (November 27, 1998), and reprinted in my collection Essential Cinema. — J.R.

The Young Girls of Rochefort

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed and written by Jacques Demy

With Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, George Chakiris, Gene Kelly, Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, Grover Dale, Jacques Perrin, Geneviève Thénier, Henri Crémieux, and Jacques Riberolles.

As eccentric as this may sound, Jacques Demy’s 1967 Les demoiselles de Rochefort is my favorite musical. Yet despite my 30-year addiction to the two-record sound track, the first time I was able to see the movie subtitled was a couple of weeks ago — helpful considering my faltering French. It’s certainly the odd musical out in terms of both its singularity and its North American reputation — a large-scale tribute to Hollywood musicals shot exclusively in Rochefort in southwest France, and an unabashedly romantic paean to American energy and optimism that’s quintessentially French. It has a score by Michel Legrand that’s easily his best, offering an almost continuous succession of songs with lyrics by Demy, all written in alexandrines (as is a climactic dinner scene that’s spoken rather than sung); choreography that ranges from mediocre (Norman Maen’s frenchified imitations of Jerome Robbins) to sublime (Gene Kelly’s choreography of his own numbers); and perhaps the most beautiful dovetailing of failed and achieved connections apart from Shakespeare and Jacques Tati’s Playtime, shot during the same period.

When it comes to charting movie genres and traditions, most of this film’s virtues fall off the map. Joseph McBride invited me to contribute to his recently published Book of Movie Lists, and I opted for a list of the ten best jazz films — neither the best films about jazz nor the best examples of filmed jazz but something more rarefied: movies in which the aesthetics of jazz and the aesthetics of film find some happy, mutually supportive meeting ground. The Young Girls of Rochefort certainly qualifies: from Legrand’s improvised piano solos and big-band arrangements to stretches of scat singing and Demy’s allusions to Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Lionel Hampton, this movie swings. Even when the choreography is less than it might have been, Demy’s sweeping cranes and extended pans and intricate mise en scène cook as infectiously as a first-rate rhythm section.

It’s also a musical that periodically defamiliarizes — “makes strange” — the form of the musical. Defying the obsessive symmetry and frontality of Hollywood numbers, dancing extras here move at the periphery of the frame in certain shots. There are two cheerful songs about an ax murder, “The Woman Cut Into Pieces” and another just afterward about policing the crowd near the scene of the crime. And Demy’s clear tributes to Hollywood musicals — On the Town, An American in Paris, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — wind up making the movie seem more French than American.

Most musicals shift back and forth between story (spoken dialogue) and song-and-dance numbers — sometimes creating queasy transitions just before or after these shifts, when we’re uncertain where we are stylistically. But The Young Girls of Rochefort often daringly places story and musical numbers on the screen simultaneously, mixing them in various ways and in different proportions. One of the stars may be walking down the street, for example, but the pedestrians around her are suddenly dancing, and she slips momentarily in and out of their choreography. This curious mix produces powerful, deeply felt emotions — an exuberance combined with a sublime sense of absurdity, shot through with an almost constant sense of loss, yearning, and even tragedy. Yet the coexistence of this strangeness and this intensity will inevitably make some American viewers laugh in disbelief and regard the whole spectacle as an esoteric piece of camp. (The same problem exists to a lesser extent in two of my favorite American freak musicals, Love Me Tonight and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, both of which display a related metaphysical impulse to perceive the musical form as a continuous state of delirious being rather than a traditional story with musical eruptions.)

Some American viewers may find it difficult to feel their way into such an aesthetic overload. In France the film was revived regularly even before its 1996 restoration by Demy’s widow, Agnès Varda (who has a walk-on as a nun). And in her wonderful documentary about the film — The Young Girls Turn 25, which I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1993 — we encounter a French teenager with a backpack who proudly and calmly informs us that she carries the CD of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion and the video of Les demoiselles de Rochefort everywhere she goes, unwilling to spend even a night without them. Such a degree of passion about art is bound to seem demented in a “utilitarian” (i.e., money-minded) society such as ours, but it’s entirely compatible with the degree of passion expressed in the film itself. And surely the reluctance of some American filmgoers to go with that kind of flow partly accounts for Miramax’s refusal to allot any advertising budget to the movie’s Chicago engagement.

Received opinion on musicals is that the genre’s greatest achievements — such as the entertaining Astaire-Rogers steamrollers and Singin’ in the Rain — are triumphs of engineering, coordination, and expertise; it’s almost as if we judge this art the way we judge our smart bombs and sporting events. This quantitative aesthetic doesn’t allow for the possibility that a musician with limited technique like Thelonious Monk might be a greater pianist than a virtuoso like Oscar Peterson. And unless you conclude that the only reason for “technique” is to express what you want to say, the technical shortcomings of The Young Girls of Rochefort are bound to be disappointing. The verdict of critic Gary Carey in the late 70s is characteristic: “Unfortunately Demy, who had been so good at choreographing the movements of ordinary people through his camera, does not know how to photograph the choreography of dancers. (He doesn’t have much of an eye as to what is good choreography and what isn’t, either.) The film falls to pieces whenever anyone begins to dance, and since someone is always dancing, it ends as a pile of very pretty rubble.” Pauline Kael wrote in separate articles that “a movie like The Young Girls of Rochefort demonstrates how even a gifted Frenchman who adores American musicals misunderstands their conventions” and “it was obvious from Rochefort that [Demy] had — momentarily, I hope — run dry.”

Made on the heels of Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which enjoyed worldwide success, this extravaganza — which had a much bigger budget than Cherbourg — might well be considered an attempt to do the impossible if one views it as an imitation of the Hollywood musical rather than an inspired appropriation of some of its elements. It would, of course, be unreasonable to expect a facsimile of the Hollywood musical from a filmmaker with no stage or film-musical experience (apart from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and without the resources of a Hollywood studio or an indigenous tradition. But there’s no reason to believe that Demy — a filmmaker with a fully developed style and vision of his own when he made Les demoiselles de Rochefort — intended to reproduce something we already have. An English-language version shot simultaneously — which I’ve never seen, and which has been so scarce since the 60s it may no longer exist — was a commercial prerequisite for the film getting made, but it was the subtitled version that opened in New York in April 1968. It was so poorly received commercially that Demy’s career never fully recovered, and we’ve had to wait 30 years to see the movie again.

The film unfolds over a single weekend. On Friday morning a team of boat, bicycle, and motorcycle salespeople in trucks and on motorcycles and horses, including Etienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale), arrive in Rochefort by ferry. As they set up their stands and stages in the huge city square for the fair on Sunday afternoon, the camera pans, cranes up, then pans again to the studio where Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and her twin sister Solange (Françoise Dorléac) are giving a combined music and dance class to kids. We discover that Delphine is a ballet teacher and dancer, Solange a composer and singer, and that both dream of meeting their romantic ideals and moving to Paris. (Deneuve and the late Dorléac — who died in a car accident the same year Les demoiselles was released — were real-life sisters but not twins: Dorléac was one year older than Deneuve. This is their only movie together, though both appeared separately in films by François Truffaut and Roman Polanski.)

It turns out that Delphine’s ideal man, whom she’s never met, is an artist and sailor currently stationed in Rochefort, Maxence (Jacques Perrin): the ideal woman he’s painted, whom he’s been searching for across the globe, is a dead ringer for Delphine. His canvas hangs in a local gallery run by Delphine’s unsuccessful suitor, Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles). The sisters have a ten-year-old half brother named Boubou; their mother, Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux), runs the cafe-restaurant in the city square, which Maxence, Etienne, and Bill all frequent. Unbeknownst to the family, Boubou’s father has recently moved back to Rochefort to run a music store; Yvonne had backed out of marrying Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) years earlier, when she became pregnant with Boubou, because she couldn’t face the prospect of being called Madame Dame. Though Simon knew she’d had twins by a former lover, he’d never seen them, so when Solange comes to his shop and they become acquainted, he has no idea that she’s one of Yvonne’s daughters.

It’s love at first sight when Solange encounters an old friend of Simon Dame — famous American composer and concert pianist Andy Miller (Gene Kelly) — while she’s collecting Boubou from school. She has no idea this man is Miller, whom she wanted to meet so he could hear her piano concerto. They don’t exchange names or addresses, but he has a page from her score, which she inadvertently leaves behind. Meanwhile, when two of the young women in the show planned for the Sunday fair run off with a couple of sailors, Etienne and Bill convince Delphine and Solange to stage a number in their stead, promising them a free ride to Paris afterward….

Apart from the ax murder and periodic dark reminders of the nearby soldiers in training, both of which further develop the theme of thwarted desire, these are the basic elements of the plot, and Yvonne’s cafe on the square is the hub of all the complex comings and goings. (Like many of the buildings in Playtime, this freestanding structure has huge glass windows, allowing us to see much of the surrounding traffic.) But to summarize these intricate moves, characters who are ideally suited keep missing each other as they go about their daily routines; in most cases they don’t even realize that they’re occupying the same city. And even though The Young Girls of Rochefort is on all counts Demy’s most optimistic film — the one in which every character eventually finds the person she or he is looking for — the missed connections preceding this resolution are relentless, and one may still wind up with a feeling of hopeless despair despite the overdetermined happy ending. Indeed, the split second by which Maxence misses Delphine at the cafe before he’s shipped away might well be the most tragic single moment in all Demy’s work, perhaps even surpassing the grisly suicide at the end of Un chambre en ville. By contrast, when the “ideal couple” do eventually meet (an event represented only obliquely) in the film’s final shot, it’s a simple concession to musical- comedy convention, registering only as a sort of offhand diminuendo and postscript; what reverberates more decisively is the sense of dreams just missing realization.

In fact the movie overall leaves one in a unique manic-depressive state, a kind of poetic fugue in which boundless despair and exuberant optimism coexist. This is Demy’s vision of life — Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are suffused with much the same ambiguous mixture — but thanks to Legrand’s buoyant score and the size of the canvas, The Young Girls of Rochefort conveys it with unparalleled vibrancy and luminosity.

If songs and dances represent fantasy, and everyday activities reality, it can’t be said that Demy ever privileges one over the other; he’s more concerned with how fantasy and reality interact, or fail to interact. One might say that the missed connections in the film represent reality — the characters are too engrossed by everyday life to see that their ultimate dreams are only a block or so away — and that the eventual successful connections represent fantasy, the dreamlike closure of musical comedy. But in fact Demy is a much subtler dialectician, converting the Cartesian principle of French life and culture — “I think, therefore I am” — into “I dream, and dreaming is a part of life, therefore I live.” Furthermore, by staging all his musical numbers in real locations rather than on sets, Demy deliberately mixes his modes, with the result that the missed connections are as much a function of his mise en scène as the chance encounters. A poetic realist as well as a dreamer, Demy confused some audiences and critics throughout his career, much as his mentor Tati did, by keeping a firmer grip on the realities he was filming than many were prepared to see at the time. For viewers trained to regard fantasy as an alternative to reality rather than part of the reality of consciousness, Demy’s mixture is bound to seem jarring — though it may also jar one into perceiving a richer reality than most entertainments acknowledge.

The film’s chance encounters and missed connections are expressed not only spatially but musically, in the score and in Demy’s delicately crafted lyrics. Maxence’s song about his search is reprised as Delphine’s song about her own longings; Simon’s account of his lost love becomes, with appropriate alterations in the lyrics, Yvonne’s own regrets about having abandoned him; Solange’s piano concerto takes on lyrics after Andy intercepts the score. Many other reprises are less obvious than these. The song that goes with policing the crowd, for instance, reprises and adds lyrics to a secondary theme from the opening dance number in the city square. Both sequences emphasize community over individual destiny: here, as elsewhere in the film, Legrand and Demy enrich the meaning of other scenes by playing with the emotional and thematic effects of rhyme.

Masterpieces normally connote perfection, but it might be argued that some of the imperfections in The Young Girls of Rochefort enhance the overall experience by bringing it closer to life, making the actors seem more vulnerable. (Other imperfections, like the product plugs during the climactic fair — another parallel with Playtime, given some of its neon signs — are simple reminders of the difficulties of making big-budget French movies.) Darrieux, for instance, is the only cast member who does her own singing, though the dubbing of the others is usually carried out well, with the actors’ singing voices carefully matched to their speaking voices (including Kelly’s spoken French). More artificial are Delphine’s and Solange’s performances on trumpet and flute.

Yet given some of Demy’s original plans for the movie, it’s a miracle it turned out as well as it did. Before he selected Rochefort as his location, he considered making “Les demoiselles d’Avignon,” “Les demoiselles d’Hyeres,” “Les demoiselles de Toulouse,” and “Les demoiselles de La Rochelle,” among others. Rochefort won out because of the size of its central square, though production designer Bernard Evein found it necessary to repaint 40,000 square meters of the city’s facades. (Still, director André Téchiné has cited the movie as one of the best ever made about this part of France.) Even more improbable, Demy originally thought of casting Brigitte Bardot and Geraldine Chaplin as the twin sisters.

Demy also planned to make more extensive references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg by casting Nino Castelnuovo, the hero of that film, as Bill. When Castelnuovo proved unavailable, Demy had to change the script. But it’s worth pointing out that the offscreen victim of the ax murder is Lola, the title heroine of Demy’s first feature, and there are many other allusions to earlier Demy films throughout: According to critic Jean-Pierre Berthomé, the three successive endings of The Young Girls of Rochefort replicate the final shots of Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Lola. And both Lola and The Young Girls of Rochefort associate Americans with white convertibles.

Given the extraordinary lift Gene Kelly gives the movie, it’s hardly surprising that Demy wanted him from the outset, though he had to wait two years before Kelly was free of other commitments. Indeed, Kelly brings to the movie the kind of boundless elation musicals exist to produce, as do Chakiris and Dale, the other two American dancers featured, though to a lesser extent. Indeed, it’s the combination of this spirit with the soul of the French cast that gives The Young Girls of Rochefort its distinctive flavor. Like the pairing of Jean Seberg with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless, or the mating of a David Goodis plot with Charles Aznavour’s mug in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, this combination provides the kind of combustion that powered the French New Wave and the general reinvention of movie energy in the 1960s. Godard and Truffaut may have watered the roots, but it was Demy who produced this relatively late blooming flower, combining the virtues of the Hollywood musical with French poetic realism to produce these fresh, colorful petals.

The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer

From Written By 3, no. 11, November 1998. — J.R.

Let me start this off (in April 2011) with an update: a plug for Wurlitzer’s most recent novel. — J.R.

“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know how to answer that.”
I was suddenly afraid of losing the anonymity that existed between us, as if once we knew our names         the erotic focus we were falling into would dissolve. I curled my lower lip.
“We’re overloaded as it is.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said.
– Rudolph Wurlitzer, Quake (1972)

SQUIER  We must move southward. Only by expanding can we hope to avoid a civil war and save those in
situtions we hold most precious.
DR. JONES  I assume you are including slavery?
SQUIER  I certainly am. We must not be sentimental if we wish to preserve that which is most precious to
us. The camera cuts to Ellen, enraged by the conversation. As her eyes dart around the room, she and Walker begin to move their hands in sign language. We see for the first time that Ellen is deaf.
Walker notices her agitation. In subtitles we read what she is saying.

ELLEN (subtitles)  Screw your institutions. WALKER (translating)  Miss Martin says that perhaps not all our institutions are worth saving.
SQUIER (patronizing)  Perhaps. But I am sure she would agree that we must save our way of life at any
cost. Otherwise the barbarians will storm the gates and then where will we be? Walker translates what    Squier has said into sign language.
ELLEN (subtitles)  Go fuck a pig.
WALKER (translating)  Miss Martin has a rather different view. She positions herself more on the side of
change, rather than cultural preservation.
– Rudy Wurlitzer, Walker (1987)

One has been hearing lately that the 1960s are making a comeback, but what this actually means is a   matter of dispute. Whose 60s is being evoked, and has it ever been away in the first place? If we’re talking about a counter-cultural state of mind, my own 60s has been a constant companion for the past three and a half decades, but for many younger people it remains something of a cryptic, unexplored continent.

Judging by the versions of that decade filtered through most movies and TV, the lingering image of dashed political hopes and bad acid trips has been hard to shake loose, even though this necessarily elides certain political victories (such as the civil rights movement) and a few good acid trips that are less fashionable to remember. Yet the persistence of some legends from the heroic side of that era suggests a solid residue waiting to be noticed — a potent collective vision firmly inscribed in the present that has been obscured by such terms as “new age” and “liberalism”. Let me propose novelist and screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer — who started signing his works “Rudy Wurlitzer” in the 80s — as an excellent tour guide to that sensibility.

The story of the talented east coast novelist who is lured out west to write for the movies is almost as old as Hollywood, and it rarely has a happy ending. Although it could be argued that William Faulkner used Hollywood to subsidize his own fiction at least as much as Hollywood used his limited screenwriting skills, a more characteristic tale is that of Jeremy Larner, author of the 60s novel Drive, He Said, whose first screenplay, for The Candidate (1972), won him an Oscar, but who has remained in development purgatory and published no further novels ever since.

Roughly speaking, Wurlitzer’s career to date falls somewhere in between those of Faulkner and Larner. He has continued to publish books as well as write scripts, but where he arguably differs from both–as well as from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, and James Agee — is in the degree to which he has managed to retain his literary persona in many of his best screenplays. Unfortunately, most of these scripts remain to be filmed, though even if one concentrates on some of those that have made it to the screen — especially Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Candy Mountain (1987), but also Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Walker (1987) — the continuity with his novels is unmistakable. (In other cases — ranging from his polish of Jim McBride and Lorenzo Mans’ Glen and Randa to his uncredited final draft of Coming Home to his work with Volker Schlondorff on Voyager – it’s either fitful or indiscernible.)

It would diminish Wurlitzer’s considerable originality as a novelist to call him a translator of Samuel Beckett (especially the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable) into precise American equivalents and home-grown idioms, but that represents at least part of the achievement of his first two novels, Nog (1969) and Flats (1970). In fact, this “translation” is so seamless and so authentically American that it goes well beyond mere recreation. Perhaps one could say that Wurlitzer has applied some of the lessons of Beckett to the meaning of his own experience and created something new out of the encounter, including a use value that never would have occurred to his master.

If loss of history and loss of identity are the preconditions of the shifting Beckett hero (Molloy, Malone, the unnameable), the central figures of Nog and Flats, both minimalist constructs at the outset, gradually take on histories and identities, though the extent to which these are adopted or invented is deliberately left ambiguous. Thus the drifting narrator of Nog is not the eccentric Finnish traveler of that name whom he once met, even if “Nog” becomes his adopted moniker whenever he has to explain who he is to other people. And the various tramps seated around an open fire in the even more minimalist Flats — all of them named after American cities, but so mutable in their identities that they all collapse into one another — add up at most to a single individual. The American ethos behind this process — you are what you do and how you seem, not where you come from and where you go — is one version of the western cowboy myth writ large, and in one way or another, all of Wurlitzer’s best work is replenished by it.

According to Richard Poirier in The Performing Self (1971), it is a process that gave voice to a mainly voiceless counterculture. As he put it, Nog “makes the first ser-ious effort since [Thomas] Pynchon to create a style that renders states of being in which separate identities can barely be located, and, when they are, seem merely accidental. Identities fuse and separate without intention and without feeling, as if persons had the consistency of air….For Wurlitzer to have created a stylistic approximation of these conditions is an accomplishment of some historic consequence, showing that our language can manage to reach into those areas of contemporary life where, among its young inhabitants, there is mostly silence.”

Though it’s hard to imagine a project more inimical to mainstream Hollywood, director Monte Hellman hired Wurlitzer to script Two-Lane Blacktop on the strength of Nog, and his screenplay received the singular honor of being printed in its entirety in Esquire prior to the picture’s 1971 release, where it was heralded on the cover as “the movie of the year”. That the film failed commercially after this fanfare is hardly surprising, yet it survives as one of the key road movies of the era. Chronicling a coast-to-coast race between strangers identified only as The Driver and The Mechanic in one car (musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson), G.T.O. (Warren Oates) in the other, the latter of whom immediately assumes a different past and identity with every hitchhiker he picks up, the movie registers as an existential comedy with tragic undertones about going nowhere. Although most of the country gets crossed and many other characters drift through the plot, the process of continuous motion eventually overtakes any sense of destination, and not long after the race gets abandoned, the plot ends metaphysically with the film itself burning up inside the projector.

In a comparable contrary spirit, Wurlitzer recently described to me a script he wants to write for an action film in which the action gets progressively slower. A practicing Buddhist for the better part of 25 years — and one who sharply criticizes his own work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha for its self- consciousness in his 1994 memoir Hard Travel to Sacred Places — he has wrestled throughout his screenwriting career with the challenge of reconciling the rewards of meditation with the forward motion of film narrative, and much of his best screenwriting grows out of this conundrum. It also relates to a desire to broaden the thrust of his writing. He once wrote to literary critic David Seed that he initially turned to screenwriting “for relief and therapy as my prose was so much on the edge of being solipsistic, as well as introverted. I needed, or so I thought then, to be more out in the world, even if it meant being battered by a relentlessly profane marketplace.” A few years later, he wrote that “the first axiom of the screenwriter…is to sublimate language to image.” In keeping with this axiom, apart from the loquacious G.T.O, Two-Lane Blacktop moves along with a minimum of dialogue.

No less ambitious was Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, also written for Hellman, but the ambitions in this case collided with those of Sam Peckinpah, who later inherited the project and ordered changes. In Wurlitzer’s version, the title characters never meet until the last scene, when the former kills the latter; Peckinpah made them old friends from the outset and added a prologue flashing forward to Garrett’s own death 18 years later. The results are an unstable mix of Wurlitzer’s dry, flavorsome dialogue — always
one of his strongest suits–and Peckinpah’s more high-flown  and elegaic sentiments, complicated still further by various location disasters and studio tampering. As partial compensation, Wurlitzer eventually published a draft of his own version of the script as a mass market paperback, introduced by an account of the project’s checkered past that pointedly neglects to mention Peckinpah’s name once.

Wurlitzer’s best western script, however, remains unfilmed — a powerful turn-of-the-century tale about former mountain trapper Boone Pike breaking out of Northwest Territorial Prison with a bullet in his heart and fleeing cross-country so that he can die with what remains of his family. Mountain of the Heart – like Wurlitzer’s more recent (and perhaps second-best) western script Gold Fever, set in the mid-19th century — proceeds on an epic scale, in striking contrast to the minimalism of his early work, but it represents an evolution rather than a negation of what went before because the same concentration of language and incident is evident.

These and other scripts reveal retroactively how much a precoccupation with history pervades all of Wurlitzer’s work — including all four of his novels, Two-Lane Blacktop, Candy Mountain, and Just To Be Together (a recent and unrealized script coauthored by Michelangelo Antonioni that revises their previous collaborative screenplay, Two Telegrams), all of which have contemporary settings. The minimalist histories of Wurlitzer’s characters in Nog, Flats and Two-Lane Blacktop represent not rejections of history but searches for what is essential — that is, useful — about the past in relation to the present. This is also why the post-apocalyptic Los Angeles setting of his third novel, Quake (1972), charting social disintegration after an earthquake, and the filmmaking milieu of his fourth, Slow Fade (1984) — part of which clearly derives from his on-location experiences and skirmishes with Peckinpah — vividly reflect their respective decades. (As Gary Indiana noted in the Village Voice a few years ago, all of Wurlitzer’s books can be read as “socio-logical artifacts” and period pieces.) It furthermore helps to explain why Wurlitzer’s current novel-in-progress is set in the 19th century, and why his recent screenplay Shinobi — a remarkable Ninja fantasy inspired in part by early films of Akira Kurosawa — is mainly set in the year 1600. Yet another recent unrealized script, Dark Angel, adapting J.F. Federspiel’s novel The Ballad of Typhoid Mary, is set during the same period as Mountain of the Heart, albeit on the other side of the United States — New York City at the end of the 19th century.

Walker is a satirical fantasy about the real-life exploits of William Walker, the American southerner and onetime abolitionist who ruled Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857 and altered its constitution to reinstate slavery. Written for eclectic cult director Alex Cox and boldly filmed on location (though far south of the war being waged then against the Contras), it’s the most overtly political of Wurlitzer’s scripts, and sufficiently radical to have evoked the scorn of most mainstream critics, though the wit behind its anger — including several deliberate anachronisms that make its contemporary relevance unmistakable — continue to make it suggestive and potent.

Significantly, Wurlitzer largely views Walker’s arrogance in terms of rhetoric and language, such as the fact that the offscreen narration of Walker, played by Ed Harris, eerily alternates between first and third person (a ruse inspired by Walker’s book The War in Nicaragua). This connects up with the use of sign language and subtitles in relation to Walker’s deaf-mute fiancee Ellen Martin, cited at the beginning of this article, and is equally apparent in a dialogue with Cox that was published at the time of the film’s release, in which Wurlitzer said, “We don’t have the right to interpret Nicaragua for Nicaraguans….It’s not our business with left governments, right governments, any governments, you know? And we must defend our right to be innocent that way. Our fight not to be sophisticated. We must defend our right not to join that language, to be innocent and to refuse that dialogue.”

Considering how many of Wurlizer’s projects are road movies, his most characteristic script may be the one he wound up codirecting with Robert Frank, Candy Mountain. (1987). The hapless hero, a wanabee musician named Julius Book (Kevin O’Connor), works his way north via various barter exchanges from New York into the remote Canadian wilderness, in search of a legendary guitar maker named Elmore Silk, subsidized by music entrepeneurs who want Silk to resume his craft. Bearing an audiocassette carrying messages from Silk’s former associates, Book encounters Silk’s discarded friends, lovers, and relatives, who add their own messages to the tape, along with Book’s own ruminations and bulletins of his progress. When Silk eventually plays the tape back, the parallel portraits of his gradual retreat into the wilderness and the reasons for that retreat–the culture he has fled — are equally evident. If it’s a movement that recalls the shape of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the Silk at the end of the rainbow is the opposite of Conrad’s Kurtz (a figure who has more in common with Walker). Signing an agreement with Japanese investors to turn over a dozen of his guitars, destroy the rest, and make no more, Silk cheerfly abdicates the patriarchal power that Book and the other characters have invested him with and donates most of his life’s work to a bonfire.

Given all the autobiographical resonances in Wurlitzer’s script, it’s clearly one of his most personal works.Born in Cincinnati in 1937, he comes from the famous family of musicians and instrument makers that gave us the Wurlitzer organ, and his own periodic flights into the wilderness from New York and Los Angeles — his principal bases nowadays are Nova Scotia and Hudson, New York — describe the retreats and drifts of his fiction and screenwriting. Most important of all, the deliberate relinquishment of power, a key aim of 60s counterculture, represents the closest thing in his work to utopia.

Remaking History [on SHULIE]

This article about remakes of independent films, from the November 20, 1998 Chicago Reader, is being reprinted as a follow-up to my discussion in the Reader of the remake of Psycho that was reprinted here two weeks ago. — J.R.

Shulie

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Elisabeth Subrin

With Kim Soss, Larry Steger, Rick Marshall, Eigo Komei, E.W. Ross, Marion Mryczka, Ed Rankus, Kerry Ufelmann, and Jennifer Reeder.

What is it about American culture that compels the film industry to do remakes? The compulsion has been growing over the past two decades — one of my oldest friends, a cinephile and sometime screenwriter based in Hollywood, was already viewing it with philosophical resignation ten years ago. As she put it, “My best friends and I have been spending most of the 80s sitting in cars discussing remakes.”

Since the early 80s we’ve been inundated with more cultural objects than ever before, but we have less and less sense of what to do with them. It’s easy to explain the Hollywood remake syndrome as unimaginative cost accounting: it made money before, so why not do it again? Then there’s the expanding youth market, which encourages unimaginative cost accountants to figure that former hits can be recycled for younger generations — one of the justifications offered by Gus Van Sant for his forthcoming remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

There are, of course, remakes that won’t even own up to being remakes. Introducing his published screenplay for the “new” Lolita, Stephen Schiff insists, “Right from the beginning, it was clear to all of us that this movie was not a ‘remake’ of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation….I had not seen it for maybe 15 years, and I didn’t allow myself to go back to it again.” Some of the differences between the two movies are indeed striking, including some that seem designed to provide a contrast; but the action in Schiff’s version — like the action in Kubrick’s and unlike the action in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel — begins at the very end of the story, so it’s hard to believe that Kubrick’s movie played no part in the deliberations.

It’s creepy enough that Hollywood and its flacks — including some uncritical members of the audience — have bought into the inevitability of so many remakes. But when independent and experimental artists start feeling compelled to repeat, my first impulse is to reach for the panic button. After all, the traditional function of the alternative media is to offer alternatives; when they start aping the worst excesses of Hollywood, the implications are not encouraging.

The decision by Elisabeth Subrin and Jill Godmilow, two intelligent and resourceful academics, to remake little-known 60s political documentaries can neither be identified with the Hollywood remake syndrome nor entirely disentangled from it. It seems to me that they and Hollywood are responding to the same cultural and political block — an inability to come up with new thoughts about the present — but I don’t believe they’re responding in the same way or for the same reasons. After all, it isn’t as if they’re remaking classics of the avant-garde like Un chien andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, or Scorpio Rising. On the contrary, they’re calling attention to buried works most of us wouldn’t have a clue about if it weren’t for their films.

It’s worth adding that the impulse to copy classic works has been a staple of the avant-garde for some time; Yvonne Rainer’s formidable first feature, Lives of Performers (showing at the Film Center on Friday), concludes with a restaging of stills from the published script of G.W. Pabst’s silent film Pandora’s Box, one of the most important Louise Brooks features. And it was amusing to discover from Subrin that the flacks promoting the remake of Psycho contacted her about her remake because they feared Gus Van Sant might not be doing something entirely original in remaking a film shot by shot. In fact, the practice has existed for most of this century, though one wouldn’t expect contemporary publicists to be aware of such precedents. (One famous early example is John Cromwell’s 1938 Algiers, a Hollywood remake of Julien Duvivier’s 1936 French feature Pepe le Moko, but I’ve heard that some Edwin S. Porter films were remade in the same fashion during the first years of this century.)

Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught [see second photo above], a half-hour remake of Harun Farocki’s German agitprop film Inextinguishable Fire (1969) [see first photo above], recently turned up at the Film Center, and Subrin’s Shulie [see second photo in heading], a half-hour remake of a 1967 Chicago documentary of the same title [see first photo in heading] by four Northwestern students — Jerome Blumenthal (today known as Jerry), Sheppard Ferguson, James Leahy, and Allan Rettig — is being shown this Friday at the same venue (on a separate program after Rainer’s film; Subrin and Blumenthal will attend the screening). The differences between these two works are as important as the similarities, but the main thing they seem to have in common is a political impulse to return to the 60s as a way of figuring out how to deal with the present.

The subject of Inextinguishable Fire and What Farocki Taught is the manufacture of napalm during the Vietnam war. Farocki stages a series of events and dialogues with actors to illustrate didactically his various points; Godmilow translates the dialogue from German to English and shoots in color instead of black and white, but otherwise adheres closely to the original.

The subject of both versions of Shulie is 22-year-old Shulamith Firestone, who in 1967 was getting a BFA with a major in drawing and painting at the School of the Art Institute, making photographs, and supporting herself by working at the post office. Three years later she would publish The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, a powerful and highly influential book (I read it in the early 70s) that’s seldom mentioned today, though it was reprinted five years ago. In Subrin’s version, Firestone is played by Kim Soss, who worked on the film in other capacities too, and Firestone’s teachers and a couple of her friends are played by other actors.

At the Rotterdam film festival this year I saw both Godmilow’s film and Subrin’s video. At that time Shulie concluded with the disclaimer “This is a work of fiction,” which has since been removed. There’s no question that remaking a fiction film like Farocki’s — even if the fiction has a didactic, documentary function — is radically different from remaking a documentary like the 1967 Shulie. I think it could even be argued that Godmilow’s work turns a fiction film into a documentary and Subrin’s work turns a documentary into a fictional video. Both works attempt in their different fashions to collapse the 60s into the 90s and vice versa, and in this endeavor Shulie may fail more profoundly simply because there’s a world of difference between a 22-year-old woman speaking for and about herself and an actress speaking the 22-year-old’s words. It’s not a commentary on Soss’s skill as an actress that her manner of speaking is colorless and more guarded than Firestone’s and that she conveys a certain emotional vacancy. But it’s difficult to pinpoint how much this is a matter of the differences in everyday speech and body language now and 30 years ago and how much this is a matter of existential authenticity. Subrin’s uncanny precision in fanatically duplicating some of the awkward camera angles and ragged cuts of the original ultimately reinforces our sense that the past can only be imitated. (Subrin describes Soss’s performance as an “interpretation” rather than an attempt at duplication, but this in no way prevents Soss’s behavioral tics from reeking of the 90s.)

This ambiguity is one of the abiding mysteries of Subrin’s project, and it makes her video much denser than Godmilow’s film as a historical inquiry, even though Subrin is about 20 years younger than Godmilow and didn’t experience the 60s as an adult. It’s a mystery that — not as an act of will but inadvertently — forces the 90s to the surface much more profoundly than Godmilow’s more controlled experiment possibly could. Godmilow is interested in teaching the 90s how to think as well as speak, but Subrin is bent on discovering what the 90s are already thinking and saying. Though it was her discovery of the 1967 Shulie that led Subrin to read The Dialectic of Sex, it’s clear that she finds the only partially articulated feminist issues of the original film relevant, even contemporary.

Godmilow remade a 60s agitprop work for more theoretical reasons; she offers Farocki’s film as a political model, but at a time when napalm and the Vietnam war are no longer contemporary issues. It may be possible to extrapolate from Farocki’s analysis and use his methods to uncover outrages today that are being perpetrated in our name and with our tacit consent, but Godmilow takes us only a small part of that distance. She appears to be working from the premise that the mid-90s represent a political ground zero and that we need to go back 30 years to understand this.

Subrin’s model, if I read her intentions correctly, is not so much the 1967 film Shulie as it is Firestone herself — what she was in 1967 and what she was shortly to become, which the original film semi-inadvertently pays witness to. It’s important to stress that the 1967 Shulie was made by four men and that the five teachers in the film who interrogate Firestone about her paintings are also all men; considering that it was 1967, it isn’t surprising that the discourse of everyone — with the partial exception of Firestone, who offers some faltering and at times apologetic resistance to her male questioners — is resolutely prefeminist. (One comes away from both films with a sense that nine men ganged up on Firestone, which is also highly characteristic of the mid-60s.) In the remake, it’s Subrin rather than a male filmmaker (Blumenthal) who asks “Shulie” the offscreen questions, and though the questions being asked are the same, they register in a decidedly different way.

It’s important to note that Firestone herself objects to both versions of Shulie, though she hasn’t spoken publicly about what her objections are. (Perhaps her problem is the same as mine: reconciling the tentativeness of her 1967 persona with the rage and precision of The Dialectic of Sex.) Subrin’s video does raise the ethical issue of what it means to duplicate someone’s impromptu remarks — not to mention her everyday life and even her canvases and drawings (which have been copied with loving exactitude). One also has to take into account the fact that Firestone’s mid-60s discourse was controlled to some extent by the four male filmmakers’ filming and editing choices. Subrin’s decision to treat this material as “found” object and historical artifact also sets it somewhere beyond the will of the ostensible subject — which isn’t changed by bracketing the material with statements about the importance of The Dialectic of Sex.

I have to confess that I prefer Subrin’s Shulie to the film it remakes, if only because the complex historical pathos produced by her efforts yields far more information about the 90s than the original film could possibly tell us about the 60s, then or now. However, I prefer Inextinguishable Fire to What Farocki Taught, because the political motivations of the former are more direct and lucid. My preferences have very little to do with the technical skill or resourcefulness of either Subrin or Godmilow, but they have a great deal to do with assessing the value of a political work in its own time.

Godmilow’s film, like Farocki’s, is shot almost exclusively in interiors, which gives her more opportunity to create precise equivalents of the shots in the original. Subrin’s video, like the original Shulie, consists largely of documentary shots filmed in the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago, which obliges her at times to use only approximations. Both versions of Shulie, for example, show the subject walking with a friend into a movie theater playing Andy Warhol’s 1966 The Chelsea Girls. Not being a longtime Chicagoan, I didn’t recognize the theater in the original, though it appears to be a large movie house in the Loop; in the remake it’s the Music Box. (Her opening montage of Chicago locations has no counterpart in the original.)

With some justice, conventional wisdom has it that the 60s were a much freer time than today, so there’s a certain boldness in Subrin focusing on a moment in that period when feminist consciousness was still struggling to be defined. The paradox is that even historical hindsight isn’t enough to give an actress playing Firestone 30 years later the kind of emotional urgency Firestone conveyed in the original film through her own shyness and confusion; Soss [see both photos below] projects the kind of contemporary coolness we tend to identify as normal. Yet it’s only through this juxtaposition that we begin to see the petrifying fear that describes our present moment — the kind of fear that makes the very notion of a remake seem like a logical response.

William Faulkner once remarked that he arrived at his prose style as a novelist only by first failing as a poet and then by failing as a short story writer; one might hypothesize that his achievement as a novelist is therefore inextricably tied to his failed attempts to imitate Keats and Wordsworth. In a comparable spirit, Dizzy Gillespie once described the origins of his own style in his unsuccessful efforts to play like Roy Eldridge. I think it can be argued that Godmilow’s successful attempt to duplicate Inextinguishable Fire offers a provocative starting point for a discussion about the political void of the 90s, but not much more. Whereas Subrin’s less successful attempt to duplicate a much less interesting film tells us more about the 90s than we can begin to make use of.

Lives of Performers

Of all Yvonne Rainer’s films, this 1972 first feature most clearly bridges her formidable career as an avant-garde dancer and choreographer and her subsequent work as an experimental filmmaker. Its 14 fiction and nonfiction episodes chronicle and/or comment on Rainer’s performances, using sound and intertitles in various inventive and unorthodox ways and concentrating on issues of power and gender that culminate in a reenactment of the movie stills that illustrate the published screenplay of Pandora’s Box, the silent G.W. Pabst film starring Louise Brooks. Rainer’s dry vernacular humor is also much in evidence, bouncing off her feminism: “Well you know, Shirley, that I have always had a weakness for the sweeping revelations of great men.” Shot in ravishing black and white by Babette Mangolte; Rainer will attend the screening. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, November 20, 6:00, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.

A Simple Plan

Sam Raimi’s provocative, in some ways rewarding, but ultimately disappointing attempt to make a mainstream art film (1998) harks back to Erich von Stroheim’s Greed in terms of story material. The characters of Scott B. Smith’s novel, which he’s adapted for the screen, receive an unexpected windfall and their lives are destroyed by it. It’s a suggestive premise, but Raimi and Smith lack the focus of a Stroheim or a Frank Norris (Stroheim’s source for Greed) to work out precisely what’s being suggested. The script dawdles, and in spite of a good castBill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton (who’s especially resourceful), Bridget Fonda, and Brent Briscoethe movie tends to amble around its points rather than drive straight toward the heart of the matter. It’s still a better-than-average melodrama with thriller elements, and it uses its remote midwestern setting almost as well as its actors, but don’t expect a fully achieved work. R, 121 min. (JR)