JonathanRosenbaum.com

Tim Russert/Dennis Kucinich

It’s the cruelest of ironies: newscaster Tim Russert, who died unexpectedly on Friday–taken to be the essence of all that’s honorable and serious about the TV news—has been used ever since as a substitute for the TV news, a means for excluding as much of it as possible.

In the mid-1990s, the trial of O.J. Simpson became such a media obsession that one could virtually say that most other news was suspended so that the TV news could be devoted around the clock to a single subject. The result was that TV news reporting got so far behind in keeping up with the other events of the world, especially foreign news, that it became clear after a certain point that it could never hope to catch up again. And of course it never has.

It would appear that ever since this alarming, infantile regression, TV news has been nakedly hungering for more O.J.-like events, as many as possible, that can crowd out all others. Whether this happens to be the deaths of Frank Sinatra or Ronald Reagan or events as consequential as Hurricane Katrina, the effect is always the same: to eliminate the world outside the single, all-encompassing event, which is then chewed over endlessly, not for hours but for days.

It’s within this context that the House of Representatives voting 251 to 166 to send Dennis Kucinich’s 35 articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney two days ago can get marginalized or overlooked in the news–delegated to the back pages or else ignored entirely–so that still more eulogies on behalf of a relatively serious newscaster can command all our attention. Assuming that Russert really was as serious about the news as the media are claiming, one wonders whether he would have approved of keeping us as blinkered as possible about everything else for the sake of his memory. [6/15/08] Postscript: My friend Andrea Gronvall has provided me with a link to this excellent piece in the L.A. Weekly, by Marc Cooper. It’s chilling to discover that it’s still relevant, a full week after I wrote the above. [6/22/08]

Jean Harlow/Anita Loos

RED-HEADED WOMAN, written by Anita Loos and directed by Jack Conway, with Jean Harlow and Chester Morris (1932, 79 min.)

I thought I was a Jean Harlow fan, at least after seeing her in DOUBLE WHOOPEE, THE PUBLIC ENEMY, PLATINUM BLONDE and BOMBSHELL (not counting her easy-to-miss bits in CITY LIGHTS and THE LOVE PARADE), but this abrasive late-Prohibition comedy, included in TCM’s “Forbidden Hollywood” collection, volume one—“her breakthrough film,” according to James Harvey’s book ROMANTIC COMEDY—gives me some pause. In fact, I think the real auteur here is Anita Loos–who makes Harlow’s ruthless and promiscuous flirt both a successor to Lorelei Lee in her 1925 best-seller GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES and a predecessor of Marilyn Monroe’s version of Lorelei in 1953.

Harvey rightly points out that Harlow’s character in RED-HEADED WOMAN is both a villainous schemer and a triumphantly comic golddigger, reflecting an overall uncertainty about how to regard her, which is why this movie has separate endings to accommodate each aspect. But this makes her at best a dialectic; by contrast, Monroe’s Verdoux-like performance is an improbable yet lethal synthesis, a reshaping of venal Lorelei to make her an image of the opulent 50s, not the flapper 20s or the Depression 30s. Monroe’s much closer to a Tex Avery conceit. Harlow makes the character’s desperate nihilism more apparent, yielding an interesting period ambience with less charisma. I find her scary but not sexy; Monroe is clearly both. And as a comment on economic desperation, Barbara Stanwyck in BABY FACE (1933), released the following year–also included in the same TCM package, in its censored and uncensored forms–is a lot more pungent. [7/19/08]

Meet Marcel L’Herbier

Written for Moving Image Source [movingimagesource.us], and posted there, as “Obscure Objects,” on June 19, 2008. — J.R.

He’s hardly a household name anywhere, yet there’s still a striking discrepancy between the profile of filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier (1890-1979) in France and everywhere else —- almost as if a “not for export” label had been stamped on his forehead. Founder and head of l’IDHEC (l’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques), the most famous French film school, for over a quarter of a century (1943-1969), as well as onetime director of the Cinémathèque Française (1941-1944), author of hundreds of articles, and a pioneer in French television who produced over 200 documentaries, he’s still better known today as the writer-director of about 50 films, mostly features. Yet none of these is easily obtainable in the U.S.

Probably the best known, formerly on VHS, is La nuit fantastique (Fantastic Night, 1942), a fantasy with Fernand Gravey as an innocent student literally pursuing the woman of his dreams (Micheline Presle) in his dreams. Both whimsical and disturbing —- with a happy ending even more troubling than anything that precedes it —- this nocturnal adventure conveys the dark, cavernous underside of the German occupation almost as pungently as Cocteau’s Orphée did retrospectively, eight years later. Conceived as a tribute to Georges Méliès, and registering as a kind of Eyes Wide Shut avant la lettre, it features a formal ball held at the Louvre, complete with a magic show and trapdoors —- and echoes of the visual style found in L’Herbier’s more overtly experimental work during the silent era, such as diverse uses of blurred focus and superimpositions to suggest subjective states of mind. (In L’Herbier’s 1921 El Dorado, the distraction of the prostitute heroine, thinking of her ailing son while dancing in a crowded club, is conveyed by making her the only on-screen character who’s out of focus.)

When L’Herbier died at age 91, a few film titles were mentioned in the bare-bones obituary in the New York Times, but little else. Almost thirty years later, the almost simultaneous appearance of a lavish two-disc edition of L’Herbier’s most celebrated film, L’Argent (Money, 1928), newly restored on the French Carlotta label, as well as an ambitious collection of articles drawn from a 2006 conference, Marcel L’Herbier: L’Art du Cinema (edited by Laurent Véray, Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma) — including a DVD with another restored silent feature, Le Diable au Coeur (1927) — gives us a good opportunity to explore the reasons for both his importance and his relative obscurity outside of France.

None of this material is in English, apart from abstracts of all 25 of the articles in the Véray collection–suggesting a kind of vicious circle in this syndrome of neglect. An earlier French book about L’Herbier by American expatriate and film theorist Noël Burch came out in 1973, when Burch was still a formalist. His contribution to the new collection, discussing “the ambivalences of a `bisexual’ filmmaker”, reconfigures his interest in relation to gender studies. (The prominence of Jaque Catelain — L’Herbier’s relatively untalented muse, whom Burch calls a “wooden Harry Langdon”–in nine early pictures may have contributed to the critical scorn heaped on some of them, especially L’inhumaine.)

Even a cursory look at what L’Herbier meant to French cinema in the late teens and 20s suggests that one of the reasons for his neglect may be simple classification. France might be the only country in the world where, during most of this period, experimental and commercial narrative filmmaking had some kind of working coexistence, as evidenced by such films as Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919), La Roue (1923), and Napoléon (1927); Louis Delluc’s Fièvre (1921) and La Femme de nulle part (1922); Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidèle (1923) and La chute de la maison Usher (1928); Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923); Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928); and L’Herbier’s El Dorado (1921), L’Inhumaine (1924), and L’argent (1929). Without a grasp of this context, it becomes difficult to place L’Herbier, who arguably straddled these seemingly disparate realms more than anyone else.

English-language resources for exploring this fertile terrain include Richard Abel’s indispensable French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (1984) and Dudley Andrew’s invaluable Mists of Regret (1995). A superb U.S. DVD of La roue has just been released by Flicker Alley (which is planning to release J’accuse in the fall), and we already have good versions of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’or (two key items missing from the above list), while excellent shorts from this period by Dulac and Epstein can be found on Kino Video’s Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s.

Other French restorations without subtitles, of El Dorado and L’Inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman), can be tracked down as well. The latter —- a campy, bizarre SF extravaganza featuring sets by Fernand Léger, Claude Autant-Lara, and Alberto Cavalcanti —- sometimes prefigures the grandiosity as well as misogyny of L’argent in terms of space, costume, and what might be termed diva behavior. (The diva in this case — soprano Georgette Leblanc, known as the lover of both Maurice Maeterlinck and The Little Review’s Margaret Anderson — was also the producer.)

An admirer of Debussy, Claudel, Proust, and Wilde who could be described as a sort of fin de siècle decadent, L’Herbier started out as a poet, playwright, and drama and ballet critic until he discovered cinema via Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat in 1917. After working for Gaumont up through El Dorado in 1921, he founded his own production company, though most of his subsequent features were coproduced.

Some of his films — such as Le Diable au Coeur, made just before L’argent —- are relatively conventional narrative fare. But even this tale has striking features: set in an impoverished fishing village, it’s the first French film to be shot on panchromatic stock, and it positively glistens. Two early lighthearted talkies based on Gaston Leroux thrillers, Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1930) and La Parfum de la dame en noir (1931), offer many playful formal hijinks involving sound and space. And L’argent itself, the most expensive film ever made in France at that time (making the film’s title especially apt), was shot on such a grand scale that L’Herbier was able to take over the Paris Bourse for three days. Yet it also can be viewed as a summation of many of L’Herbier’s earlier avant-garde experiments.

Adapted from Emile Zola’s novel of the same title about the 1868 crisis at the Paris Stock Exchange, it updates the action sixty years to the present, entailing radical alterations that come close to anticipating the hysteria of the market crash of 1929. The grandiosity of the design is reflected not only in the many large global maps that recur in the plot but in the international cast. Featured are two German stars from Metropolis, Brigitte Helm and Alfred Abel, as well as the imposing Pierre Alcover. All three play villainous and ruthless capitalists, but it’s the robust and pudgy Alcover in a highly nuanced performance who emerges as the most sympathetic and commanding character, even more than the putative hero and heroine —- a pilot hero modeled roughly on Charles Lingbergh (Henry Victor, the English-born actor who would later play Hercules in Freaks) and his impressionable wife (Mary Glory), whom Alcover’s character Saccard lusts for. (Antonin Artaud and Jules Berry play smaller roles, as two of Saccard’s confederates —- his secretary and a reporter.)

The pilot gets exploited in a stock-market scam concocted by Saccard in which he makes a well-publicized flight to French Guyana, where Saccard owns oil fields, and then appears to die in a crash en route. (He survives, but then begins to lose his eyesight.) Eventually Saccard’s machinations are exposed in a trial, thanks to the skullduggery of his former mistress (Helm) and key rival (Abel) and the revenge of the pilot’s wife (Glory).

Stylistically, the film is as extravagant as its plot. The pendulum-like crane movements and elaborate tracks in both the Bourse and the gigantic, cavernous sets designed by Lazare Meerson and André Barsacq are the main attractions in a 40-minute “making-of” documentary by Jean Dréville shot at the same time (and included as a bonus on the DVD). These sets are anticipated in some of L’Herbier’s earlier features, where the crowded interiors tend to provoke either claustrophobic or agoraphobia; there’s also an absurdly opulent party here that can be traced back to one in L’Inhumaine. Even more characteristic are some of the other visual effects —- blurred focus to suggest subjective impressions; graphic displays of words within the narrative spaces; superimpositions that, like the cluttered and crowded interiors, evoke Josef von Sternberg; eccentric low or high angles; and musically percussive patterns of editing. The real sounds of Bourse crowds and airplanes were played back on 78 rpm records during screenings when the film premiered, and some of these noises are preserved on the DVD.

The degree to which L’Herbier’s films reek of their own periods is evident especially in their promotional materials. The elegant hologram stills encasing the L’argent box set are splendid examples of this. One shows Alcover seated behind Helm on a sofa in a huge, stylish living room; the trail of her evening gown extends so far out of frame that it traverses an entire section of the carpet. On the reverse side, Abel and Glory confront one another across an intricately checkered floor while a huge, monumental map of South America dominates the curved wall behind them. It’s at such moments — when the graphic designs seem to overwhelm or else become the dramas — that the art of L’Herbier might be said to flourish.

Mise en Scène as Power Struggle: THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT

This essay was commissioned by the Australian DVD label Madman, for their 2008 release of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. In fact, I wrote essays about four separate Fassbinder films for them — the three others were Katzelmacher, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Martha — and these will also be posted here in the future. —J.R.

“I love movies. Pictures about passion—and pain. Lovely!

[…] “Discipline’s okay as long as you’re having fun.”
–Karin (Hanna Schygulla) in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

An early watershed in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s career as a filmmaker, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), his twelfth feature, might even be regarded as the first in which he explicitly “discovered” mise en scène.  Adapting his own play —- which had premiered in Darmstadt half a year before, in June 1971, in a production directed by Peer Raben —- the film makes no effort to “open up” the original material in terms of its original setting, the flat of its title heroine, and it focuses on issues of camera placement and camera movement like few other Fassbinder films made before or since.

For Christian Braad Thomsen, who may be Fassbinder’s most authoritative critic, the film marks a significant turning point. After completing work on Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Fassbinder took an eight-month break, which in terms of his usual breakneck speed and productivity was unprecedented. It was during this period that he first saw and wrote about half a dozen Douglas Sirk films, during the winter of 1970-71 —- which inspired a major reorientation of his filmmaking practice, as well as a personal visit with his film crew to Sirk at his home in Lugano, Switzerland, where he had retired after terminating his Hollywood career with Imitation of Life in 1959. According to Thomsen, the first two Fassbinder films made after this meeting, The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), both show the mark of Sirk’s influence, albeit in separate ways, and both had autobiographical origins: the first was inspired by an incident in Fassbinder’s family and the second was essentially a recasting of Fassbinder’s own relationships with his lover Günther Kaufmann (a black Bavarian whose father was an American GI during the postwar German occupation) and his assistant (or devoted “slave”) Peer Raben. (Fassbinder’s first explicit and detailed depiction of male homosexuality would come in his 1974 feature Fox and His Friends, and The Bitter Tears, with its lesbian characters, might be regarded as a significant way station, paving the way towards this candor.)

Each of these features inaugurates a new strain in Fassbinder’s work which Thomsen labels, respectively, “bourgeois” films and “cinema” films. And the joint significance of these two new strains is that they mark the overall shift of Fassbinder during this period from being a marginal and somewhat experimental artist to achieving the status of more widely recognized and celebrated arthouse director. This shift was accompanied, moreover, by a certain political change, at least in some of the implications of his work.

Subtitled “a case history” and dedicated “to the one who became Marlene here” (which would appear to be Peer Raben), The Bitter Tears focuses during its credits on a couple of cats nibbling on food on the four steps between the two floors of the title heroine’s apartment. As the credits end, we see Marlene (Irm Hermann) moving behind the steps as the camera pulls back and then tracks to the right, passing first a frameless painting which covers the entire back wall of Petra’s bedroom — a cropped reproduction of Nicolas Poussin’s Midas and Dionysos (1629)–and then, in the foreground, the full length of Petra’s bed, moving from foot to head, where Petra lies sleeping, until Marlene, offscreen, opens the blinds.

What follows is a discontinuous monologue by Petra as she slowly and very gradually maneuvers her way out of bed, interrupted mainly by the successive orders she gives to her secretary-assistant Marlene, all of which Marlene silently and dutifully fulfills or accepts: to bring Petra the phone (so that she can call her mother); to squeeze her a glass of orange juice; to “start on the drawing” (Petra is a fashion designer, and part of Marlene’s work is to execute her designs on paper); to type a letter that she dictates to one “Joseph Mankiewicz,” saying that she’ll be unable to make a scheduled payment on a loan (apparently because of a 5,000-mark loan she has just agreed to give to her mother); to bring her the typed letter so she can sign it; to post the letter (“and be quick”); to dance with her to the record (by this time, Petra has finally gotten out of bed and put on, successively, a robe, a record by the Platters [“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”], and a wig); to resume her drawing (which “must be done by noon”), and then to interrupt this work in turn to fetch her the mail.

The beginning of this opening sequence is deceptive but pointed —- deceptive because the presence of the two cats suggests some elements of chance in the mise en scène (especially if we overlook the prior placement of food on the stairs to ensure their presence there), and pointed because we’re introduced to the Poussin painting before we’re introduced to Petra von Kant herself, and because the arbitrariness of Petra’s despotic rule over Marlene is already being highlighted.

As for “Joseph Mankiewicz,” this is most likely a nod to All About Eve, which also centers on the ambiguous relationship between a temperamental diva and a dutiful, worshipful protégé. And Sirk, though he isn’t cited verbally, is certainly a reference point in the flamboyant employments of color and lighting, not to mention the overall ambience of melodrama and “women’s pictures”. Furthermore, in a more general fashion, Fassbinder might be said to be taking some of his cues from the everyday perversity of certain Hollywood melodramas, noirs in particular, such as Gilda —- that is, pointing up the perversity that can already be found in such pictures and then replicating some of their features in a campier and more self-aware style.

What’s perverse here is not only the mistress-slave relationship between Petra and Marlene, but also the affair that is launched before the end of the first act between Petra and Karin (Hanna Schygulla), at least as it develops in subsequent acts, and the ambiguous shifts in power and control between them. But it’s important to add that the perversity of this relationship, as perceived by Fassbinder, isn’t automatically mandated by the fact that it’s homosexual. On the contrary, the possibility of progressive liberation from the perversions of patriarchy is raised by this film before it’s decisively squelched.

There’s a brilliant essay by Lynne Kirby called “Fassbinder’s Debt to Poussin” that appeared in Camera Obscura no. 13-14 (Spring-Summer 1985) and analyzes the complex functions of the painting in relation the film’s mise en scène and meaning. Without attempting to summarize Kirby’s lengthy and multifaceted argument, it seems worth quoting the first part of her description of the painting as a way of underlining its most salient feature, the positioning of male figures—-which is all the more striking because no other onscreen male figures appear in the film:

Defined overwhelmingly by its predominant
foreground, the space of the represented
painting divides into two major domains, each
anchored in a figure constituted as the opposite
of the other. The left-hand side features an
ecstatic bacchante stretched out between the
dozing infant lying below her, and the drunken
Silenus slumped over his wine jug perched above.
The figure of Midas bowed before that of Dionysos
fills the right side, although a few other male
figures and the rear-end of a goat are squeezed in
as well. The mural is evidently cut to fit the
wall, since the original painting extends further
to the right and top. Reframed for symmetry, the
female and Midas are meant to be seen as opposites,
as sexually different, as symbolically other; this
is indicated not only by their different skin
colors (traditional in mythological painting: white
for women, bronze for men), or the different states
of consciousness indexed by their respective posi-
tions. The spatial division itself is constructed
around the figure at the center of the painting,
Dionysos. With his arms spread out on both sides of
his body, the corporeal disposition of this figure
seems to say, “on the one hand, men; on the other,
women—-” and in between, himself. (1)

The crucial significance being pinpointed here is the simultaneous determination, claim, failure, and inability of Petra von Kant (and, by extension, Fassbinder himself) to live and act freely, outside the bourgeois norms of patriarchy. In Petra’s terms, this means her failure to achieve in her relationship to Karin something more liberated than a replication or parody of heterosexual behavior in terms of possessiveness. The Poussin painting, in short, serves as a mocking rebuke to Petra’s pretense to have transcended the limitations of her two previous and failed heterosexual marriages —- which is also why virtually the entire action of the film is framed between the two sides of a 45 RPM record of The Platters that she plays on her phonograph, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” at the beginning and “The Great Pretender” at the end. It’s almost as if Fassbinder was bracketing his own plot as a failed self-psychoanalysis, yielding a cynical autocritique that inherently posits any change as impossible. It might be oversimplifying matters to claim that this flip position made his work both more commercial and less political. But it would be less of a stretch to say that it made his attitude more humorous and fashionable. (Spoiler alert: those who haven’t yet seen the film are cautioned to stop reading here.)

The sarcastic end of the film, however, is not the same ending found in the play, which was more open- ended. At the play’s end, Petra says to Marlene, after having just liberated her, “Now tell me about your life”—-echoing the invitation she made earlier to Karin–at which point the final curtain falls. In the film, the same declaration is followed first by Petra putting on the record “The Great Pretender,” which then plays over the remaining action, and then by Marlene immediately packing her suitcase in the foreground of the shot before she leaves the premises.

In his book-length study of Fassbinder (2), Thomsen persuasively criticizes this ending of the film on two counts: (a) One of the items packed in her suitcase by Marlene is a revolver, which makes its first and only appearance at this moment—-and which Thomsen faults, even though it can be taken as a personal reference to the revolvers that crop up in many of Fassbinder’s earlier films, because it functions primarily and not secondarily as a symbol. (In a 1973 interview with Thomsen, Fassbinder suggested that it was used in order to stress that Marlene’s slavery was voluntary, but this fact was surely already clear without it.) (b) The song “The Great Pretender” implies in a rather facile way that Petra’s claims at liberating herself from patriarchy were fraudulent from the beginning.

One other detail in this ending seems worthy of mention, if only because it implies the same defeatist resolution, with just as many inherent contradictions. Just before Petra says to Marlene, “Tell me about yourself,” she says, “I have to apologize to you for many things, Marlene. In [the] future, we’ll really work together. You’ll have what you’re entitled to —- freedom and fun!” Marlene then steps forward and rather meekly kisses Petra’s hand, and Petra sharply responds by saying, “Not like that!”

Even though the intellectual and emotional battle waged throughout The Bitter Tears is ultimately lost, it remains alive as long as the mise en scène might be said to persist as a mode of inquiry. One of the most telling signs of life in this inquiry appears to be Fassbinder’s desire to keep his camera in motion, within or between shots (to mark changes of camera angles), whenever it can still function as a means of discovery or rediscovery, a way of redefining or potentially breaking free of compulsive behavior and oppressive power relations. It hardly seems coincidental that the plot’s overall development towards defeatism can also be traced to some degree in the growing proliferation of long, static takes filmed from fixed angles, when neither the camera nor the actors seem able to budge. (Another growing tendency —- the habit of characters speaking to one another while looking in opposite directions —- reflects the possible influence of Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud, with its own tragic stalemates between freedom and some form of predestination. But properly speaking, the rather reductive and vulgarized fusion of Dreyer and Fassbinder wouldn’t come about until some time later, with the arrival of Lars von Trier.)

The broad issue of how and to what degree freedom can be said to exist within a sadomasochistic relationship is an ongoing preoccupation of Fassbinder’s work, and here it can be said to surface periodically in the costumes (e.g., the “slave” dresses worn by both Petra and Karin), in the placements of both the actors and the camera (which sometimes juxtapose characters in relation to their relative degrees of power and/or mobility, and sometimes juxtapose them with mannequins and/or diverse figures in the Poussin painting), and in the degrees of mobility or stasis assigned at various junctures to the camera. That it ends with a fixed angle framing the departure of Marlene–an act positioned as a kind of bitter punch line–suggests that at some point between the premiere of the play and the ten-day shoot of this film, half a year later, Fassbinder lost faith in his own capacity for change.

Footnotes

1.    Kirby, Lynne, op. cit., p. 5.

2.    Thomsen, Christian Braad, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, translated by Martin Chalmers, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004, p. 116.

Doing the CALIFORNIA SPLIT

From Stop Smiling No. 35 (its gambling issue), June 2008. — J.R.

“Trusting to luck means listening to voices,” Jean-Luc Godard reportedly said at some

point in the mid-Sixties. This has always struck me as one of his more obscure aphorisms,

and one that even seems to border on the mystical. Yet the minute one starts to apply it to

Robert Altman’s California Split, released in 1974 — a free-form comedy about the

friendship that develops and then plays itself out between two compulsive gamblers,

Charlie (Elliott Gould) and Bill (George Segal), and the first movie ever to use an 8-track

mixer — it starts to make some weird kind of sense.

What’s an 8-track mixer? According to the maestro of overlapping dialogue himself,

speaking in David Thompson’s Altman on Altman (Faber and Faber, 2006), this is a

system developed by Jim Webb known as Lion’s Gate 8-Tracks, and it grew directly out

of Altman’s ongoing efforts to make on-screen dialogue sound more real. Sound mixers

would frequently complain that some actors wouldn’t speak loudly enough and Altman

would counter that this was a recording problem, not a performance problem involving

the actors’ deliveries. Plant enough microphones around the set or on the location — in

this case, eight — and one could always adjust the volume later, when the separate

channels were being mixed together and one could decide which channels should

predominate, and in which proportion. In other words, assuming that you had a certain

amount of scripted dialogue and a certain amount of “background” improvs being

delivered at the same time — the modus operandi of many Altman movies, especially

this one — trusting to luck was a matter of recording all this dialogue on eight separate

tracks. And listening to voices was what you did afterward — shoot first and ask

questions later, working out a hierarchy of what should have the most clarity after the fact.

If an improv was funnier or more relevant than a scripted line delivered at the same

moment, allow the former to overtake the latter.

Even before the title sequence starts, over the familiar Columbia Pictures logo, California

Split has already started to chatter. A steady rush of talk — telegraphed, overheard,

sometimes barely audible — spills into the opening scenes like a scatter of loose change

from a slot machine, meeting or eluding our grasp in imitation of a strictly chance

operation. Admittedly, the overall odds of the game are somewhat fixed because the

movie has a script (by Joseph Walsh, a gambler himself), two box-office favorites and

hard Hollywood money behind it. But the improvisatory spirit is unmistakable, if only

because an alert audience is obliged to ad-lib in order to keep up, compelled to shift its

attention as often as the characters.

So using Lion’s Gate 8-Tracks was putting into practice a certain dialectic of chance and

control, one of the cornerstones of Altman’s filmmaking style. And this would become

even more systematic in the movie Altman made next, Nashville, where instead of having

just two main characters, Altman opted, at least in theory, to feature two dozen. (Some of

them proved to be much more prominent than others.) And when he made A Wedding in

1978, he arbitrarily decided to double that number to 48.

But in fact, the most apt cross-reference to California Split in the Altman canon isn’t

either of those films but his lesser-known Jazz ‘34: Remembrances of Kansas City Swing

(1977) — a feature-length adjunct to Kansas City that featured real jazz musicians in

period costume casually performing after hours in a 1934 Kansas City club. This

culminates in a friendly but frenetic cutting contest between two tenor sax players trading

solos, not unlike some of the riffs developed in California Split between Gould and Segal.

More generally, this simultaneously relaxed and lively swing-fest, a celebration of

collective euphoria, shows how deeply akin Altman’s style is to the aesthetics of

improvised jazz, which at its best tends to thrive not so much through competition as

through the kind of sudden inspiration that fellow players can spark in one another.

A compulsive casino gambler, Altman once boasted, “At one time I could stand at a craps

table for two days.” And he inherited — by chance — a film project scripted by another

compulsive gambler, Joseph Walsh, who had been developing his script with Steven

Spielberg, of all people, during his pre-Jaws phase. (Walsh was a child actor in the Fifties

and Sixties, prominently featured as Joey Walsh in such films as Hans Christian

Andersen and The Juggler and countless TV shows; in California Split he plays Sparkie,

a bookie owed a fortune by Bill.)

Of course Walsh was taking a gamble himself by trusting his script to a master doodler

like Altman who favored improvs. Nevertheless, figuring out what’s prearranged or not

in this movie isn’t always a simple matter, and it’s often the spirit and climate of

improvisation that counts more here than anything else. The opening sequence, where

Charlie and Bill first encounter one another at a poker table in a gambling hall, certainly

looks and sounds authentic, but it was shot on a set designed by Altman regular Leon

Ericksen, who redressed a dance hall. Most of the extras were hired from the drug

rehabilitation center Synanon, although a few real gamblers were included as well, and

some of the background dialogue was loosely plotted if not precisely scripted by Walsh

(whose own brother Edward plays a pivotal role as another poker player — a sore loser

who accuses Charlie of cheating, and later beats him up). So the mix between real and

semi-real, simulated and actual, is pretty intricate, and it’s only because of the DVD

commentary by Altman, Walsh, Gould and Segal that we know that Charlie and Bill’s

drunken efforts to reel off the names of all the seven dwarfs were invented by the two

actors.

We also know that the house Charlie shares with two hookers (Ann Prentiss and Gwen

Welles) is a real house and not a set, that most of the film was shot in continuity

(allowing the seven dwarfs gag to get reprised at the house), and that Altman staged both

the horse race and the prizefight that the heroes attend, but also used plenty of extras at

those locations who qualified as authentic. Most importantly, the mix between fiction and

documentary throughout is so fully entangled that each winds up educating the other,

while the multiple sound levels lead to periodic eruptions, especially in bar scenes, where

peripheral characters briefly upstage and overtake the two leads, background becoming

foreground and vice versa. Oneexample among many is actually set in a paint store,where

Bill looks up his old friend Harvey and gets an impromptu and irrelevant monologue

from him about his alleged ESP and why he thinks Bill has tracked him down.

Like a minor character in a painting by Brueghel or a comedy by Preston Sturges,

Harvey momentarily takes over the movie, then drops out of sight.

Needless to say, this resembles gambling in the number of risks and unforeseeable

outcomes that are involved, and there are naturally some losses in this kind of game as

well as a few winning streaks. As Altman pointed out, California Split has less plot and

more concentration on character than most of his other movies; and when the story is

supposed to build to a climax — after Bill rushes off to Reno to gamble his way out of

debt, with Charlie in tow — it arguably dribbles off into random shtick, or at least a

dramatic diminuendo as it shows the hollowness of Bill’s victory. (We also learn on the

DVD that the final scene in the movie isn’t the one Walsh scripted.)

Some of the chance encounters in the movie are between the dialogue and various gritty

songs that are sung offscreen by Phyllis Shotwell — encounters “staged” during

postproduction by the film’s editor, Lou Lombardo. Shotwell eventually appears onscreen

in the movie at the Reno casino, belting out her numbers to her own piano

accompaniment, but the fact that we start to hear her music much earlier in the movie,

long before Reno is even mentioned, suggests an eerie kind of predestination, as if she

were gradually pulling the two heroes toward her establishment like a magnet.

Her lyrics usually have only the broadest relation to the action, but sometimes they draw

closer in witty surprises — or at least they once did. Unhappily, two of the most magical

conjunctions between her songs and the on-screen action vanished from the movie on its

way to DVD, due to problems with music rights: “Goin’ to Kansas City” was originally

heard over the trip to Reno, and after the heroes arrived there, Gould’s and Shotwell’s

seemingly independent raps, hers heard offscreen while Charlie and Bill crossed the

street toward the casino, suddenly converged on the word nobody, pronounced by the two

voices simultaneously. But on the DVD, Shotwell’s performance in this sequence is

replaced by simple instrumental music, and thanks to yet another glitch, the DVD’s

commentary still alludes to the magical convergence of the two voices saying nobody as

if this were still in the movie. (Win a few, lose a few.)

In what might be his best performance to date, Gould is a perpetual live wire. His verbal

cadenzas embody his character’s freewheeling spirit throughout the picture, for Charlie is

an aggressive loudmouth forced to justify his vulgarity with invention and virtuosity,

whereas Segal plays, as it were, a sort of inner-fire Miles Davis to Gould’s Charlie Parker,

smoldering with brooding intensity. A similar contrast is afforded by the respective

“hard” and “soft” styles of Prentiss and Welles as Charlie’s affable housemates,

demonstrating a comparable kind of creative teamwork.

In both cases, you might say that feeling ultimately counts for more than thought. (”I can

never think and play at the same time,” the great jazz pianist Lennie Tristano once

maintained. “It’s emotionally impossible.”) And one might also argue that it’s the

ensemble that matters — which in this movie extends even to the energy and vibes

provided by the minor characters, whether they’re bit players or extras, especially in all

the scenes set in bars and gambling joints. Like the listeners and dancers in Jazz ‘34:

Remembrances of Kansas City Swing, they prove there’s an art to being a spectator or a

participant that’s just as important in a way as the art of being a performer. And if

watching an Altman movie like California Split makes you a bit of an artist and a bit of a

gambler, feeling your way into what remains imponderable and unforeseeable, that’s part of

what’s being celebrated.