This obviously wouldn’t be an appropriate time to revive my negative review of Hopper’s Colors in the Chicago Reader 22 years ago, which can easily be accessed by anyone who might be interested. But I’d like to reproduce a couple of short paragraphs from it about my favorite Hopper film, which I continue to cherish:
To make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, I recently took another look at Hopper’s previous film, Out of the Blue (1980). Here was proof, if any is needed, that a celebrated burnt-out case came back to establish himself as the legitimate American heir to the cinema of Nicholas Ray — a cinema of tortured lyricism and passionate rebellion that reached its fullest flower in the 50s, as if to match the action painting that was roughly contemporary with it. Hopper managed to remake Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (the film in which Hopper made his acting debut) in terms of a working-class punk (Linda Manz), an androgynous heroine whose grim fate suggested an Americanized version of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette. Casting himself, moreover, as her dissolute father, Hopper gave himself a disturbing part that seemed to update his role as Billy in Easy Rider.
Originally hired to work on Out of the Blue solely as an actor, Hopper took over as director at the last minute. He fashioned an extraordinary movie with a minimum of time (a month of shooting, six weeks of editing) and money ($1.2 million, $780,000 of it reportedly Hopper’s own) that easily surpassed both Easy Rider (1969), and The Last Movie (1971) — his respectively overrated and underrated first two movies — as historical testimony and as aesthetic object. But very few people have ever heard of this late-blooming masterpiece, much less seen it. The fact that it belongs to that elephant graveyard of titles available on video doesn’t mean that it’s been validated by even the minimal cultural attention routinely given to every Sylvester Stallone release. [5/30/10]
The outrage of the mainstream press in Cannes about Godard’s Film Socialisme was quite predictable. In his Scanners, Jim Emerson has even gone to the trouble of compiling excerpts from 15 New York Times reviews of Godard’s films, spread out over half a century and all offering variations on the same complaint: “[approaching] the films themselves as though they are puzzles designed to frustrate (and to eventually be ‘solved’), then [blaming] Godard for not doing a better job of solving them himself because they’re too hard.” And it was apparent even to me, witnessing everything from Chicago, that this anger was only intensified by the minimalist pidgin-English subtitles and Godard’s last-minute cancellation of his press conference. I was reminded of the near-riot once occasioned by a screening of his Un Film comme les autres (perhaps the emptiest and the most talkative of all of Godard’s films to date), in New York’s Lincoln Center in 1968, thanks in part to an attempt at adding an English voiceover on the spot that made the French and English equally incomprehensible. Which suggests that Godard’s aesthetic and ideological provocations often help to clear the way for still other sources of anger that may or may not be related to them.
Most striking for me in the current fracas has been the exhuming of an offensive statement Godard made to the American press 40 years ago, at the height of his intransigent and still-insufferable “Dziga Vertov Group” period, expressing his hope that the three astronauts on Apollo 13 would die in outer space — a statement now used simply as a way of dismissing anything Godard might possibly do or say today. This ugly remark, cited by Colin MacCabe in his 2003 Godard biography, was recalled by Todd McCarthy on Indiewire on May 18, adding, “I have become increasingly convinced that this is not a man whose views on anything do I want to take seriously,” and then his personal opinion that if only Godard and Anna Karina had had a child over 40 years ago, he might have turned out to be a nice guy like Truffaut. Soon afterwards, Roger Ebert repeated the Apollo 13 remark on his own blog, meanwhile implying that Godard might just as well have said it yesterday (“I think something came loose. Maybe a screw”.) Before long, one was seeing it everywhere; when I Googled “Godard” and “Apollo 13” just now, this yielded over 8,000 hits (even though some of these obviously have nothing to do with the recent discussions). The implication was that this was all anyone needed to know about why Film Socialisme wasn’t worth taking seriously or even thinking about (apart from those coterie “insider” types such as me who are said to automatically endorse everything Godard says or does). And I guess it makes things even more conclusive and permanent if you settle on some idiotic statement he made four decades earlier.
But having just recently seen Film Socialisme (I won’t say how) myself, without any subtitles and with only fitful comprehension of the dialogue, I was impressed not only by the film’s singularly fresh, daring, and often beautiful employments of sound and image, but also by its tenderness towards virtually all the contemporary characters and figures in the film (including the many animals) —a virtue I don’t find in the least bit present in For Ever Mozart. I guess it’s also worth noting that Film Socialisme tries to say something about the contemporary world, Europe in particular, an impertinence that isn’t shared by such harmless, good-natured fare as Inglourious Basterds. But none of the film’s tenderness towards its own characters can be said to be extended towards the preferences, habits, expectations, or overall well-being of the mainstream reviewers at Cannes — which I suppose makes everyone else potential members of a coterie of insiders.
I’m reminded of the endless and escalating public outrage occasioned by a sexual crime committed by Polanski 30-odd years ago — even though, ironically, McCabe reports an even more offensive remark made by Godard in 1969, shortly after he lost a bidding war with Polanski to acquire the rights to a book, when he was told about the slaughter of Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate by Charles Manson’s gang: “Good — he just stole those rights from me.” Surely one of the most repugnant remarks anyone has ever made about anything, and, by the standards of Todd and Roger, another nifty way to invalidate any films that Godard might consider making in the foreseeable future.
What do these recent uproars about Polanski’s sexual offense and Godard’s 1970 remark about Apollo 13 have in common? Both are clear signals, even more plain than the achievements of The Ghost Writer and Film Socialisme, that the ideological wars waged in the late 60s and early 70s created huge rifts that remain active and unresolved. And it’s those rifts that finally seem to be causing so much outrage in the press, far more than any particular activities of Polanski or Godard. Which may help to account for why there’s so much compulsive reaching back towards the past and away from the present.
The first two stills below come from a couple of French films dating from 1907 and 1909, respectively, which were shown in the tenth and final program in “From the Deep,” a wonderful program at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival that’s briefly described here. The first, Le Cochon danseur (”The Dancing Pig”) is, according to Luis Buñuel, the first film he ever saw, when he was about eight years old; the second, a wild and hilarious farce largely staged on the streets of Paris, is Un Monsieur qui a mangé du taureau (”A Man Who Ate Bull Meat”). Such is the scarcity of all these films that practically none of the stills shown here, with the possible exception of the first, can do them any sort of justice. [5/23: This article has appeared in the Turkish film monthly Altyazi, and my thanks to Gözde Onaran, my fellow juror at Oberhausen, who translated it into Turkish, for furnishing me with the still below from Médor au téléphone.] – J.R.
The time is circa noon on May 2, outside the Lichtberg Cinema at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Olaf Möller, one of the programmers, and an old friend — a critic who tends to favor the critically overlooked in relation to the critically overexposed, preferring Verhoven to Hitchcock, Kuleshov to Sternberg, and Saless to Kiarostami — is explaining to me why he also tends to prefer Raoul Walsh to Howard Hawks For him, the terrain of Hawks is more limited, having more to do with the cinema itself than with the world.
Half an hour later, I’m watching the fifth program in a remarkable series curated this year by Eric de Kuyper and Mariann Lewinsky, “From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918”, an interesting and valuable intervention in the Oberhausen program that is attracting very large and enthusiastic audiences, many of them composed largely of viewers who have rarely if ever previously seen films from this period. This program, appropriately titled, “So Much To See, So Much to Hear: A Panorama,” is both an eye-opener and an ear-opener, in more ways than one — not simply because of the surprising number of color and sound films included (there are many of these in other programs in this series as well), but also because of the thematic and stylistic range of the material: “ethnographic” travelogues from Tangier as well as Brittany (both in 1908); portraits of Ceylonese and Indian woman in 1913; a 1908 spin-off of the 1905 English classic Rescued by Rover (Dog Outwits the Kidnappers) that fully justifies the programmers’ claim that it’s superior to the original; very funny pieces of French slapstick from 1911 and 1907 about two rambunctious ladies at the theater and a master speaking to his dog over the telephone; a priceless 1908 recording of a performance by music hall star Little Tich (one of the major acknowledged sources of Jacques Tati’s pantomimes); and two delicious sound-on-disk samplings of German operetta from 1908 and 1911 — a far from exhaustive list of this single program.
Although I risk oversimplifying this issue, part of the undeniable freshness of this program is a view of cinema that’s a Walshian view of the world rather than a Hawksian view of cinema. And this becomes unmistakable even when the plots are sheer fantasy: in Dog Outwits the Kidnapper, in which the canine hero chases after the getaway car of a kidnapper abducting the young Barbara Hepworth, then jumps into the driver’s seat when the kidnapper steps away on some errand and drives the child back home, part of the glory of this absurd caper is the free arrangement of the narrative: after the child gets returned to her home and safety, she and the dog are seen once again back in the front seat of the car, providing a protracted and hilarious encore.
One of the key virtues of this series is the creativity and intelligence of the selections and groupings, two enduring hallmarks of Oberhausen programing. The absence of certain national cinemas (including, most noticeably, those of the U.S. and Russia) help to focus other common elements in the ten programs. At one of these, de Kuyper reads aloud passages from Proust in order to place historically some French films that are contemporaneous, and in a delightful program devoted to “destruction,” the rebellion of cantankerous maids against their bourgeois employers in two separate films are juxtaposed with patches of films that have suffered extreme deterioration. The fact that most of these films and fragments are “shorts” that were made before the concept of shorts even existed only adds to the history lesson — a lesson about the world as much as it’s about cinema.
One of the joys of living in Chicago is the special quality of its scruffy storefront theater, although I must confess that during my 20 years here as a film reviewer, I took advantage of this resource only rarely, apart from a few intermittent discoveries over the years (such as the 21-year-old Theatre Oobleck, which I was lucky enough to stumble upon and savor in some of its earliest productions). More recently, since my retirement from the Chicago Reader, I’ve happily come across no less than four separate theaters of this kind in my own neighborhood so far, and over the past two Friday evenings I’ve had the pleasure of attending very impressive productions of Brecht’s The Good Soul of Szechuan at the Strawdog (on 3829 North Broadway) and, tonight, Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata at the Oracle just a few doors down from there (on 3809 North Broadway).
The Strawdog’s funky and entertaining version of Brecht (see above) has had the benefit of a thoughtful and passionate rave from the Reader’s Albert Williams, so the performance I attended was nearly sold out. But the Oracle’s Strindberg, despite a mainly favorable capsule in the same paper from Kerry Reid, shockingly had only seven customers at the performance I attended tonight, making us a slightly smaller crowd than the production’s able cast of eight. (The Oracle is also a more modest place, I hasten to add — with a normal seating capacity of only 24, if I counted correctly.) Part of this difference can undoubtedly be attributed to the more unfashionable aspects of Strindberg, combined with the fact that The Ghost Sonata is now a ripe 103 years old, an obstacle hinted at in some of the reviews of this production that I’ve read, despite the fact that these are mainly favorable. And I must confess that certain aspects of this play eluded me as well. Yet the nearly constant magic-show inventiveness of Max Truax’s expressionist direction, working hand in glove with the sets (credited jointly to Truax and Brieanne Hauger), Michal Janicki’s unnervingly mysterious video, and the volatile performances — all contriving to suggest various kinds of mental projections, contortions, and displacements, and spatial foreshortenings or extensions, as seen and experienced through a troubled mind’s eye — kept me enthralled even when I found myself getting lost in the maze of the plot. This production. in short, has a nightmarish intensity and a creepy authenticity that shouldn’t be missed [5/14/10].
