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GERTRUD and LIGHT IN AUGUST

Commissioned by Criterion’s The Current, and published there on October 26, 2010. — J.R.

For many decades now, William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964) have been major touchstones for me—not only separately but also in some mysterious relation to each other. I even managed to find a way of discussing these two works together over the first four paragraphs of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (I also published a lengthy essay about Gertrud, in which I make glancing reference to the novel). The fact that Dreyer once expressed some interest in adapting Faulkner’s Light in August — an interest he shared with Luis Buñuel (and with actors Zachary Scott and Ruth Ford, a couple who once actually held the film rights) — was part of the inspiration and pretext for my musings about Dreyer and Faulkner, but for me the affinities run much deeper.

Both are works I take pleasure in revisiting every few years — they seem to grow in density each time — and I had occasion to revisit both of them this fall. I’m presently teaching film at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and last month, after starting a weekly cine-club there with a colleague, we hit upon the idea of showing Gertrud as our first film after another colleague, filmmaker Rob Tregenza, said he’d always wanted to see it. Having once viewed the film with the late novelist Iris Owens (author of the brilliant and about-to-be-reprinted After Claude), who disliked its slowness and its characters so intensely that she said that she’d rather leave the country than have to sit through it again, and recalling the reports of the film’s disastrous reception when it premiered in Venice and Paris, I was afraid that it would scare off some potential cine-club members. But in fact, they seemed to find it both fascinating and emotionally compelling, and the students who came all stuck around to discuss it afterward. So maybe we’re all finally starting to catch up with a forty-six-year-old film that was widely derided as out-of-date when it first appeared.

Light in August — still my favorite novel, discovered in my teens — was the focus of my master’s thesis. I analyzed its two major characters — Lena Grove (a pregnant young white woman on the road from Alabama, searching in Mississippi for the father of her child-to-be) and Joe Christmas (a doomed, bitter orphan of thirty-three with alleged biracial origins who can’t ever discover whether he’s white or black), who never meet—in terms of the respective styles of The Odyssey and the Old Testament, as described by Erich Auerbach in the brilliant first chapter of his Mimesis: seamless and untroubled in Homer, like figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, and turbulent and full of gaps, like expressionist bolts of lightning, in the story of Abraham. As Claire Denis recently suggested to me, it may be the best novel ever written about racism, and it’s also a profoundly troubled moral inquiry about the failure of southern Christianity to cope with racism. It boldly alternates pastoral comedy (Grove) with urban tragedy (Christmas), a cinematic form of stillness, presence, and persistence (Grove, who opens the novel in the present tense) with a very literary form of tortured narrative progression (Christmas).

It wasn’t until I read Maurice Drouzy’s still untranslated biography of Dreyer in the 1980s that I began to recognize Dreyer’s personal investment in the material of Light in August, especially in its two leading characters. Born illegitimate, he grew up idealizing his Swedish mother — who died when he was still an infant from her attempt to abort a second child—and hating his Danish foster parents. Two years after he left home as a teenager in 1906 (the same year that most of Gertrud’s action unfolds), he left Denmark for the first time to discover whatever he could about his mother in rural Sweden. Over half a century later, he was inspired to adapt Hjalmar Soderberg’s play Gertrud by adding an epilogue when he discovered that the real-life Swedish woman the title heroine was based on spent her final years only a few miles from where he’d been conceived. (Dreyer’s original plan, which he was unable to realize, was to shoot this epilogue on location in the woman’s home.)

For all its radical differences in period (1906), milieu (Copenhagen), and class (upper) from Light in August, Gertrud is no less preoccupied with questions about existential identity—for the implacable title heroine (who, like Lena Grove, lives in a continuous present and never changes) and for the various men who pursue or abandon her (preoccupied with the past and their own careers). There isn’t much room for comedy here (as we get in the final chapter of Light in August), certainly not in the tragic failure of the men to live up to Gertrud’s ideal of total love and commitment, or in Gertrud’s own tragic inability or refusal to compromise her ideals. But the tension between narrative and nonnarrative forms of presence, between stillness and instability, is remarkably similar in the two. And the piercing, exquisitely “overlit” flashbacks and epilogue of Gertrud evoke some of the charged luminosity of Faulkner’s world.

Lost and Found: MIX-UP

From the October 2010 Sight and Sound. I regret a few errors that crept into this piece as originally published, all of which were my own fault and all of which are corrected here. — J.R.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention at the outset that Françoise Romand has been a good friend for over two decades. But I hasten to add that she became a friend because of my immoderate enthusiasm for Mix-Up (1985), her first film — one of the strangest as well as strongest documentaries that I know.

To make matters even more mixed-up, I should also point out that, on the region-free DVD bonus of this hour-long French documentary in English, Françoise, after interviewing herself in French, shows her filming of my talking head in English while I attempt to explain why I find her film so powerful and exciting. What follows represents another try.

Filmed over just twelve days, but recounting a multilayered real-life story that covers nearly half a century, Mix-Up recounts and explores what ensued after two English women, Margaret Wheeler and Blanche Rylatt, respectively upper-middle-class and working-class, gave birth to daughters in November 1936 in a Nottingham nursing home, and the babies were inadvertently switched. The switch came about through a filing error that was only confirmed 21 years later, after Wheeler persisted in pursuing her own queasy suspicions, meanwhile keeping contact with the Rylatts. But by then, of course, Peggy and Valerie had grown up with the wrong mothers, Blanche and Margaret respectively.

To take on everything this entailed, Romand enlisted all the surviving members of both families in her radical experiment, staging comic and highly stylized psychodramas about the diverse emotional histories of this colossal mishap — group psychoanalysis as mise en scène (and as découpage). “To me the cinema is a universal language,” she says in her DVD bonus, “because it starts from the unconscious.” And she somehow makes the whole process fun rather than ponderous, even though the emotional currents and issues about identity and destiny run as deeply and as thickly as they do in Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud (which isn’t exactly a comedy).

Because various stages in this long narrative are made to coexist in the present, the plot and characters ultimately register with the density of a 500-page novel. And the subject is treated so exhaustively that the film’s 63 minutes register like a much longer film.

But at no point does Romand pretend to offer an objective, “balanced” account of what happened (even though her recurring imagery, some of it surrealist and/or allegorical, includes babies being weighed on matching scales), and the viewer is obliged to become no less invested. Margaret, an intellectual, had a lengthy correspondence with George Bernard Shaw about this case (we see the boxes of letters, but Wheeler wouldn’t permit Romand to quote from them). Yet it was clearly Valerie who grew up maimed by feeling unloved, whereas Blanche, whose matching hobby consists of collecting tiny pig figurines and cuttings about pigs, and who proudly poses for us in her bowling hat, seems to have given Peggy a genuine sense of belonging.

Mix-Up has a French subtitle, Méli-mélo. My dictionary defines that as a “jumble (of facts, etc.); hotchpotch; medley (of people, etc.); clutter (of furniture)” — which helps to define the film’s methodology as well as its subject. Romand’s staging and editing strategies are formal inventions involving many kinds of poetic audiovisual rhymes, involving color, music, sound effects, domestic interiors (with windows, doors, and mirrors predominating as framing devices), and urban exteriors (with various modes of transport — bus, railroad, walking — predominating here). There are also some Godardian juxtapositions of language and image: during walks, Valerie and Peggy each stand in front of key color-coded words, scrawled like graffiti on peeling walls.

The intermingling of fiction and non-fiction produces many daring mixes and clashes. (When Martin, Margaret’s affable youngest son, crouches as an adult under a table to describe a conversation he overheard under the same table at age 13, the moment is uncanny.) Through the ever-widening cast of relatives — mostly composed of siblings, and ranging all the way from Margaret’s droll husband, Charles (the most Dickensian character), to Blanche’s rather dour Jehovah’s Witness son, Peter — a vexing moral question is repeatedly posed: the value of truth and awareness versus ignorance and innocence in living one’s life.

Reseeing Mix-Up recently, and finding it has only expanded and improved over time, I continue to wonder why it isn’t more widely known. Romand’s films, described in her self-interview, are all quite different from one another (and her semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional Thème Je, which she calls The Camera I in English, is even more radical and transgressive than Mix-Up), and this gives her a somewhat elusive profile as an auteur.

But perhaps the most serious obstacle is that her masterpiece poses a genuine challenge in how it makes art and life indistinguishable, merging artistic choices with ethical initiatives, and dares us to do likewise in following her. The implicit rivalry between the two mothers and their respective cultures and approaches to life is everywhere apparent, but part of Romand’s genius is the way she gets the entire family engaged in the serious game-playing of this film’s production, a game we become obliged to play as well. This makes her art both an unpredictable, risky adventure and an unusual form of healing, for the people on-screen as well as for us. The film’s hopeful closing motto, “We all belong together,” may sound a trifle optimistic, but the film itself is nothing less than a multifaceted demonstration of this thesis.

Published on 11 Sep 2011 in Notes, by jrosenbaum

Recommended Reading: Aaron Cutler on CERTIFIED COPY

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/10/new-york-film-festival-2010-certified-copy/

A Brief Reflection on “Winning” and “Losing”

I’ve been haunted lately by a very moving and eloquent comment made last Saturday at a panel discussion which I participated in, held at the Smithsonian. The occasion was a screening of a restoration of Hai Ninh’s lovely 1974 North Vietnamese feature The Little Girl from Hanoi, a film so scarce that I can’t find any stills from it on the Internet to illustrate this post. [Update, 6/13/12: Some stills have subsequently appeared and have been posted with my review of the film, here, as well as on this page.]

After one of my (American) copanelists remarked that even though “we [sic] lost the war in Vietnam,” the country had a thriving market economy today, and then either he or someone else alluded to America “winning” the Cold War (which provoked an angry riposte from me that if the Cold War had any “winners” at all, these were gangsters on both sides), a Vietnamese diplomat in the audience, who said he was speaking not as a diplomat but simply as a Vietnamese, stated that he thought it was inappropriate to claim that anyone “won” the war in Vietnam. He was right, of course, which got me thinking that the American compulsion to see all of life (and death) in the simplistic terms of sports and games has a lot to answer for. Winning and losing are of course predominantly the concepts and concerns of children, and to insist on applying them repeatedly to grown-up matters often means refusing to deal with them at all in any serious way. [10/08/10]

R.I.P. Arthur Penn 1922-2010

This review of Night Moves appeared in the May 1975 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. [September 11, 2009 postscript: Having just reseen Night Moves for the first time since it came out, I think it holds up remarkably well, in terms of its script and direction and almost uniformly fine performances. There’s also some additional interest now in seeing Melanie Griffith in her first credited performance and James Woods, less impressive, in one of his earliest after Elia Kazan discovered him for The Visitors. As for Alan Sharp, it would appear that his filmography (which also includes The Hired Hand and Ulzana’s Raid) warrants further investigation — as does Jennifer Warren’s.]—J.R.

Night Moves

U.S.A., 1975                                                                             Director: Arthur Penn

Cert—X. dist—Columbia-Warner. p.c—Hiller Productions/Layton. p—Robert M. Sherman. assoc. p—Gene Lasko. p. manager—Thomas J. Schmidt. asst. d—Jack Roe, Patrick H. Kehoe. sc—Alan Sharp. ph—Bruce Surtees. col—Technicolor. underwater ph—Jordan Klein. ed—Dede Allen, Stephen A. Rotter. p. designer—George Jenkins. set dec—Ned Parsons. sp. effects—Marcel Vercoutere, Joe Day. m/m.d—Michael Small. titles—Wayne Fitzgerald. sd. ed—Craig McKay, Robert Reitano, Richard Cirincione. sd. rec—Jack Solomon. sd. re-rec—Richard Vorisek. aerial co-ordinator—Dean Engelhardt. l.p—Gene Hackman (Harry Moseby), Jennifer Warren (Paula), Edward Binns (Joey Ziegler), Harris Yulin (Marty Heller), Kenneth Mars (Nick), Janet Ward (Arlene Iverson), James Woods (Quentin), Anthony Costello (Marv Ellman), John Crawford (Tom Iverson), Melanie Griffith (Delly Grastner), Susan Clark (Ellen Moseby), Ben Archibeck (Charles), Dennis Dugan (Boy), J. C. Hincks (Girl), Maxwell Gail Jnr. (Stud), Susan Barrister and Larry Mitchell (Ticket Clerks). 8,893 ft. 99 mins.

Former football star Harry Moseby, now working as a private detective, is hired by Arlene Iverson, a promiscuous former starlet, to find her runaway teenage daughter Delly. After speaking to Delly’s previous boyfriend Quentin, a movie stuntman who explains that she went off with Marv Ellman, another stuntman, Harry surreptitiously follows his own wife Ellen as she leaves a cinema with another man, Marty Heller, and later confronts Heller in his flat. There is an angry scene with Ellen, just before Harry leaves leaves to look up Ellman, also meeting and befriending stuntman Joey Ziegler, who directs him to Delly’s stepfather, Tom Iverson, on the Florida keys. There he meets Tom, and his girlfriend Paula and Delly, who appear to be involved in a ménage à trois. Delly refuses to come home, until she comes across a corpse in a wrecked plane while swimming at night and changes her mind; later the same night, Paula comes to Harry’s room and seduces him. Shortly after Harry returns Delly to Arlene, she dies in a movie car stunt with Ziegler at the wheel; suspecting foul play, Harry goes to see Quintin, who reveals that Ellman was the corpse in the wrecked plane. Hoping to save his marriage, and closing down his detective office, Harry nevertheless insists on flying back to Florida when he learns that Ellman’s death hasn’t been reported to the Coast Guard. There he finds Quintin has just been killed by Tom; after a fight with the latter, Harry sets off in his boat with Paula, who explains that she, Tom, Ellman, and Quentin  had been smuggling archaeological remains out of Yucatan, and admits that she was seducing Harry while Tom was diving for a statue in the wrecked plane. While she is diving for the statue, a seaplane appears; Harry is sounded by gunfire and Paula killed just before the plane crashes; Harry sees that the pilot is Joey Ziegler. Alone, Harry navigates the boat in circles around the wreckage.

Beneath the complicated unraveling of a mystery, an anti-mystery, with the hero’s detection registering as an evasion of his own problems; beneath a densely charted intrigue of betrayals and cross-purposes, a cryptic void, like that ambiguous trophy of treasure and wreckage around which Harry is drifting in the final shot. Thanks to an efficient script by Alan Sharp, and clean direction by Arthur Penn that lingers over seemingly peripheral matters only further to drive a bitter moralistic message home, Night Moves effectively subverts the Ross Macdonald formula that it partially appropriates — runaway child of wealthy, corrupt household saved from perdition by fatherly detective, who sets all the closet skeletons in order — by making its detective as much of a “runaway” as the child, and a virtually “solved” mystery as oddly unedifying and irrelevant as an unresolved one. Distanced by a brittle and heartless muzak score  that ironically reflects genre expectations, the plots its focus almost equally between what Harry uncovers and what he “misses” — or is in flight from. Thus one is only half-engaged in the seductions of a game while intermittently scoring off points against the featured player, although Hackman makes Harry likeable enough to keep this tension interesting for a while, as long as he can remain a step or two ahead of the film’s impending sermon about the folly of his ways. Absurdist anarchy and a search for roots, the thematic poles common to all of Penn’s features, figure implicitly in the sardonic, fleeting references to American history in the dialogue (Washington, Franklin, the Kennedy assassinations) — wistful epitaphs to lost purposes in a post-Watergate climate that the film is at some pains to describe. Within such a context, a quintessential Penn “folk” character like Paula, however corrupt, serves more as a spokesman for the film’s values than Harry, if only because of her relative flexibility and lack of illusions. And her sexuality, for all its apparently duplicitous nature in her seduction of Harry, is made to seem rather freer and looser than Arlene and Delly’s indiscriminate promiscuity, Tom’s incest, and the indiscriminate girl-chasing of Marv Ellman (of whom Ziegler remarks, “He’d fuck a woodpile on the chance there was a snake in it”), perhaps because it appears to be less bound up in automatic reflexes. (Jennifer Warren’s performance — like Hackman’s, Binns’, and Crawford’s — is a model of completeness suggesting incompleteness, i.e. teasing aspects of the character that are never spelled out. Harry, on the other hand, seems to be handled throughout as the stooge and representative of our self-deceptions: nothing we see in the film goes beyond his range of vision (the boat he is marooned on at the end is called, a bit patly, “Point of View”), so that his responses to events — such as his denunciation of Arlene after Delly’s death – often seems designed to duplicate, and therefore ultimately question, our own. Unlike Delly, who likes for “things to change no matter what”, he and (by implication) the audience are delineated as victims of compulsive habits, going nowhere in a hurry: Penn’s image of America today. According to the somewhat awkward chess motif bandied about in the film, it is a stalemate whereby one becomes estranged equally from present and past (exemplified by the story Harry tells Ellen about tracking down, and then fleeing from, his missing father in Baltimore) while mechanically stumbling after a fugitive and steadily diminishing future –- a plight epitomized by Harry’s helpless exchange of looks with Ziegler through a glass pane while the latter recedes from sight in the sinking plane, recognition suddenly dawning only when communication is no longer possible.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1975 (vol. 42, no. 496)