Category Archives: Essays

December 9, 2013

2013: The Year of the Ford

On one level, every year is the “Year of the Ford” in the Smith household. I am, after all, watching his movies all of the time, both for my own pleasure and in classes that I’m teaching. I’ve shown more films by John Ford, and in a greater variety of film studies classes (Intro to Film, Film and Society, Perspectives on Film, World of Cinema, etc.), than any other director. In less than five years I’ve managed to screen seven Ford features: Stagecoach (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); and this is not to mention that I also frequently show Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary feature Directed By John Ford in full — as well as clips from various other Ford films, including 3 Bad Men (1926), The Informer (1935) and The Battle of Midway (1942). My insistence on teaching Ford is in part because his very name seems synonymous with the American cinema — in much the same way that William Faulkner might be said to be synonymous with American literature or Bob Dylan synonymous with American music. (I’ll never forget how intensely gratifying it was to hear a young Korean student say she felt she was able to “understand America better” after watching Ford’s movies in my class.) Yet, even given my Ford-o-philia, 2013 was something special.

The year began on a sour note for some Ford aficionados when Quentin Tarantino repeatedly badmouthed Ford’s movies for their supposed “racism” to anyone who would listen (including Charlie Rose and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) while traveling around the world to promote his presumably more enlightened Django Unchained. Fortunately, Ford soon received the most eloquent defense his admirers could have hoped for in the form of a Film Comment rebuttal from the great Kent Jones. Then, in the following months, the world was reminded of the maestro’s continued relevance when four of what I would argue are among his five best movies were released on Blu-ray for the first time: How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, The Sun Shines Bright and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (Ford’s other best movie, The Searchers, was released on Blu-ray years ago.) Incredibly, none of these titles were released together as part of any sort of Ford-themed package or box-set deal. Instead they were dropped, coincidentally and separately, by three different labels: 20th Century Fox, Olive Films and Paramount UK. TCM and Sony also teamed up to release the “John Ford Columbia Films Collection” box set but the five titles included there were made available on DVD only (and as much as I welcome the digital debuts of such underrated gems as The Whole Town’s Talking and Gideon’s Day, I passed on this set because I no longer purchase DVD-only releases). Finally, 2013 also saw the very welcome DVD release of the recently rediscovered Ford silent Upstream (included on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s “Treasures New Zealand” anthology). The rest of this post, however, will be devoted to the four new Ford Blu-ray titles that rocked my world in 2013.

How Green Was My Valley is my second favorite Ford film and my favorite of his non-westerns. I am also fond of stating that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences correctly named it the Best Picture of 1941 over Citizen Kane, with which it curiously shares a flashback structure and a “subjectivity of memory” theme. This beautiful, melancholy story of one family’s disintegration in a turn-of-the-20th century mining town in Wales (though Ford was clearly thinking of Ireland) is set against the backdrop of union struggles and was one of the director’s most personal films. In it, he presents a vision of an idealized family life, the kind that he personally never knew (where Donald Crisp presides with benign authority over a brood of dutiful, mostly male offspring), and offers a stirring illustration of his Catholic belief that one’s physical death is not “the end.” Yet the film’s obsessive focus on the inevitability of change simultaneously marks it as one of Ford’s most pessimistic works. How Green Was My Valley has amazing deep-focus cinematography courtesy of the great D.P. Arthur Miller, a poignant Alfred Newman score and a star-making performance by the lovely Maureen O’Hara (working with Ford for the first of many times). Fox’s Blu-ray, which I reviewed at length back in February, is perfect.

The Quiet Man is the most impressive of the new batch of Ford Blu-rays, not only because it looks and sounds incredible but also because it represents the most dramatic upgrade over all of the film’s previous home video incarnations. This movie has never looked good on VHS or DVD, the old video transfers of which were soft and blurry and sported sadly faded color (a particularly offensive crime since Ford insisted on shooting in Technicolor, the premiere color process of the day, over the objections of Republic Pictures boss Herbert Yates, who had patented his own color process — the cheaper and more lurid TruColor). So Olive Films did the world a huge favor by taking Ford’s single most personal film (and the only passionate love story he ever directed) and restoring it to something approximating its original luster. This new version boasts a high-definition transfer and remaster of the original camera negative and the results are glorious: primary colors (especially greens and reds) are vibrant and saturated: when John Wayne’s Sean Thornton first spies Maureen O’Hara’s flame-haired Mary Kate Danaher walking barefoot in an impossibly green grassy field, he wonders aloud “Is that real? She couldn’t be.” I said the same thing when I first watched this Blu-ray.

In contrast to How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man, both of which are popular classics beloved by many casual movie fans, The Sun Shines Bright has always been the Ford-lover’s Ford movie. A remake of the director’s own Judge Priest (1934), a Will Rogers vehicle that remains a great film in its own right, this 1953 version similarly blends comedy and tragedy in a story of racial intolerance set in post-Civil War Kentucky. But it also daringly restores the incendiary lynching scene that censors ordered to be cut from the original, which was Ford’s acknowledged reason for revisiting the material to begin with. While the film may have looked deliberately old-fashioned by the standards of the early Fifties, this beautiful slice of Americana, and its impassioned plea for tolerance, looks positively ahead of our time today — Stepin Fetchit and all. Again, this is a terrific transfer courtesy of Olive Films: the original black-and-white cinematography comes across as satisfyingly film-like, showing admirable depth and grain, and the DTS-HD rendering of the mono soundtrack is likewise subtly awesome. Both Victor Young’s score and the crisp sound design (notably the rhythmic sound of marching feet in the back-to-back processions that serve as the movie’s double-climax) make a big impression.

1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was Ford’s last great western — and the first of many great movies belonging to a subgenre concerning “aging cowboys” (followed swiftly by Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country). As the West is on the brink of being “settled,” the way of the gun (John Wayne) must cede to the rule of the law (Jimmy Stewart). While Ford sees this progress as being both inevitable and right, it is obvious that his heart belongs more with Wayne’s rancher-character, Tom Doniphan, and that he mourns the passing of the era when men like Doniphan existed, which turns the whole thing into a complex and ironic tragedy. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is in many ways Ford’s magnum opus (with explicit nods to earlier classics like Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln) and Paramount UK’s hi-def transfer does this masterpiece proud. It bests Paramount’s very good previous DVD in terms of image and sound — boasting a robust new 5.1 mix in the latter area. One does wonder why Paramount U.S. hasn’t yet bothered to release the same title although given that the U.K. edition is region-free (and can thus be played on any Blu-ray player worldwide), the cost of international shipping isn’t too much of a price to pay for a release this essential.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance also, of course, contains some of the most important dialogue Ford ever directed: “This is the west, sir. When the fact becomes legend, print the legend.” These lines, delivered by a newspaper editor to Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, have frequently been misunderstood — including by Steven Spielberg in the pages of Time magazine — as somehow being an argument in favor of the importance of inspirational “heroes and legends.” I would argue that they actually play out on screen as a sad reminder that official histories are often tragically incorrect. Fortunately, in 2013, John Ford’s own legend has been solidified more than ever due to the magnificent Blu-ray releases of four of his most timeless works. I am jealous of anyone who gets to see them in such pristine form for the first time.

15 Comments | tags: How Green Was My Valley, John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Quiet Man, The Sun Shines Bright | posted in Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Essays

December 2, 2013

The Secret History of Chicago Movies: The Raven

By michaelgloversmith

In late 1915, Chicago’s Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was in decline. World War I had halted the export of the once-formidable studio’s films to Europe, which had previously been a lucrative source of revenue; Charlie Chaplin, the company’s biggest star, was dissatisfied with the way the studio was run and had no intention of renewing his contract when it expired at the end of the year; and, worst of all, the Motion Picture Patents Company, a consortium of studios to which Essanay belonged that was intent on monopolizing the industry, was being sued by the United States Justice Department for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. The most significant Chicago-shot Essanay films of this era were The Raven, an Edgar Allan Poe biopic directed with imaginative flair by Charles Brabin and starring the great Henry B. Walthall, and Sherlock Holmes, a seven-reel feature directed by one Arthur Berthelet. The latter was the first feature-length Sherlock Holmes movie as well as the first film in which the famed detective was portrayed wearing his soon-to-be-iconic deerstalker cap. William Gillette, an acclaimed theatrical actor who had originated this look onstage, reprised his role for the screen version. In her Chicago Daily Tribune review, film critic Kitty Kelly wrote, “It is a production to which Essanay may point with pride and may file away in the strong box for future and again future revival.” Unfortunately, the Essanay “strong box” was not strong enough. Sherlock Holmes does not survive today. The Raven, on the other hand, happily does survive and is available on DVD from Grapevine video.

The Raven begins with an exceptionally bizarre prologue that traces Edgar Allan Poe’s ancestors all the way back to Ireland in the 18th century. This scene has absolutely nothing to do with the story that will follow but it does introduce some interesting trivia, such as the fact that Poe’s biological parents were theatrical actors. Brabin then shows a still photograph of the actual Poe, which dissolves into a close-up of lead actor Henry B. Walthall. The moment is startlingly effective because Walthall bears a striking resemblance to Poe — albeit if Poe had possessed movie star good looks. (Walthall’s casting may also have been the result of his having starred in D.W. Griffith’s Poe-inspired The Avenging Conscience a year earlier.) This dramatic introductory scene was also fitting for a star of Walthall’s caliber: The Raven was the eleventh of twelve films he would appear in that were released in 1915. (The second was Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, in which he played the lead role of the “little Colonel.”) The Raven‘s narrative proper begins with Poe as a young man living in Virginia as the adopted son of the wealthy Allan family. Poe courts his cousin Virginia (the first of several women in the movie, real or imagined, to be portrayed by Essanay contract player Warda Howard). One of the most interesting sequences in the film is from this section: Poe sees a black slave being beaten by his owner and, though he cannot really afford it, arranges to buy the slave’s freedom. The shocking progressiveness of this scene as written is somewhat tempered, however, by the fact that the slave is played with broad comedic flourishes by a white actor in blackface makeup.

The death of Poe’s beloved bride is seen as precipitating his descent into madness, which provides The Raven‘s dramatic high point: a reenactment of the title poem with Poe in the role of the narrator, alone in his study, taunted by a real raven and haunted by the ghost of his “lost Lenore” (Howard). In this scene, Walthall’s tortured and highly emotive performance is effectively matched by director Brabin’s use of proto-Expressionist high-contrast lighting and an impressive and creative use of superimpositions (e.g., a human skull appears as an eerie vision before Poe). The Gothic atmosphere of this climactic scene — and Poe’s “wine”-induced hallucinations — was certainly ahead of its time: the horror genre would not really catch on in the American cinema until the late silent era, after it had already fully blossomed in Germany. The Raven would prove to be the highlight of Walthall’s tenure at Essanay although he would continue to appear in productions for the studio on and off through 1917 before returning to Hollywood for good. Among the scrapbooks that belonged to Marvin Spoor (brother of Essanay-founder George Spoor and one of Essanay’s top directors of photography) that are now in the archives of the Chicago History Museum, one is devoted entirely to photographs of The Raven, an indication of just how important the studio thought the movie was. Charles Brabin would go on to a fairly distinguished Hollywood career, directing, among many other films, the Boris Karloff vehicle The Mask of Fu Manchu in 1932. He may be best known today, however, for being the husband of notorious stage and screen actress Theda Bara. Their long and — unusual for Hollywood — successful marriage lasted from 1921 until her death in 1955.

The Grapevine Video version of The Raven can be purchased on amazon here: http://tinyurl.com/kg2drd9.

It can also be rented from http://www.facetsmovies.com.

Beware of public domain versions (including one uploaded to YouTube), which are not only missing scenes but garble the story by presenting the reels in the incorrect order.

7 Comments | tags: Charles Brabin, Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

September 2, 2013

The Westbound / Breathless Movie Mystery

By michaelgloversmith

“Let’s go see a western.”
— Patricia (Jean Seberg) in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960)

I’ve been a fan of ace American auteur Budd Boetticher ever since I saw The Tall T, a superior B-western from 1957 starring Boetticher’s favorite leading man Randolph Scott, on VHS back in the mid-1990s. That film, written by Burt Kennedy and based on a short story by Elmore Leonard (R.I.P.!), features this incredible exchange of dialogue: “How old are you, Billy?” / “I don’t know — young, mostly.” I’ve been a fan of the French iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard even longer: I first fell in love with Godard’s New Wave landmark Breathless in 1994 and, to this day, it is the movie I’ve seen more than any other. Mostly because I show it in film history classes, I’d estimate that I’ve seen Godard’s debut feature well over 60 times by now. Yet, in spite of the fact that I’ve always known Breathless uses a lesser-known Boetticher/Scott western, 1959’s Westbound, as an important reference point, I’d never gotten around to actually watching this western until recently — and this despite there being something about the reference that always struck me as curious in the extreme: when Patricia and Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the lovers-on-the-lam couple at the center of Breathless, duck into a movie theater showing Boetticher’s latest opus in order to avoid a police dragnet, the French-dubbed dialogue of the Westbound soundtrack sounds suspiciously poetic — and even rhymes! For example:

Male Voice: Beware, Jessica. On the kiss’s beveled edge, time is a void. Avoid, avoid memory’s broken pledge.

Female Voice: You’re wrong, sheriff. Your tale is noble and tragic like the mask of a tyrant. No drama so perilous or magnetic, no detail can make our love pathetic.

What I’ve always wondered is whether these crazy lines, which sound like something out of a Shakespeare comedy, were in fact an accurate representation of Westbound‘s dialogue or just more Godard tomfoolery (i.e., did he create a fake Westbound soundtrack expressly for Breathless?). So I put on my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap and headed to my local video store to investigate . . .

Westbound was released toward the tail end of Budd Boetticher’s richest period as a Hollywood director, but it has always been considered a minor effort and has been somewhat difficult to see. It was not, for instance, part of the lavish 2008 DVD box set devoted to Boetticher and Scott, which included more well known titles such as the aforementioned Tall T, Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959) and Comanche Station (1960) — not to mention an excellent new documentary, Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, featuring testimonial interviews with the likes of Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino (who named Michael Madsen’s Kill Bill character, Budd, after Boetticher). The omission, however, may have had more to due with the vagaries of rights issues than anything: Westbound was originally released between Buchanan Rides Alone and Ride Lonesome but it was made for Warner Brothers while the other films included in the DVD box set were all made for Columbia. The only other Boetticher/Scott western not in the box set was their first collaboration, the highly regarded Seven Men from Now, which was also made for Warner Brothers. But, while Seven Men from Now was released to much fanfare in a “widescreen special collector’s edition” DVD from Warner Home Video in 2005, Westbound has been relegated to the more obscure “Warner Archive Collection” (i.e., it is available for sale only as a lower-quality DVD-R through their “burn-on-demand” program). Fortunately, Facets Multimedia in Chicago rents titles from the Warner Archive Collection and I was able to discover that, in spite of its second-class status, Westbound remains a very enjoyable entry in the Boetticher/Scott cycle.

The plot of the Civil War-set Westbound centers on Randolph Scott’s John Hayes, a Union Cavalry captain who is given the perilous task of overseeing a long-range shipment of government gold via stagecoach. Hayes runs into trouble when the stage stops in Julesburg, a Colorado town full of Confederate sympathizers — including his former nemesis Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan), a land baron who stole Hayes’ girl, Norma (Virginia Mayo), years earlier. The screenplay for Westbound was not written by Burt Kennedy (who penned four of the Boetticher/Scott movies) and it therefore lacks the terse poetry that provides the best films in the series with their most memorable lines (i.e., “There are some things a man can’t ride around,” or “A man can do that.”). It was written instead by one Bernie Giler and based on a story by Giler and Albert S. Le Vino. The Westbound script does not, however, deviate so much from the typical Kennedy/Boetticher template that it attains the poetic flights of fancy that Godard would have us believe. As much as it would please me to hear Viriginia Mayo, a pin-up with gravity-defying breasts, say that “Time is a void,” there is simply no dialogue anywhere in the movie that remotely resembles the “beveled edge” nonsense that we hear in Godard’s film. And yet every reference I’ve seen in books or academic essays alluding to the Westbound scene in Breathless assumes that the dialogue is genuine (with some critics even praising Godard for using an excerpt of dialogue from the Boetticher movie that seems to cleverly comment on the dilemma of Michel and Patricia!). There are several obvious clues, however, that Godard’s soundtrack is phony: first, there is no character named “Jessica” in Westbound. The only other female character aside from Norma is named Jeanie (Karen Steele). Then, there is the unlikely way that Godard’s poetic dialogue is spoken calmly in a sound mix that simultaneously features loud gunshots and a musical score of blaring horns, which seems to be Godard’s way of declaring “This is a western” rather than marking a serious attempt at recreating an authentic western soundtrack.

Critical confusion is somewhat understandable, however: Godard did, after all, use actual dialogue from Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (this time in its original English-language track) earlier in the movie. These lines of dialogue can be heard in a scene in which Patricia, without Michel, attempts to elude the plainclothes cop who is following her by running into a cinema showing a revival of Preminger’s classic 1949 film noir. This scene occurs shortly after Patricia has lied to the police by denying that she knows anything about Michel’s whereabouts. The police, of course, don’t believe her and so the Whirlpool soundtrack does cleverly comment on Patricia’s situation:

Ann: No matter what I tell you, you don’t want to hear the truth. You won’t let me tell it. You think I’m lying!

Dr. Sutton: You are.

Ann: Oh no, Bill.

Dr. Sutton: Does this cheap parasite mean so much to you that you’re willing to risk everything to cover up for him?

In the 1950s Budd Boetticher was one of those Hollywood directors, along with John Ford and Anthony Mann, who helped to usher in a new era of “adult westerns” that featured more neurotic protagonists (Jimmy Stewart actually cries at the end of Mann’s masterpiece The Naked Spur) and dealt more explicitly with the genre’s darker themes of racism, colonialism and disillusionment (e.g., Ford’s The Searchers) than what had been possible in prewar Hollywood. In the 1960s Godard and his compatriots in the New Wave, as well as “art film” directors from other European countries, would usher in a new era of self-reflexivity and modernism that would break down the illusion of Hollywood’s “invisible” storytelling altogether. And yet, for one brief moment, on the beveled edge between these eras and continents, it was still happily possible for Jean-Luc Godard’s youthful and rebellious characters to attend — and appreciate — a new western by a Hollywood master like Boetticher.

Postscript: Thanks to Adrian Martin for clarifying the mystery surrounding the origins of the Westbound dialogue in Breathless in the comments section below. For Ever Godard, the book containing Adrian’s essay, can be purchased from Amazon here: http://tinyurl.com/l7j5e4s

11 Comments | tags: A bout de souffle, Breathless, Budd Boetticher, Burt Kennedy, Jean-Luc Godard, Otto Preminger, Westbound, Whirlpool | posted in Essays

July 15, 2013

The Decline of the DVD and the Rise of the CGI Spectacle

By michaelgloversmith

One of the most provocative commentaries about the landscape of the new Hollywood arrived last month in the form of a Salon article by Lynda Obst entitled “Hollywood’s Completely Broken.” The thrust of Obst’s troubling piece, an excerpt from her forthcoming book Sleepless in Hollywood, is that the near-ubiquity of big-budget CGI-laden spectacle films, almost all of which are sequels, remakes or reboots, is directly attributable to the sharp decline in DVD sales that began about five years ago with the advent of online streaming. Not merely another tired think-piece about the “death of cinema” (which is usually nothing more than a writer’s thinly disguised lament for his or her lost youth — whether that occurred in any decade from the 1960s through the 1990s), Obst, a movie producer by profession, uses actual interviews with a Hollywood studio executive to bolster her argument about the film industry: the major studios, which have long relied on profits generated by the sales of physical media, have had to readjust by making more movies aimed at the international theatrical market. Every studio wants every film they make to earn a billion dollars in ticket sales, especially since the global success of Avatar in 2009, and they’re now willing to routinely spend upwards of 200 million dollars in order to make that happen.

Unfortunately for those of us who care about cinema, this also means that there has been a disheartening uniformity to the most recent spate of Hollywood blockbusters: the “plot” of every movie is now more than ever merely an excuse to blow stuff up, the movies cannot exceed the PG-13 rating (which, of course, means a total absence of sex, nudity and even the word “fuck”), there can be nothing in these movies that might be deemed politically inflammatory, and the movies need to be simple enough, in every conceivable way in terms of form and content, to be understood by teenagers in every country around the world (“Say, how well do you think these one-liners will go over with Malay subtitles?”). And this is to say nothing of Hollywood’s annoying recent trend of “courting” the massive Chinese audience through superfluous scenes set in China or featuring Chinese characters or Mandarin dialogue — examples of which can be found in everything from The Dark Knight to Skyfall to Iron Man 3 to the forthcoming Transformers 4. In short, Hollywood has never been more risk-averse than it is today.

It has also become increasingly common to hear cultural commentators and ordinary folks alike remark that “the best storytelling has migrated to television.” While I’ve greatly enjoyed recent television endeavors by some auteurs more commonly associated with the “big screen” — including Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes and Jane Campion — I’m alarmed at how many people I know treat this perceived cultural shift as a foregone conclusion. A lot of intelligent adults, the kind who used to go to the theater regularly, have virtually conceded that the movie theater has become a place primarily for teenagers and children (and “children of all ages,” as the saying goes). Even more bizarre, I have more than a couple friends who have attended the latest round of Hollywood blockbusters in the theater but haven’t yet caught up to Richard Linklater’s masterpiece Before Midnight, in spite of the fact that they are acknowledged fans of Linklater’s other work. I’m assuming they figure that, in a world of CGI spectacles, a character-based romantic comedy consisting solely of scenes of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy talking to each other can wait to be seen on their small screens at home. And yet it would be a tragedy if films like Before Midnight (which is currently underperforming at the box office, even considering its small budget), are eventually relegated to television entirely. I would argue that the chief pleasures of Linklater’s new movie are exquisitely cinematic and actually do need to be seen on the biggest screen possible in order to be fully appreciated.

After recently taking two Film History classes on field trips to see Before Midnight in the theater, I was astonished to hear many of my students say they felt “immersed” in the world of the movie and they felt that it was specifically Linklater’s use of long takes and lack of cutting (in contrast to the rapid editing of contemporary Hollywood action movies) that made them feel as if they were “in the scene” with the characters. There is no doubt in my mind that the relationship of the size of the screen to the audience is precisely what makes Before Midnight such a transformative experience for many viewers. I would also argue that, in a similar vein, the film’s relative dearth of close-ups makes such shots all the more impactful when they do occasionally appear on a large screen. My favorite scene in this talky movie is one without any dialogue at all: after the big blow-out argument in which Delpy’s Celine storms out of their romantic-getaway hotel room, Hawke’s Jesse looks around the room as Linklater cuts between close-ups of Jesse’s face and shots of — in order — a full cup of tea, the hotel room door, a bottle and two full glasses of wine, and their unslept-in hotel-room bed. For me, seeing that close-up of Celine’s undrunk cup of tea on a giant cinema screen feels both momentous and heartbreaking, qualities with which I don’t expect it to register on my home television (even on Blu-ray and with a 42-inch screen).

I recently half-joked to a cinephile friend on facebook that I considered myself “a warrior in a cultural battle” in the act of taking my students to see Before Midnight in the theater. Yet surely everyone who cares about cinema, myself included, could be doing more to put our money where our mouths are by diversifying in terms of the kinds of movies we choose to see in the theater — instead of just staying at home and bitching about how Hollywood is producing garbage. And I’m not by any means calling for a boycott of Hollywood blockbusters (though I do think they were a lot easier to swallow when they weren’t being released every single week, and seeing them felt more like an option rather than an enforced duty); I did, after all, recently enjoy Monsters University and I’m looking forward to catching up soon with Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s robots vs. monsters epic. I’m merely suggesting that movie lovers need to make it a point of going to the theater regularly and that the continued theatrical success of small and medium-budget movies (of independent, foreign and Hollywood origin) will be vital to the overall health of our film culture in the future.

Me and my Intro to Film class from Oakton Community College before a recent screening of Before Midnight in Evanston, IL.

30 Comments | tags: Before Midnight, Lynda Obst, Richard Linklater, Sleepless in Hollywood | posted in Essays

July 1, 2013

Richard Linklater and the VHS Generation

By michaelgloversmith

“He sort of won the race, didn’t he? Through sheer persistence, consistency and focus. And longevity. He’s a poet who just kept going. When people would say of Before Sunrise that it reminded them of an English-language Rohmer film, I’d go, ‘Well, that’s very flattering, but I don’t think he’d ever make a film that simple.’ My work is so much simpler than his. I give him more credit than that.”

— Richard Linklater, on the death of Eric Rohmer in 2010

What most intrigues me about the genuinely humble tribute from one master to another I’ve cited above is the notion that Richard Linklater thinks Eric Rohmer “won” a “race” without elaborating on exactly which race that might be. I can only imagine that the director of Before Midnight had the story of the tortoise and the hare in mind when he made that remark and that he saw Rohmer as being analogous to the slow-but-steady turtle and most of his compatriots in the French New Wave as being frenetic rabbits: Rohmer may have in many ways been the “slowest starter” (i.e., the least commercial or intellectually fashionable) of the major nouvelle vague filmmakers during the 1960s but his body of work as a whole arguably ended up being more impressive in the long run. It’s also hard for me to imagine that Linklater isn’t revealing something about his own career in that remark — even if only subconsciously. Critics, after all, often lump Linklater in with Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith as constituting a “VHS Generation” — a group of American filmmakers who never graduated from college (in pointed contrast to the celebrated “Film School Generation” of the 1970s) but who educated themselves about film history via home video in the 1980s before directing their first independently made breakthrough features in the early-to-mid 1990s. While Linklater may indeed have been the least flashy of that particular group during the Nineties (Dazed and Confused developed an almost-instant cult following but it didn’t make its writer/director a “star” in the manner of a Tarantino or a Smith), it seems inarguable to me that he has the most impressive filmography from the vantage point of the year 2013. He and Anderson are the only directors of the bunch who I would cite as actually having significantly improved in the 21st century.

So here’s why I consider Richard Linklater the most important filmmaker of his generation:

1. His work is more profitably rooted in a specific sense of place.

Unlike most contemporary American directors, whose movies either might as well be taking place anywhere or are set in pop culture-infused Neverlands of their own imaginations, Linklater’s work stems, culturally as well as geographically, from deep in the heart of his home state of Texas (he’s a native Houstonian). As Martin Scorsese is to New York, as Alain Guiraudie is to the southwest of France, so too is Richard Linklater to Texas: Slacker, Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, The Newton Boys, Waking Life, Fast Food Nation, A Scanner Darkly and Bernie are all mostly set in — or were shot in — and are ultimately about communities and subcultures within the Lone Star state. It even seems significant that in the director’s beloved, European-set Before trilogy, Ethan Hawke’s Jesse hails from Austin, and thus his character can be seen as offering a kind of “Texan’s-eye-view” of cosmopolitan Austria, France and Greece, respectively. More importantly, Linklater’s films profoundly reflect the iconoclastic, often-contradictory character of Texas, which is nowhere more apparent than in Bernie, the story of a horrific real life murder that nonetheless manages to be both darkly comic and surprisingly warmhearted. Watch this hilarious clip in which Sonny Carl Davis, a native of rural Carthage (where the film is set), describes how Texas could actually be five different states:

2. He is the most knowledgable about film history while simultaneously the least likely to show off his cinephile cred.

Richard Linklater is a hardcore cinephile, which is evident throughout his life and work — from the clip of Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud included in his obscure first feature It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books in 1988 to his recent passionate defense of Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running in the book The Best Films You’ve Never Seen. And yet Linklater’s films are about “real life” (which, of course, includes cinephilia) more than simply being about other movies. In other words, in contrast to Tarantino and Rodriguez — who seem increasingly content to merely mash-up moments from their favorite grindhouse movies of their adolescence — Linklater has fully absorbed the lessons of his masters and applies them to the modern world in a way that results in something entirely fresh and new. Consider the way Julie Delpy’s Celine references Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy in Before Midnight: her lines about watching Italy‘s Pompeii scene allow Linklater to engage in a meaningful critical dialogue with Rossellini’s masterpiece (both are ultimately about the salvation of long-term relationships between couples vacationing in a foreign country); but her lines are written and performed in such an offhanded and naturalistic “I once saw this old movie on television” kind of way that the scene doesn’t alienate anyone who hasn’t seen Italy. More profoundly, when asked if he in any way emulated the visual style of Orson Welles when making his underrated 2008 biopic Me and Orson Welles, Linklater wisely replied that he hadn’t because his film was about Welles’ pre-Citizen Kane theatrical career. He then added that he was more influenced by John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln since the scenario of both movies hinges on a sophisticated manipulation of the viewers’ knowledge of the “future greatness” of their subjects. Contrast this with the way Quentin Tarantino used his Django Unchained World Domination Tour to denigrate the career of John Ford (and showed a startling ignorance of Ford’s work in the process). One should also note that Linklater’s education in film history came mostly on film instead of VHS — his interest in moviemaking was spurred by repeated visits to a Houston repertory theater and he founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 in order to bring more diverse cinema fare to Austin.

3. He is the most formally innovative director of his generation.

Linklater is a formal innovator who has impressively managed to make his innovations accessible to a wide variety of audiences. Slacker, which borrowed its narrative-relay structure from Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, was shot on a budget of just over $20,000 and almost single-handedly spearheaded an independent filmmaking renaissance in America when it was released in 1991. Tape (2001), a gripping adaptation of Stephen Belber’s single-setting play, was shot on miniDV tape — thus adding another layer of meaning to the title (in addition to its referencing an audio-recording that prominently features in the plot); in an era when everyone else wanted to make video seem like film, Linklater intriguingly chose to emphasize Tape‘s video origins, incorporating the graininess of the digital-to-film transfer into his sleazy motel-room visual design. Both Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006) pioneered “rotoscoping” animation (with its trippy, undulating textures), which can now be seen in television commercials for large corporations. But Linklater’s greatest formal innovations probably result from his experiments in structuring narratives around real-time sequences. Because he has always favored philosophical dialogue over physical action, Linklater typically also favors long takes to fast cutting, and many of his movies consequently take place over the course of a single day: Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, SubUrbia, Tape, Waking Life, Before Sunset and Before Midnight all take place in a span of less than 24 hours. Additionally, Tape and Before Sunset are among the few feature films in the history of cinema that take place entirely in real time. The apotheosis of Linklater’s style can be found in Before Midnight, in which the lack of cutting and the choreography between the camera and the performers seem so organic to the material and achieve such a perfect sense of harmony that the film’s ostensible European-style “art-film” aesthetic has deservedly found success among general audiences — as if it were a more typical American-style rom-com.

And all of this is to say nothing of Linklater’s skills as a writer (the progress of which can be charted from the way his characters have evolved from charming-but-irresponsible adolescent autodidacts to charming-but-mature and sensitive adults) and as a director of actors (he is particularly good at directing children and non-actors — see again the extraordinary School of Rock — and his seven-films-and-counting collaboration with Ethan Hawke must surely rank as one of the most fruitful director-actor partnerships of modern times).

Below is my subjective countdown, from worst to best, of all of Richard Linklater’s feature films. In case it isn’t obvious from the rankings, I believe Linklater’s art underwent a quantum leap in terms of quality between the 1998 release of The Newton Boys and the 2001 releases of Waking Life and Tape (both of which premiered at that year’s Sundance Film Festival):

17. It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988)
16. SubUrbia (1996)
15. Bad News Bears (2005)
14. The Newton Boys (1998)
13. Fast Food Nation (2006)
12. Tape (2001)
11. Me and Orson Welles (2008)
10. Slacker (1991)
9. Before Sunrise (1995)
8. Waking Life (2001)
7. School of Rock (2003)
6. Dazed and Confused (1993)
5. Bernie (2011)
4. A Scanner Darkly (2006)
3. Before Midnight (2013)
2. Before Sunset (2004)
1. Boyhood (2014)

76 Comments | tags: Before Midnight, Bernie, Eric Rohmer, Journey to Italy, Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater, Roberto Rossellini, Tape, Viaggio in Italia | posted in Essays

November 19, 2012

Adventures in IMAX

By michaelgloversmith

Disclaimer: Everwhere, LLC provided me with compensation for this post. However, all thoughts and opinions expressed herein are my own.

A few weeks ago, Michael Cieply wrote an article for the New York Times titled “Movies Try to Escape Cultural Irrelevance.” It was only the latest in a series of high-profile articles that have recently appeared in print and online (the most prominent of which is probably Andrew O’Hehir’s notorious piece for Salon in September) pondering if “film culture” is dying or dead. Cieply, like O’Hehir and most recent commentators, explicitly contrasts what he sees as the decay of cinephilia with what he perceives as the concurrent rise in the artistic quality of shows on cable television – you know, smart, well-written fare targeted at adults like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which have allegedly usurped the movies as a buzz-worthy topic of conversation at those mythical cocktail parties where people only seem to talk about buzz-worthy things. Cieply’s article quotes George Stevens, Jr., founder of the American Film Institute, who blames the supposed decline in the cultural importance of movies on the industry’s “steady push” towards making them available to view on phones, tablets and other tiny electronic devices. Stevens has a point; when Norma Desmond spoke of the pictures getting smaller in Sunset Boulevard, she meant it figuratively. In the 21st century, that reduction in grandeur has become literally true. Yet, while the motion picture industry is undoubtedly undergoing radical change, is there validity to the latest round of doom and gloom cries from the cognoscenti? And, if so, can new technology be used to lure viewers back to the big screen in order to restore the medium’s importance?

As someone with a vested interested in film culture (not just the movies themselves but how they are distributed, exhibited and disseminated), I recently jumped at the chance to see a couple of films at Chicago’s Navy Pier IMAX theater for the preparation of this article. Building on earlier innovations like Cinerama and Cinemiracle, IMAX auditoriums exhibit large-format films that promise an “immersive” experience due to the unprecedented clarity and size of their images, which are projected onto a giant, curved screen, as well as their pioneering use of “surround sound” audio. Prior to my recent adventures in IMAX, my only experience with the format was a single documentary short from 1994 titled Into the Deep, made in an IMAX 3-D process very different from the one they use today (and which I saw, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Sarris, under the influence of something stronger than oregano). My recent experience with IMAX included seeing two films that utilized very different technology in how they were produced as well as exhibited – The Dark Knight Rises, which was mostly shot on 35mm film (with a little over an hour being shot on IMAX’s 70mm cameras) and projected on film, and Skyfall, which was shot and projected digitally, but with image and sound that have been reconfigured specially for IMAX theaters. The difference in technical quality between the films offers instructive lessons in what specific changes the industry is presently undergoing and what this might mean for film culture in the future.

IMAX’s 70mm film cameras differ from the once-common 35mm motion picture cameras (not to mention the now ubiquitous digital cameras) in that the large size of the IMAX 70mm film itself renders images of exceptional detail and depth. IMAX 70mm even differs from traditional 70mm film (which made something of a welcome and unexpected comeback in the past year with the releases of The Master and Samsara) in significant ways. Traditional 70mm has five perforations per film frame and is literally twice the size of standard 35mm film. It runs through cameras and projectors vertically but at a faster rate than 35mm, yielding a super-sharp image that is typically in a widescreen aspect ratio (i.e., one where the image is much wider than it is long). IMAX 70mm film has 15 perforations per frame and runs through cameras and projectors horizontally and at a faster rate still, yielding images of almost supernatural clarity. The IMAX film is also presented in what is closer to a square aspect ratio that consumes a viewer’s entire field of vision when seen in an IMAX theater. Because The Dark Knight Rises was shot in multiple formats (the noise generated by IMAX’s 70mm cameras makes shooting an entire feature in that format difficult, much as the loudness of 35mm cameras in the days of early talkies did), to watch the film in IMAX is to witness the jarring spectacle of a film with an aspect ratio that continually changes throughout its presentation – from 1.43:1 to 2.4:1 and back again. Unsurprisingly, director Christopher Nolan used the IMAX 70mm cameras mostly for action scenes and landscape shots and resorted to 35mm for the dialogue scenes that take up the bulk of the film. Still, however unwieldy, IMAX is truly the way this movie was “meant to be seen.”

Fortunately, the scenes in The Dark Knight Rises shot in IMAX 70mm are also the most impressive in the film and, if you’re a fan of the Nolan franchise, they justify seeking it out in that format. For me, the best moments were the breathtaking aerial shots of Gotham City, which seemed almost three-dimensional in their depth. During several such shots, Nolan and D.P. Wally Pfister’s use of deep-focus cinematography had a vertigo-inducing effect that made me feel as though I might somehow fall into the screen. The action set pieces, such as the one on the plane that opens the film as well as the two fistfights between Batman and Bane, also pack a wallop. This is in part due to the sense that they have been edited in a more spatially coherent manner than the previous Nolan Batman movies but also due to the eardrum-bursting sound design, which is even more responsible than the curved IMAX screen in making viewers feel immersed in the action. The Dark Knight Rises is an exceptionally loud movie and, in IMAX, that sound is dispersed throughout the theater via a 6-channel digital sound system. There are speakers placed directly behind the screen, which is perforated with millions of tiny holes, as well as in strategic places around the theater, including a “top center” speaker that corresponds to the screen’s enormous height. IMAX’s sound mix engineers, working with Christopher Nolan’s production team, are able to literally place viewers in the middle of the action as far as the sound is concerned. This means that, in the action scenes, every punch lands with a bone-crunching immediacy and, in the dialogue scenes, every word is crystal clear. While Bane’s mask may have unfortunately inhibited the expressiveness of Tom Hardy’s performance as an actor, I had no problem understanding the character’s dialogue (as was the complaint of many viewers who saw the film in regular theaters).

Skyfall was shot digitally in 2K resolution on the Arri Alexa camera and then “up-resed” to 4K for IMAX projection. The resulting image is of a lower resolution than the 70mm sections of The Dark Knight Rises and therefore not as impressive in terms of clarity. In fact, Skyfall should not look much different in IMAX than how it looks at a regular theater equipped with 4K digital projection. The primary difference between seeing Skyfall in a regular theater versus seeing it in IMAX lies in IMAX’s patented “DMR” digital remastering process. This involved IMAX engineers working with director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins in post-production to “optimize” Skyfall‘s aspect ratio for IMAX screens. The result is that viewers who see Skyfall in IMAX are seeing it in a 1:9 aspect ratio, not nearly as “high” of an image as the 1.43:1 ratio of The Dark Knight Rises but considerably higher than the 2.35:1 aspect ratio in which Skyfall appears at regular theaters. In other words, viewers who see Skyfall in IMAX are literally seeing more visual information (26% more to be exact) in the top and bottom portions of the frame. This, however, begs the question: how much of that information is valuable or even necessary? Roger Deakins is a great cinematographer but he surely knew when shooting the movie that the vast majority of the people who see it in theaters are going to see it in the 2.35:1 ratio (i.e., not in IMAX theaters). Therefore, 2.35:1 should probably be seen as the true aspect ratio in which Deakins framed his compositions. While watching Skyfall in IMAX, I noticed how impressively high the image stretched across the giant IMAX screen but I couldn’t also help but notice a lot of “dead air” in the top and bottom portions of the frame.

Still, while Skyfall may not be as impressive as The Dark Knight Rises as an “IMAX experience” because of the technology used in its creation and exhibition, I must also admit that I found it to be a more satisfying one overall simply because I enjoyed it more as a movie – regardless of how it may have been shot or projected. In other words, technical quality is not synonymous with artistic quality; I believe that Roger Deakins is a greater artist with a camera than Wally Pfister, and there was nothing in The Dark Knight Rises that thrilled me as much as what Deakins did with the neon lights, primary colors and reflective surfaces (not to mention a Modigliani painting) in the Shanghai sections of Skyfall – even if the latter was shot in a lower image resolution. Then there is the matter of Skyfall‘s astonishing Macao casino scene, which bears an uncanny and startling resemblance to Josef Von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (right down to Bérénice Lim Marlohe’s “dragon lady” make-up), but I digress. More importantly, while both films are franchise entries centered on iconic action heroes, Skyfall is the one that offers a more refreshingly original spin on its formulaic story material. For these reasons, I would have preferred Skyfall to The Dark Knight Rises even if the Bond film had been shot on VHS tape.

There will always be something magical to me about seeing movies on the big screen, whether they are projected digitally or on film, and I don’t think the big screen experience will ever die. I am grateful to IMAX for pioneering technology that has made such theater-going experiences special in the 21st century and I also believe that they will continue to make improvements that should make their digital projection superior to that of regular theaters. However, to truly inspire the kind of movie love that the likes of Michael Cieply worry is evaporating, I think IMAX would benefit from offering more diversity in terms of the kinds of films it exhibits. While PG-13 rated action movies aimed at teenage boys serve a purpose, is there not something disheartening about the possibility of living in a world where they are our primary option? The breakout hit of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival was Holy Motors, a truly wild movie whose tone unpredictably and exhilaratingly shifts from the jubilant to the elegiac and back again. It is an unmitigated masterpiece that rocked both the festival’s jury (it took the prizes for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director) and the lucky sold out audiences who saw it. While Holy Motors fortunately returned to Chicago recently for a regular run at the Music Box Theatre, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to experience such a movie with IMAX-quality image and sound. Though even ardent admirers of Holy Motors are likely to see that film’s non-narrative elements as a hard sell for the kind of “general audiences” that tend to populate IMAX theaters, I’m not so sure; if audiences can be conditioned to see something as overstuffed and curiously mirthless as The Dark Knight Rises as “popcorn entertainment,” I see no reason why they couldn’t also be wowed by something as undeniably joyous as Holy Motors‘ accordion jam entr’acte on a screen six-stories high and in glorious surround sound audio.

You can learn more about IMAX on the web at:

www.imax.com
www.facebook.com/IMAX
www.twitter.com/IMAX

Holy Motors Rating: 10
Skyfall Rating: 6.5
The Dark Knight Rises Rating: 5.3

21 Comments | tags: Christopher Nolan, Holy Motors, IMAX, Leos Carax, Roger Deakins, Sam Mendes, Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, Wally Pfister | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

November 12, 2012

Getting Screwed

By michaelgloversmith

The screwball comedy is a beloved comedy subgenre that flourished in Hollywood from the mid-1930s through the early 1940s. The word “screwball” literally means crazy and therefore perfectly captures the spirit of fast-paced, zany mayhem that typifies many of the best comedies of that era. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night is widely credited with kickstarting the genre by establishing its core conventions, the influence of which can still be found on Hollywood comedies today. Since the humor in screwball comedy is dependent upon language as much if not more so than sight gags, it is entirely logical that this genre would peak in the early sound era when sound recording technology was still relatively new.

The conventions of screwball comedy are:

– A battle-of-the-sexes love story (there is frequently a healthy sense of competition to go along with the courtship of the male and female leads)

– Rapid-fire, machine-gun paced dialogue (it is sometimes impossible to understand the characters, which doesn’t really matter as the sound and speed of their voices can be more important than what they’re actually saying)

– Female protagonists who are independent, strong-willed and free-spirited

– Situations that become increasingly ridiculous as the protagonists pursue their goals.

These conventions are all beautifully exemplified by three of my favorite screwball comedies, all of which I frequently show in film history classes: Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937), Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941).

When Leo McCarey won a Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth in 1938 he noted in his acceptance speech that he had won the award for the wrong movie, a reference to his superb work on the tearjerker Make Way for Tomorrow, which he had directed the same year. Contemporary critics and viewers seem to have taken McCarey at his word; the reputation of Tomorrow has soared in recent years as that film has received deluxe home video releases in both America (The Criterion Collection) and the U.K. (a Masters of Cinema Blu-ray). It’s a shame though that the reputation of The Awful Truth, which is only available in a mediocre quality DVD released almost a decade ago, has been seemingly downgraded at the expense of Make Way for Tomorrow because the movie that actually won him the Oscar is one of the best and funniest screwball comedies ever made.

The Awful Truth tells the story of a married couple, Jerry and Lucy Warriner (the unbeatable pair of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne), who get divorced due to mutual suspicions concerning infidelity and then promptly proceed to sabotage one another’s new romantic relationships. The film is based on a stage play and yet, as was customary for McCarey, the final script evolved out of improvisations with the actors, resulting in a feeling of uncommon spontaneity. While a sense of carefully structured chaos characterizes McCarey’s very best comedies (he also directed the immortal and anarchic Marx Brothers romp Duck Soup), he lends the film’s two part structure a formal elegance and sense of harmony through a delightfully symbolic use of doors: characters are constantly hiding behind them or trying to knock them down, and scenes frequently begin and end with characters barging through them. The door symbology reaches its apex in the final shot of the film where a male figurine follows its female counterpart through the tiny door of a cuckoo-style clock, one of the cleverest instances of sexual innuendo in Hollywood’s studio system era.

The chemistry between Grant and Dunne is amazing. They make the viewer feel that, even though their characters seem to be at odds with one another, they each really want the same thing deep down inside, causing us to root for them into getting back together. A good example is the climactic scene where Lucy pretends to be Jerry’s drunken floozy of a sister in order to undermine his new engagement to a prim socialite. Jerry’s reaction to Lucy’s antics is a mixture of annoyance and barely concealed glee that lets us know he actually appreciates the cleverness of her performance. This makes us feel that these characters were meant to be together. If, as has been said, all screwball comedies are about either the construction or the re-construction of a couple, The Awful Truth is the best example of the latter that I have ever seen.

Bringing Up Baby, on the other hand, is a superb example of how the screwball comedy can chart the construction of a couple, which should not be surprising considering that screenwriters Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde fell in love while writing it. They, along with director Howard Hawks, clearly used The Awful Truth as their model. Bringing Up Baby, made just one year after McCarey’s film, carries over both Grant and Skippy (AKA Asta) the dog, as well as a reference to Grant’s character having the ridiculous nickname of “Jerry the Nipper.”

Bringing Up Baby concerns the misadventures of David Huxley (Grant, playing the straight man), a deadly serious paleontologist whose life is turned upside down by the madcap heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn). After meeting cute on a golf course, Susan does everything she can to prevent David’s impending wedding to a frigid woman named Alice Swallow. This includes convincing David to help her escort a pet leopard (the “Baby” of the title) from her luxurious New York City apartment to her aunt’s house in the Connecticut countryside. The scenes become increasingly ridiculous as Susan, determined to prevent David from returning to New York, sends his clothes out to the dry cleaners while he’s taking a shower. This forces him to don a frilly, feminine-looking bathrobe, the only available clothing item in the house. When confronted by Susan’s aunt regarding his strange attire, the only explanation David can offer is that he “just went gay all of a sudden!” This line, which doesn’t appear in any known version of the screenplay, was apparently ad libbed by Grant and, due to the rapid-fire nature of the delivery, snuck past the censors of the time. It is now believed to be the first time the word “gay” was used in a Hollywood film to connote homosexuality, and the line always gets a big laugh from my students when I screen the film in class today.

In another memorable line of dialogue, David tells Susan that he’s strangely drawn to her in quiet moments . . . although there haven’t been any quiet moments. As McCarey did in The Awful Truth, Howard Hawks spins comic gold out of a scenario where Grant is tricked into going along with the harebrained scheme of a wacky female. Crucially, the success of this scenario in Baby stems from the audience’s belief that David has recognized that Susan, his opposite number, is somehow good for him and thus he has actually half-allowed himself to be virtually kidnapped.

While the battles-of-the-sexes on display in The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby prove that the women are at least equal to the men in terms of intelligence and cleverness, the balance shifts decisively in favor of the fairer sex in Preston Sturges’ 1941 film The Lady Eve. Sturges’ masterpiece concerns both the construction and reconstruction of the same couple. This is possible because the male lead, Charles Pike (Henry Fonda, sensational in his only comedic role), is so dumb that he never realizes the two different women he has fallen in love with, Jean Harrington and the Lady Eve Sidwich, are in fact the same person (Barbara Stanwyck in her prime). As the kids like to say, boo-yah!

The Lady Eve begins with Pike returning to “civilization” after spending a year up the Amazon studying snakes. (The snake imagery allows Sturges to sneak in a wealth of both biblical and sexual references.) While aboard a luxury liner that will take him back to America, Pike meets and falls in love with the con artist Jean. Although it is her initial plan to fleece the “tall, backward boy,” she unexpectedly falls in love with him. After Pike learns of her original intention, he unceremoniously dumps her, which causes Jean to create a new identity in an attempt to even the score. Preston Sturges was the first significant Hollywood director of the sound era to write his own screenplays and, elsewhere on this blog, I have compared him to Mark Twain for, among other things, his brilliant ear for satirical dialogue. Here is a small sampling from The Lady Eve to prove my point:

“I need him like the axe needs the turkey.”

“Well, it certainly took you long enough to come back in the same outfit.”
“I’m lucky to have this on. Mr. Pike has been up a river for a year.”

“You ought to put handles on that skull. Maybe you could grow geraniums in it.”

“If you waited for a man to propose to you from natural causes, you’d die of old maidenhood. That’s why I let you try my slippers on. And then I put my cheek against yours. And then I made you put your arms around me. And then I, I fell in love with you, which wasn’t in the cards.”

“I positively swill in their ale.”

“What I am trying to say is: I’m not a poet, I’m an ophiologist.”

And the memorable last line: “Positively the same dame!”

The specter of screwball still rears its head in the never-ending permutation of rom-coms today that, for many years running, all seem to star some combination of Kate Hudson/Gerard Butler/Jennifer Aniston/Matthew McConaughey/Katherine Heigl and blur together into one generic and forgettable movie. Sadly, Hollywood no longer produces comedic screenplays with dialogue like the kind cited above (which is not to say that such dialogue is no longer being written) and, for a variety of reasons, can’t seem to make movies that are nearly as funny today. But, to paraphrase Rick Blaine, we’ll always have the ’30s and ’40s, the golden age of the still uproarious screwball comedy.

30 Comments | tags: Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Preston Sturges, The Awful Truth, The Lady Eve | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

July 9, 2012

And . . . Action! Kathryn Bigelow as Heir Apparent to Raoul Walsh or: Why the Contemporary Hollywood Action Movie Sucks

By michaelgloversmith

“I know what eats a man who has endured the tension of war for years. It’s like a drug. A man can’t live without it.”
– They Died with Their Boots On

“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
– The Hurt Locker

Even though I thought highly of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker when it was first released in Chicago in 2009, it has only continued to rise in my esteem over the last three years. Prior to its Best Picture Oscar win, I found myself relentlessly championing it to skeptical friends, mostly by comparing it to classic Hollywood movies by John Ford and Howard Hawks. It does, after all, examine group dynamics and the theme of “professionalism” a la Hawks. And, in its unforgettable lead character of Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), it also arguably provides contemporary audiences with a 21st century equivalent of The Searchers‘ Ethan Edwards: a tragic hero whose “virtues” are ironically what prevent him from becoming a productive member of the very society that he is ostensibly helping to save and thus allowing to perpetuate. (I firmly believe that the film’s controversial and ambiguous ending is an illustration that James will never be a good husband or father.) Now, after going on a binge of watching movies by the great Raoul Walsh, I realize that my analogy was a little off; it is Walsh that Bigelow resembles more closely than his contemporaries Ford or Hawks.

Andrew Sarris (RIP!) aptly, and famously, summed up the heroes of Raoul Walsh by contrasting them with the heroes of Ford and Hawks: “If the heroes of Ford are sustained by tradition, and the heroes of Hawks by professionalism, the heroes of Walsh are sustained by nothing more than a feeling of adventure. The Walshian hero is less interested in the why or the how than in the what. He is always plunging into the unknown, never too sure what he will find there.” In other words, Walsh’s heroes, like Walsh himself, were “adrenaline junkies,” a phrase that has also been used to describe Bigelow’s characters. The adventurousness of Walsh’s heroes, whether they are gangsters, cavalrymen, prizefighters or western outlaws, was explicitly mirrored by Walsh himself, who captured their stories through an adventurous brand of filmmaking – usually by shooting on location in exotic locales and favoring sequences involving elaborately choreographed action over dialogue-based scenes. It is precisely this “feeling of adventure,” filmmaking as athleticism, that binds Bigelow and Walsh and that makes the Hurt Locker helmer the old master’s true heir apparent.

The question then arises: why has The Hurt Locker been treated like an “art film” instead of the Walshian action film that it is? This can only be answered by looking at how the action genre has evolved over the last century. It is a sad reality that the American action movie has suffered more than any other single genre since the decline of the old studio system. The very phrase “action film,” as utilized by a great critic like Manny Farber, used to be synonymous with a movie that was made cheaply, quickly and on a small scale. (It now seems incredible but Farber used the phrase “underground film” to essentially mean action movie.) No more. While good unpretentious action films are still churned out on a regular basis by various Asian filmmakers (Johnnie To, Takashi Miike, Na Hong-jin, etc.), Hollywood has all but doomed the genre by consigning it to the fate of the bloated, CGI-laden spectacle. The contemporary Hollywood action movie, as exemplified by Michael Bay and his alarming number of imitators, typically clocks in at over two and a half hours, does not exceed the PG-13 rating and has a budget of over 100 million dollars (traits that are all, depressingly, interrelated). What does it say that a film like the original Die Hard, a Hollywood action juggernaut that still probably stands as the finest of the 1980s, now looks both relatively modest and adult by comparison?

I hasten to add that the real problem with Bay and his ilk has nothing to do with money spent nor technology used. The biggest problem is that the filmmaking is simply inept (e.g., the axis-of-action rule is mindlessly disregarded, hyperkinetic editing is employed less to complement the action than to keep the viewer in a state of perpetual agitation, etc.). Money and technology do not automatically have to take the place of craftsmanship, as David Fincher’s ingenious and seamless use of CGI proves, and yet the best technology and the worst art frequently do go hand in hand. My first thought upon seeing the relatively lo-fi Hurt Locker (it was shot partly on 16mm and partly on digital), after getting over its initial heart-stopping, visceral impact, was to marvel at just how damn well made it is. I’ll never forget watching, for the first time, the firefight scene with the mercenaries in the desert and having this strange feeling come over me; it seemed almost novel to be watching a new American film involving characters shooting at each other over a long distance where the spatial and temporal relationships between them made perfect sense. More than anything else, I believe it was respect for Bigelow’s craftsmanship that lay at the heart of The Hurt Locker‘s critical love. Sadly, while Raoul Walsh used to direct action set pieces better than anyone, he has still not gotten his critical due and was never even nominated for an Oscar. In the golden age of Hollywood, his basic skills as a director weren’t considered unusual.

9 Comments | tags: Andrew Sarris, Kathryn Bigelow, Michael Bay, Raoul Walsh, The American Cinema, The Hurt Locker, They Died with Their Boots On | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

May 28, 2012

Eating (and Drinking and Sleeping) Raoul

By michaelgloversmith

“Your idea of light comedy is to burn down a whorehouse.”
– Jack Pickford to Raoul Walsh

Does any major director from Hollywood’s studio system era remain as unjustly neglected as Raoul Walsh? In spite of the fact that I’ve loved a few of his movies forever (The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, White Heat), the lack of critical writing about Walsh in comparison to some of his contemporaries, as well as the difficulty of seeing a lot of his best work, has tended to make him something of an admirable but shadowy figure for me. Until recently. Following a rare 35mm screening of Walsh’s excellent pre-Code comedy Sailor’s Luck in Chicago last year, I have made it a priority to see as many of his films as possible. The journey I have undertaken to get a fuller picture of Walsh’s career has led me to rent VHS tapes, purchase DVD-Rs from Warner Archives’ “burn on demand” program, watch entire movies on YouTube and even do a little illegal downloading. The result of my findings is that I have no qualms about calling Walsh one of the all-time great Hollywood directors — right up there with the likes of John Ford, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.

Like all American directors who started in the silent era and whose careers lasted into the latter half of the twentieth century, Walsh was a prolific director who worked for many different studios (though his best loved work was done for Warner Brothers). He also had to adapt to many technological changes in the industry including the coming of sound, widescreen, color and even 3-D. Nonetheless, there are many stylistic and thematic consistencies across his vast body of work. Some of these I will attempt to outline here.

1. His movies are filled with a singularly wild energy.

Raoul Walsh is most often described as a “master of action,” yet precious few critics and scholars have taken the time to elaborate on exactly what this means. Perhaps Andrew Sarris came the closest when he wrote in The American Cinema: “The Walshian hero is less interested in the why or the how than in the what. He is always plunging ahead into the unknown and he is never too sure what he will find there.” This is a concise description of the propulsive, action-oriented heroes of Walsh’s best known work, many of whom have dangerous jobs: John Wayne’s western explorer in The Big Trail, Douglas Fairbanks’ title character in The Thief of Bagdad, Cagney’s gangsters in The Roaring Twenties and White Heat, the long-haul truck drivers played by Humphrey Bogart and George Raft in They Drive By Night. What most impresses about Walsh though is his untamed sense of control in capturing the action: the violent movements of his heroes, which tend to occur in spasmodic, occasionally explosive bursts, are perfectly complemented by Walsh’s crisp editing and swift camera movements. This is true not only of action-based genres like the aforementioned gangster and western movies but of Walsh’s comedies and melodramas as well. In a savagely funny scene from Sailor’s Luck, James Dunn tears apart lingerie, newly purchased for his girlfriend, with his bare hands. In the anarchic comedy The Bowery, a bunch of old women destroy a bar with umbrellas. In the serio-comic The Strawberry Blonde, James Cagney resembles a pit bull in his attempts to launch himself over a fence to engage his college-student neighbors in a brawl. In the musical melodrama The Man I Love, Ida Lupino repeatedly slaps a male character in the face in a desperate attempt to talk him out of committing murder. The kineticism to be found in these and many other scenes, the feeling that anything could happen at any given moment, arises primarily from the intersection between the choreography of Walsh’s performers and the choreography of his camera, and renders his films 100% purely cinematic.

2. His characters tended to be beautiful losers.

The Walshian hero, “the lost child in the big world” in Sarris’ indelible phrase, tends to be a sympathetic loser. His most memorable characters are ordinary men and women — the blue collar, the downtrodden, the quietly desperate, the past-their-prime and the habitually passed-over: Cagney’s low-rent dentist Biff Grimes, always playing second fiddle to his best friend in The Strawberry Blonde, the ex-prisoners played by Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogart, trying to make one last score, in Colorado Territory and High Sierra respectively, Gladys George’s aging, sad-eyed bootlegger in The Roaring Twenties, Robert Mitchum as a rancher who is the target of assassination attempts and he doesn’t know why in Pursued, and the hard-luck dames ferociously incarnated by Ida Lupino in They Drive By Night, High Sierra and The Man I Love. Manny Farber sensed Walsh’s identification with his characters when he called the director someone “whose feel for small-time, scrappy wage earners possibly came from his own cooperative, energetic function in the movie industry . . . Walsh, who wrote some scripts as bald copies of hit films he directed, and probably entered each new project with ‘Christ, it’s not bad. It reminds me of my last movie,’ never fights his material, playing directly into the staleness. He is like his volatile, instinctive, not-too-smart characters, who when they are at their most genuine, are unreclaimable, terrifying loners, perhaps past their peak and going nowhere.”

3. His use of depth-staging was unparalleled.

In 1930, Raoul Walsh directed the cowboy epic The Big Trail in 70mm. In doing so, he achieved the landmarks of having cast John Wayne in his first leading role and, as Dave Kehr has noted, effectively inventing “the widescreen aesthetic, all at once and all by himself.” The film’s commercial failure meant that it would be another 20+ years before audiences would be able to enjoy widescreen movies again but The Big Trail, as Fox’s new blu-ray attests, remains breathtaking for its incredible panoramic compositions of the American West. Perhaps more importantly, he took the lessons that he learned from staging in deep focus and then immediately applied them to the Fox comedies he soon made after in the standard “academy ratio” (Sailor’s Luck, The Bowery, Me and My Gal). In particular, check out the swimming pool scene and the climactic dance hall fight in Sailor’s Luck to see how Walsh always has something interesting happening in the background as well as the foreground of the frame. Kehr has said that Walsh gives the impression that if he had moved his camera closer to the background extras, there would be a whole new and just as interesting movie going on. The use of depth-staging continued throughout Walsh’s career and is perhaps most brilliantly realized in the cosmic long shots of the title location that serve as the climax of his masterpiece Colorado Territory.

4. He had a terrific understanding of women.

It is well known that Walsh directed many iconic male movie stars in some of their most memorable, star-making or persona-defining roles (especially Fairbanks, Cagney, Bogart and Wayne for the performances already cited above). What’s too-little commented on is that Walsh “the man’s man” likewise directed many of the best Hollywood actresses in important roles. My god, just look at this list: Anna Q. Nilsson in Regeneration, Theda Bara in Carmen, Mary Pickford in Rosita, Anna Mae Wong in The Thief of Bagdad, Pola Negri in East of Suez, Dolores del Rio in What Price Glory?, Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson, Janet Gaynor in The Man Who Came Back, Joan Bennett in Me and My Gal, Fay Wray in The Bowery, Mae West in Klondike Annie, Claire Trevor in Dark Command, Marlene Dietrich in Manpower, Rita Hayworth in The Strawberry Blonde, Olivia de Havilland in They Died with Their Boots On, Dorothy Malone in Colorado Territory, Virginia Mayo in White Heat and Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover. And Ida Lupino? Raoul Walsh was Ida Lupino. This is a far more impressive roster of female talent than what Howard Hawks or John Ford worked with in careers spanning roughly the same time frame. I once read a quote by Ford where he said he thought Walsh was a bit like him, only “more appealing to women.” At first I thought he meant that Walsh’s movies were more appealing to women because they focused more on romance (which is typically marketed more towards women). But I’ve come to realize that what Ford meant was that Walsh was more interested in exploring the feelings of his female characters. Unlike the Hawksian woman, who proves her worth by acting just like a man (only with breasts — but not too big) and the women of Ford, who tend to be desexualized mother-figures, Walsh was interested in women as women. See again the remarkable The Roaring Twenties, which is a Cagney vehicle that achieves its genuinely tragic quality primarily because of the poignant performances of Priscilla Lane and Gladys George – as the women who are too good for Cagney and not good enough for him, respectively. As is often the case with Walsh, the women make the film.

And now, for my edification as well as yours, dear reader, here is a countdown of my top 20 personal favorite Raoul Walsh movies in order of preference:

20. They Died with Their Boots On (1941)
19. Regeneration (1915)
18. The Enforcer (1951)
17. What Price Glory? (1926)
16. Sadie Thompson (1928)
15. The Big Trail (Grandeur Version, 1930)
14. They Drive By Night (1940)
13. The Bowery (1933)
12. The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956)
11. Me and My Gal (1932)
10. Pursued (1947)
9. Sailor’s Luck (1933)
8. The Man I Love (1947)
7. The Thief of Bagdad (1925)
6. High Sierra (1941)
5. Gentleman Jim (1942)
4. The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
3. White Heat (1949)
2. Colorado Territory (1949)
1. The Roaring Twenties (1939)

36 Comments | tags: Andrew Sarris, Colorado Territory, Dave Kehr, High Sierra, Manny Farber, Raoul Walsh, Sailor's Luck, The American Cinema, The Big Trail, The Bowery, The Man I Love, The Roaring Twenties, The Strawberry Blonde, The Thief of Bagdad, They Drive By Night, White Heat | posted in Essays

March 12, 2012

Sirk/Fassbinder: Melodrama Mutations

By michaelgloversmith

“This, anyhow, is what enchants me about Sirk: this delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope.”

– Jean Luc Godard writing about A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Godard on Godard translated by Tom Milne, Da Capo Press)

In the same way that the gangster movie can be said to belong to the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and film noir can be said to belong to the 1940s, the melodrama genre belongs more to the 1950s than any other decade. This is in part because the extreme stylization of mise-en-scene that we associate with the genre arguably required the “bigger than life” virtues of Technicolor and widescreen cinematography that didn’t become de rigueur until the 1950s. It is also in part because postwar societal changes saw more Americans rebelling against narrowly defined social roles, changes that were explicitly dramatized in melodrama masterpieces like Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running. These two facets can be seen as neatly dovetailing when the filmmaking innovations of the day proved to be ideal tools for critiquing the specific climate of postwar repression that now seems synonymous with the “Eisenhower era.” In writing about Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, Geoff Andrew has noted how “At every level the banal props of ’50s prosperity are turned into symbols of suffocation and trauma, from the X-ray machine used to diagnose (James) Mason’s ‘disease’ to the bathroom cabinet mirror shattering under a desperate blow.” To which one might add that it was precisely Ray’s masterful ‘Scope compositions and bold employment of color that made his critique so effective. Ray knew how to use the latest filmmaking technology to highlight the nightmarish undertone of these new “props of prosperity.”

The medicine chest, a broken “prop of prosperity,” in Bigger Than Life:

The melodrama has its origins in theater and actually predates the movies as a genre (the word literally means “drama with music” and was coined in 18th century France), and film scholar John Belton has provocatively argued that all silent movies, even comedies, are also melodramas. But the melodrama didn’t come into its own as a cinematic genre until the 1950s when Universal Studios produced a cycle of films directed by the Danish/German emigre Douglas Dirk. Sirk was to the melodrama what Hitchcock was to the thriller, what Ford was to the western and what Minnelli was to the musical: its most famous and accomplished practitioner. The color melodramas that Sirk made for Universal between 1954 and 1959 are high water marks that virtually define the genre: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Imitation of Life. Of these, All That Heaven Allows is frequently cited as Sirk’s masterpiece, largely because it was loosely remade not once but twice: by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 1973 and by Todd Haynes as Far From Heaven in 2002. A comparison between Sirk’s original film and Fassbinder’s similar-yet-different remake offers an object lesson in how a genre can successfully mutate from one country and era to another, offering filmmakers living in different cultural climates the same framework in which to create diverse social critiques, while still retaining the same core characteristics.

These characteristics, which can be found in spades in both All That Heaven Allows and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, include:

– the extreme stylization of not only mise-en-scene (as previously mentioned) but also dialogue and acting
– a foregrounding and heightening of the characters’ emotions
– the domestic sphere as a central location
– plots revolving around family tensions and romantic entanglements
– narratives involving incredible coincidences, accidents, last minute rescues and reversals of fortune

Sirk’s stylized mise-en-scene combines different color temperatures, cold and warm, within a single frame:

All That Heaven Allows relays the dilemma of Carrie Scott (Jane Wyman), an attractive middle-aged widow who unexpectedly falls in love with Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), her much younger gardner. Their budding romance is frowned upon by the surrounding small town community, including Carrie’s grown children, because of both the age and class discrepancy that exists between them. The true subject of the film is the intolerance and hypocrisy of middle America, which Sirk shows as being rooted in prejudice and fear. This is best illustrated in two back to back scenes where Carrie is shunned first by her country club set friends at a party and then castigated by her son at home. The earlier scene offers some of the outrageously stylized, bordering-on-camp dialogue and acting for which Sirk’s movies have become beloved. When Carrie arrives at the party with Ron in tow, their “coming out” party as a couple, the reaction of her peers ranges from bemusement to envy to outright hostility. Mona, one of Carrie’s female acquaintances, references Ron’s tan from “working outdoors” before packing many layers of innuendo into a follow-up comment that he must be “handy indoors too.” Howard, a male acquaintance, likewise assumes that Carrie’s interest in Ron must be only physical and attempts to kiss her after drunkenly declaring “Line forms to the right!”

After leaving the party abruptly, Carrie returns home where she is confronted by her son, Ned, who minces words even less: “I think all you see is a good-looking set of muscles!,” Ned hisses disapprovingly. This scene, literally the darkest in the film, shows off Sirk’s stylized mise-en-scene to best effect. Both Carrie and Ned are cloaked in heavy shadows throughout their tense dialogue exchange, although Sirk also combines different color temperatures within a single frame in order to subtly comment on the characters: Carrie is bathed in a warm orange light while the light that falls on Ned is cold and blue. During this exchange, Carrie and Ned change places in the room and yet the light that surrounds them paradoxically remains the same. When the scene ends, Carrie pleads for Ned to not “let this come between us.” Ned replies, “If you mean Kirby, he already has.” Most directors would have isolated these characters from each other in separate alternating close-ups at this moment, in order to emphasize the emotional distance between them, but Sirk does something more interesting; he has the characters speak their lines to each other through a translucent Chinese screen-like room divider. By doing so, he creates frames within a frame that not only emphasize the distance between the characters but show them to be metaphorically imprisoned as well.

Frames within a frame in All That Heaven Allows:

One of the film’s most celebrated sequences (and one that Martin Scorsese chose to include in his Personal Journey Through American Movies before All That Heaven Allows had ever received a home video release) involves Carrie’s children presenting their mother with a Christmas gift of a new television. At this point in the movie, Carrie has called off her relationship with Ron, and her children clearly intend for the television to fill the new void in her life. This intention is made explicit when the television salesman informs Carrie “All you have to do is turn that dial and you have all the company you want . . . right there on the screen.” The scene ends with an image as clever as it is haunting, a somber Carrie staring at her own reflection in the switched-off television screen. Here, Sirk’s critique is twofold: as a prop of prosperity, the television is a poor substitute for a lover and, as a competing form of audio-visual entertainment, its image is inferior to that of the cinema!

The impact of Sirk on Fassbinder, while well-known, cannot be overestimated. Fassbinder’s earliest movies from the late 1960s and early 1970s were self-consciously intellectual, avant-garde-tinged works of political modernism. After discovering the films of Sirk, Fassbinder realized that not only could the cinema be simultaneously emotionally engaging and socially critical, but that audiences might be able to swallow such criticism more easily if it could be subversively couched within the conventions of a highly emotional genre like the melodrama. While many of Fassbinder’s best films from 1971 through the premature end of his career in 1982 show the obvious influence of Sirk, it can perhaps be most strongly felt in 1974’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the one time Fassbinder actively remade the plot of one of his master’s movies.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul updates the basic premise of All That Heaven Allows to the Germany of the early 1970s; it tells the story of Emmi, a middle-aged cleaning lady, who embarks on an unlikely romance with Ali, a much younger immigrant worker from Morocco. So not only does Fassbinder tackle agism and classism, a la Sirk, but racism and xenophobia as well. Similar to Sirk, Fassbinder’s unlikely scenario forces his disparate characters together in a way that will cause them to reveal prejudices that might otherwise remain hidden. But it’s worth noting that Fassbinder’s milieu is pointedly urban and multicultural (it takes place in Munich) so that the social ills he depicts, unlike those in All That Heaven Allows, cannot be seen as stemming from “provincial thinking.” Showing social prejudice to be a kind of disease underlying the facade of civilized German society is one of the links Fassbinder makes between the Germany of the time he made his film and his country’s Nazi past. This link is made explicit when Emmi takes Ali to a fancy restaurant to celebrate their engagement, one that she boasts was a favorite of Hitler.

Fassbinder’s mise-en-scene is likewise stylized along Sirkian lines with characters frequently framed behind windows or railings to suggest entrapment, although Fassbinder betrays his avant-garde roots by composing images that call more attention to themselves in their artfulness. This self-conscious use of form to explicitly comment on content was accurately and memorably described by Manny Farber as “snarl and decoration.” But taking a cue from his more urban milieu, Fassbinder also elaborates on the Sirk playbook in ways that are meaningful and original. For instance, he frequently shoots his characters from a distance, often through doorways, to give his scenes a more voyeuristic feel. Because these working class, city dwellers live in crowded apartment buildings and not, say, houses in New England, Fassbinder repeatedly makes viewers aware of the extent to which his characters are living in close quarters to each other, allowing us to read varying degrees of social prejudice into the silent gazes of his characters as they openly spy on one another.

“Snarl and decoration” in Fear Eats the Soul:

Fassbinder’s cleverest Sirk homage in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul comes in a scene that also includes a television as a prop; Emmi never bothers to inform her grown children of her relationship with Ali until after the two have married. She invites over her two sons, daughter and son-in-law (played by the director himself) with the promise of a big announcement. Once the children are seated in the living room in front of her, Emmi brings out Ali, wearing his best suit, and formally introduces him as her husband. A slow pan across the children’s faces registers their silent disgust. Then, one of her sons, stands up and proceeds to kick in the screen of his mother’s television set. The difference between the television scene in each film illustrates the extent to which the television ceased to be a prop of prosperity for the rich and had instead become a ubiquitous fixture of working class homes. In the earlier film, Ned sheepishly apologizes for only being able to afford a “table top” model. In the latter, the T.V. is no longer a status symbol and a novelty but a necessity that is both practically valueless and easily disposable.

One of the joys of raking through the history of cinema is to note the kind of explicit repurposing of genre conventions that I’ve outlined above. Fassbinder, a keen student of film history himself, was acutely aware of this impulse but also of the importance of elaborating upon and adding to that from which he borrowed. The radical nature of Fassbinder’s art is of the kind that can only stem from a true reverence for the masters who invented the very rules he intended to bend. I will leave the last word to him from his famous essay on Sirk:

“‘Film is like a battleground’ Sam Fuller, who once wrote a script for Douglas Sirk, said in a film by Jean-Luc Godard, who, shortly before he made A Bout de Souffle, wrote a rhapsody on Douglas Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die. But not one of us, Godard or Fuller or me or anybody else, can touch Douglas Sirk. Sirk has said: ‘cinema is blood, is tears, violence, hate, death, and love’. And Sirk has made films with blood, with tears, with violence, hate—films with death and films with love. Sirk has said: you can’t make films about things, you can only make films with things, with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things which make life worth living. Sirk has also said: a director’s philosophy is lighting and camera angles. And Sirk has made the tenderest films I know, they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn’t despise them as we do. Darryl F. Zanuck once said to Sirk: ‘They’ve got to like the movie in Kansas City and in Singapore.’ America is really something else.”

68 Comments | tags: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Angst essen Seele auf, Bigger Than Life, Douglas Sirk, Geoff Andrew, John Belton, Manny Farber, Nicholas Ray, Rainer Werner Fassbinder | posted in Essays, Film Reviews

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