The Story Ends

Last week, Mark Cousins’ epic series The Story of Film ended. Next year, Mark goes on tour with it, so watch in case he comes to your neighbourhood. I wrote about the series when it started, and promised to return to it.

Much of my original review was taken up with nitpicking over the early episodes’ factual errors — apparently many of these were due to the wrong edit being transmitted, which was very unfortunate. I’m glad to report that as the show went on, these lapses lessened considerably in severity and frequency, although they didn’t completely go away. TOP GUN wasn’t edited on a computer, could not have been at that time. And THE BIG LEBOWSKI was made in 1998, NOT during the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein appears in the dream sequence because the film is a period movie, not because “the war was on and the Coen brothers wanted to reflect that.” As always, the problem isn’t so much in the mistake, but in its knock-on effects. The Coens come to seem like realists with a social conscience, anxious to inject some political commentary into their light entertainment film — in fact, they’ve always been so keen to separate their films from contemporary reality, they set their film seven years in the past for no real reason. I think that tells you a lot about them, and it’s all different stuff from what you’d infer from the erroneous line.

My biggest criticism has been the use of VO in general — Billy Wilder’s rule that you should use narration only to convey things the audience can’t see or hear otherwise would have been a good one to follow here. Instead, time and again, Cousins describes exactly what we’re looking at. Sometimes this is actually fine — it focusses us on what we’re supposed to notice for the sake of the documentary’s overall argument. But too often it’s exactly as redundant as it sounds, and it not only gets in the way of appreciating the movie clips, it takes up time which could have been spent telling us what we need to know.

There are those who don’t like the quality of the voice-over, and Mark’s voice — “He does that questioning rising intonation, but he does it in the middle of a sentence!” complained one irate friend — but it doesn’t bother me. It’s such a personal and idiosyncratic view of film history that it wouldn’t make sense for anybody else to do it. And I like the voice. (I’ve heard some good impersonations, from Stephen Fry and Adam & Joe. I can’t do the voice, I can only do the walk.)

The last couple of episodes suffered from the fact that recent cinema is much harder to gain a perspective on — LA HAINE is a good film, but is it part of a particularly important movement in modern cinema? Or is it just a good film? If so, why include it, since you can’t possibly include every good film? But there are great encounters with Sokhurov, Roy Andersson, Jane Campion. Even Ken Loach, whom I don’t much like, has a great bit on his approach to editing (remind me to talk about this sometime) — he’s rarely asked about technique, as if “realism” were just a product of pointing the camera at ugly stuff.

The best stuff is in the third quarter, the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. The multinational perspective offered is genuinely unique in TV history, as we get not only Hollywood and Europe, but Japan, Hong Kong, Africa, Iran, Brazil… the series’ spine is the idea of film as a bunch of memes transmitted through time and across continents, and this helps binds the disparate threads together. But what it doesn’t necessarily create is the STORY promised in the title… since it would of necessity be an open-ended story, one with an insanely long cast of characters and more major incidents than can easily be recounted, where the sensational is at constant war with the significant, crafting a story is a tall order.

Cousins’ enthusiasm is his main driving force, and sometimes it gets in the way, spilling over into unhelpful and woolly superlatives about “the brilliance of the medium,” but when he suspends judgement he’s at his best — the aforementioned critique of TOP GUN avoids the expected slams directed at the film’s right-wing inanities, and instead details, rather deftly, the actual visual and aural qualities of the thing itself.

Tanked

Our teenage friend Louis seemed ripe for introduction to the oeuvre of the late Ken Russell, so we showed him ALTERED STATES. His father thanked us for this afterwards, so it seems it was a good move. I think he viewed it as something like the young fellow’s first trip to a bordello — a necessary stage in his development.

(William Hurt experiments with isolation tanks and hallucinogens, experiencing a physical regression to a pre-human state. Along with DAY OF THE DOLPHIN, this is the second film based on John C. Lilly’s experiments — he sued the makes of the former film… but apparently this one was OK with him.)

Fiona had been wanting a Ken Russell tribute ever since the Great Man left his body, but she was particular that it should be this film, and I thought our only copy was on loan, but then I found a spare, and so we DID IT. Ken’s first American-shot film and his last major studio film (VALENTINO was shot in the UK, CRIMES OF PASSION was an indie for New World) seems to have allowed him considerable freedom — a big budget and license to cast unknowns like first-timer William Hurt. He’s excellent, though Ken found his need to discuss everything slightly wearing. “I knew he’d marry a deaf woman.”

ALTERED STATES is full of Dick Smith bladder effects. Chief among them is William Hurt’s face.

I once met a chap from a deaf school who had dealt with Hurt on CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD. “He had an interesting time,” said the guy’s dad, and the guy immediately did a full-body clench of anger at the mere memory of Hurt: “He’s – a – very – difficult – man,” he gritted.

I may never forgive Pauline Kael for sniping that all Blair Brown displayed here was the small of her back — she gives a moving and intense performance, dealing with Paddy Chayefsky’s decidedly tricky script. She does, it must be admitted, look great in her nude scenes, but that hardly seems something that should be held against her. She’s credible as an anthropologist and as a woman in love, which is not a combination everyone can pull off. Plus, she delivers two of my favourite facial expressions in any movie — the first is her Sphinx Face, which she deploys when playing the in-between to a gila monster and a sandstone sphinx in a hallucination. It’s appropriately both sphinxlike and lizardlike, full of cold-blooded mystery.

The second is her very convincing and frightful going-into-shock face. In GOTHIC, Julian Sands has a very similar scene in a very similar shot, but his version is rubbish because he’s Julian Sands and not Blair Brown, as any fool can see.

About that tricky dialogue — the one area where Russell didn’t have freedom was the script. Chayefsky had earned the right to control his productions to the point where nobody could change a line of his dialogue without his consent, which is fair enough considering his status and the level of his success with NETWORK etc. But here, his writing does somewhat cross the boundary from florid and theatrical to ridiculously over-explicit and jargony. Russell thus proves how far a director can subvert a script without rewriting it — pretty far, it seems: to the point where Chayefsky took his name off the screenplay.

Russell’s main weapons are speed and overlap, allowing the dialogue that didn’t interest him to rocket over the viewer’s head in a cataract of projectile verbiage. Having the character spout psychological insights with their mouths full of food also adds much-needed naturalism. And actors like Bob Balaban and Charles Haid, with their cool, moist and hot, dry delivery respectively, manage to make this stuff sound believable and human. Haid gets the best rant ever, as Hurt slides to the floor laughing in his face (which, believe me, is the best reaction if anybody ever does start furiously ranting at you — try it, it makes them crazy).

The only downside of sliding so quickly over the incessant monologues is that this stuff is where Chayefsky sets up the crazy Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations that come later. This must be my sixth viewing of the film at least, but it’s the first time I’d taken particular note of a stray observation about schizophrenics almost trying to modify their bodies to suit their schizophrenic self-image. The idea of Cronenbergian psychoplasmics, where mental states take on physical forms, is a crucial one to prepare the audience for the TERRIFIC APE-MAN, who otherwise may seem a bit of a stretch.

Although, a friend said he had no trouble with the ape-man, what he found a little tricky was the weird cosmic shit, which really only gets set up quite late in the day. Of course, for Ken, the image was of singular importance, so what mattered was not establishing these concepts through science-talk, but hitting the audience right between the eyes with them as forcefully as possible, in actual scenes of violent physical action. Here, he delivers. Nothing could be more compelling that the non-verbal adventures of Hurt’s monkey self, rampaging through the streets followed by Jordan (BLADE RUNNER) Cronenweth’s dynamic, roving camera. Just beautiful!

The late Miguel Godreau, a Puerto Rican dancer, plays “primal man” with aggression, gusto, grace, and a surprising quality of choreographed grace — rather than simply running wild, he strikes poses that seem as much physical theatre as wildlife documentary, an unusual choice which shouldn’t work but does, aided by the 80s lighting, which is all smoky shafts of toplight and overwhelming Spielberg godlight. Ken’s sensory overkill needed the kind of budgetary support he got up until CRIMES OF PASSION, and the later films suffer by having insufficient resources to barrage the audience with their effects.

Attention To Detail — here are two shots from near the beginning and near the end, melodramatically lit and mirroring each other cutely. Note also the statue in image one — barely noticeable in the film, where one’s eye flashes to the silhouette of Hurt, but amusing when you spot it. Note also the image at the top of this post: I never spotted, until I went looking for frame-grabs, how the face of the schizophrenic patient bleeds through Hurt’s face during one of his trips. The amazing actress, Deborah Baltzell, tragically died of a heart attack, aged just 25, a year after the movie came out. Everybody use this as your Facebook avatar, NOW.

John Mcdonald’s production design, like most of the film, straddles a line between realism and theatricality. Everything has real-world solidity, and insists on its authenticity via texture and age, but the room with the metal grid floor, lit from below, makes very little sense if you think about it. It’s a hard balance to get right: see EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC for an example of production design that crosses that line first define by David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, between clever and stupid.

As Ken happily pointed out, what contemporary audiences really responded to was the crazy trip scenes. Ken’s crew discovered that what he responded to best was actual on-set physical effects he could see happen live, through his camera, although by the time things reached the screen he had manipulated them in all kinds of ways with the optical printer and splicer. The combination is both visceral and cosmic, which it needs to be. John Corrigliani’s score, with its Stravinskian assaults, is a great help.

And who’s this guy? Small role, but he’s AWFUL good.

“Well, they seem like agreeable people.” — classic example of the kind of fellow you wouldn’t want supervising your peyote trip!

(Apparently he’s Thaao Penghlis, and no, I didn’t just collapse face first on my keyboard, that’s his name. And he’s been in 1,053 episodes of Days of our Lives, which I guess is better than dying young, but how much better I’m not sure. Still, he’s GREAT.)

Fanck Goodness

OK, OK, here are some snowy images from Arnold Fanck’s THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. It really is a most gorgeous film. Although the “mountain film” genre was some kind of a favourite in 30s Germany, I struggle to find any really sinister ideology in it. The worst you could say is that it favours male friendship over heterosexual love. The love of nature does feed into the whole Hitler Youth cult, but is actually pretty innocuous by itself.

Luis Trenker is the principle male object of beauty on display, his face as rugged as The Dreadful North Face of the Santos where he eventually risks death. Or if, rugged manliness isn’t your thing, the film also offers, in defiance of logic and history, Ron Mael from Sparks –

But the scenic splendour is the whole show, magnificently captured by Fanck’s team of cameramen. Not only the big scenic shots with tiny posed figures for scale (all arranged without the aid of walkie-talkies!), but the details and inserts too.

Hey, remember how Werner Herzog made a mountain film, SCREAM OF STONE? Remember how it stank? Actually, Herzog’s recovery from that prolonged period of seeming irrelevant and washed-up is arguably as remarkable as Polanski’s. Herzog had the advantage of his documentary career, which never declined as much as his feature-film reputation, but his documentaries now loom much larger in his legend than they originally did.

Fanck was a documentarist too, which shows in his foregrounding of the scenic and his insistence on reality in the mountaineering stuff. Also in how all this is more significant than plot, which is minimized so each photographic opportunity can be fully exploited for the greatest viable duration. He’s rather good at keeping the balance.

With Herzog, it generally comes out in the freakish “reality” of what he’s filming, whether it be the boat going up the hill, the dwarfism of his entire cast, or Christian Bayle losing lots of weight (again).

What with Christmas on the way and all –