UPU2?

SOUTHLAND TALES felt like just the kind of film I should be defending here, before I watched it. I fairly loved DONNIE DARKO, Richard Kelly’s debut feature, and although DOMINO, which he scripted, gave me a bad vibe and I didn’t see it, SOUTHLAND sounded weird and funny and crammed with STUFF, which is often the way I like my movies. Plus it’s had a chequered history and a lot of critical savaging, much of it fairly crass.

TV’s Mark Kermode, in particular, should be struck off the critic’s list for mindlessly panning the thing on The Culture Show. “It’s terrible,” he said, “Really terrible. Look, here’s a clip. See how terrible it is?” A twenty second clip aired, and charming but light-weight co-presenter Lauren Laverne nodded. “I see what you mean.” Absolutely no critical analysis was offered whatsoever. And it’s a film which certainly warrants a bit of analysis.

The task is complicated by the fact that the version of SOUTHLAND TALES released is not the original director’s cut — Kelly was forced to alter his vision in order to get it screened at all, after the initial very bad response. What I mainly found myself wondering as I watched was what was part of the original conception and what had been added or subtracted to try and streamline the film and make it, what? Commercial, appealing, comprehensible?

The re-edit certainly fails on all three scores, at least on first viewing. The confusing narrative is surprising because there’s so much exposition — for the first third the movie is ALL EXPOSITION. Most of it is provided by a voice-over, and that’s part of the problem. Without a dramatic situation to engage us, the V.O. seems to wash over, bypassing comprehension. It’s telling us exactly what’s going on, but it’s hard to focus, in part because it’s impossible to see how the narrator, a character in the “story”, knows what he’s telling us. Since he’s not involved in most of the action, his narration blurs the story rather than clarifying it.

I was reminded of David Lynch’s DUNE, with it’s many internal monologues by many characters, seemingly pasted in out of a desperate urge to make us understand. My favourite is when the hero’s mum comes in a door, sees that her son is alive, looks relieved, and then her V.O. helpfully states, “My son — lives!” The redundancy is sort of comical and almost Lynchian. Kelly’s narration-stream isn’t as goofy as that, probably because it’s been added in an attempt to normalise a very weird film.

While Justin Timberlake delivers the verbal afterhthoughts with more gusto than Harrison Ford did in BLADE RUNNER, the result is more like the plot-summary that comes towards the end of LADY FROM SHANGHAI. As Orson Welles wanders the Crazy House, he muses on What Has Gone Before, and we pretty much miss everything he’s saying because it has nothing much to do with the imagery, which is far more interesting. Only when the words “…and I was the fall guy!” land on the image of Welles falling over are we able to register what’s being said at all. It’s not Welles’ fault, it’s the bone-heads at Columbia who forced him to add explanations at inapposite moments, just as R. Kelly has had to do.

Once the SOUTHLAND V.O. thins out and the plot, whatever it is, actually gets in motion, it starts to feel like we’re getting somewhere. Generally the bits with music feel like a movie, rather than a tape-slide presentation or a very long “Previously on Lost” montage, and I started to feel like the film could be an enjoyable experience even without my fully understanding it. I like lots of films I don’t understand. As the proceedings got more fun, I started to yearn for the original version. All the attempts at clarification seemed to make for a more boring experience.

The casting is the high point for me. I always rejoice in the gurning visage of Wallace Shawn, and it was cool to see POLTERGEIST’s Zelda Rubinstein, still looking like she’s been compressed in a car crusher. Bai Ling attempts to inject sultriness into every line reading or movement, Sarah Michelle Gellar does some good porn star acting, the Rock makes his eyes go beady and does weird nervous finger movements, and Justin Timberlake is rather good. Miranda Richardson seems to have been cast for her face rather than her acting, which is quaint as she’s a magnificent actress, one of the real power-houses. But since her costume screams “Villainess!” and that’s all her character is, she really has very little she can add.

The levitating ice-cream van at the end made me think of the flying car in Alex Cox’s REPO MAN, and it seemed clear at that point that the earlier visionary punk sci-fi masterpiece (which anticipates everything from THE X FILES to Grant Morrison’s comic book The Invisibles) was a definite influence. Interestingly, Repo Man now has a comic book sequel, just like SOUTHLAND TALES.

I also thought of the movie Guido’s making in Fellini’s EIGHT AND A HALF. “Do you like movies in which nothing happens?” The idea of a film which tries to include EVERYTHING is a perversely appealing one, even if it’s doomed to fail. In a way, all films fail — they always disappoint their makers. Kelly seems to have gone into this one believing he might never be given another job, so he had to make this film stand in for an entire filmography. Ironically, it’s such a high-profile catastrophe he’s almost certain to be offered more work by the kind of producers who like to present themselves as taming unruly talents.

“The name’s Rock. Rock Rock.”

Chigurh Happy?

Fellini used to say that he still worried about Cabiria, the prostitute heroine of LA NOTTE DI CABIRIA, and wondered what she was up to, long after he made the film, as if she had some independent existence.

I feel the same about Anton Chigurh. 

(Spoiler alert.)

Oh, I know the Coen brothers did their best to suggest at the end of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN that Anton would be fine, allowing him to walk off into the sunset as it were, and even taking care to establish the fact that Tommy Lee Jones has retired and is no longer hunting for him. But still I worry!

Chigurh, after all, is someone who kills whenever his car runs out of gas, simply to get a ride. Is there really a place for him in this wicked world? It would be terrible to think that Chigurh, “the one completely blameless individual in this whole situation,” to quote George Macready in PATHS OF GLORY, might face an uncertain future after wiping stray bits of Kelly MacDonald off his boots and setting forth in his nice new shirt.

I know he’s in all our thoughts and prayers.

 

The Chills #5: What time is love?

 

Jules Dassin definitely deserves a Shadowplay Chills moment of his own. NIGHT AND THE CITY arguably has several — it certainly has the sweatiest leading man performance, from the atomic-powered Richard Widmark. Somebody recently described his character as a manic-depressive, and I thought that was probably a good diagnosis but it somehow takes away from the film. If Harry Fabian has a medical condition, his mistakes are not really his own. The left-leaning film-makers’ noirs tend to be very consciously about WRONG VALUES, like Joseph Losey’s THE PROWLER. They can be taken as a guide to how not to live your life, what not to desire. Maybe the best thing is to simultaneously hold the idea of Fabian as a psychologically tormented victim, and also, contrarily, as a product of a society that values success at any price — and it must be EXTRAVAGANT success.

A society.

Be that as it may, the clip I’ve plumped for is from the amazing 10.30PM SUMMER. Not everyone will approve. David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, recommends Dassin’s European art-house efforts as a cure for depression — he finds them unintentionally hilarious. I think Dassin is courageous for being unconcerned whether people like Thomson snicker.

Everybody’s a critic.

He’s attempting to fuse the qualities of European art-house movies — Antonioni, the nouvelle vague, the shade of Fellini’s TOBY DAMMIT to come, with the overwrought, operatic effusion of silent melodrama. Catalogue this one next to NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and MOONRISE as a headlong plunge into cinema antiquity, coupled with a few paths not followed — it’s a vision of cinema from an alternate universe. OK, maybe it’s a universe where people think Melina Mercouri looks good as a blonde, but with a little imagination we can all go there.

10.30PM SUMMER is available on DVD in France and the USA.

Thimble Theater

Popeye the sailor’s first appearance in E.C. Segar’s newspaper strip Thimble Theater is fairly well documented. In the space of weeks the character had evolved from a grotesque walk-on part, to lead character and all-purpose superhero, displacing Olive Oyl’s beau, Ham Gravy, to boot.

(A note on names: when you’re called Elzie Crisler Segar, you probably think nothing of naming your characters Jack Snork, Glint Gore or Battling McGnat.)

The early Popeyes are now reprinted as part of a mammoth project to republish all of Segar’s ten-year run from the 1930s, daily and Sunday strips both. I had just started reading the first volume when I was struck down by my recent flu, and I found it an excellent companion in times of illness — buy it, it could work for you too.

Anybody who enjoys ’30s Warner Bros films and Dashiell Hammett novels and the like is going to enjoy the arcane slanguage paraded between these (deluxe, hard) covers. While Popeye’s garbled English (”I got personal magnecism an’ sex repeal.”) is one source of pleasure, the depression-era badinage from the other characters is at least as amusing. “Everything is hotsy-totsy.” “

Popeye himself may be one of the most complex comic characters ever. Noble-hearted and fearless, he is also dishonest and opportunistic (like everybody else in the strip). Simple (”I thinks with me fisks.”) and superstitious (”I ain’t afraid of nuthin’ ‘cept evil spiriks.”) he can still outsmart his “emenies”. Introduced into a whodunnit, he socks the butler in the jaw on general principles, only to discover, pages later, that (spoiler alert) the butler did it. When he vows (about once every couple of weeks) to quit fighting for Olive’s sake, he is generally sincere, and will maintain that unassailable sincerity even while slugging some yegg in the breadbasket a panel later.

At first, Segar’s fondness for repetition is a little disconcerting. But as with Laurel and Hardy, a certain familiarity with the characters, a certain predictability, can add to the comedy. There’s generally a variation in the way a gag is delivered, even if it’s the same old gag. And Segar’s glee at repeating a favourite joke is infectious — swimming instructions to an enemy, “Lie back and open your mouth, there’s nothin’ to it!” is even better the second time around, since it has the familiarity of an old friend.

This being the ’30s, there’s a sense of danger to the constant political incorrectness. Guns are blasted left right and centre in a way that might cause concern to modern editors. Olive is both victim of violence from bad guys (Popeye even slaps her at one point) and perpetrator, shooting thirteen cattle rustlers in the shoulder, one after the other. “I’m too kind-hearted to blow his head off,” she remarks of one fallen foe. “I’ll drop him into the cellar – maybe he’ll break his neck.” Golliwog-like cannibals are seen to menace our heroes, and animals are enthusiastically assassinated.

Throughout it all, Popeye displays the near-invulnerability of the superman, which Segar is able milk for a surprising variety of comic and dramatic situations. When Popeye hits a man so hard he breaks his own arm, it’s further proof of his own toughness. The other characters always react as if Popeye was normal, cringing and blanching as he is hit with furniture or plugged with slugs. “Pour lead into him till he sinks to his neck in the desert sands,” instructs John Holster, bad man. But Popeye ignores bullets.

With his gambling, drinking and fighting, not to mention a surprising emotional vulnerability, Popeye still has plenty of weaknesses, and part of the strip’s interest comes from putting him in the wrong and watching him struggles his way to the right.

The Popeye of the Fleischer bros’ animated cartoons is altogether less complicated. It’s a strange feature of the movie-comic relationship that when cartoon characters are adapted for the big screen, they’re generally simplified. Movie snobs would expect them to require the addition of depth and nuance, but this is more usually subtracted. “I think most comic book movies are made by people who don’t read comic books and despise those who do,” says Guillermo Del Toro.

Despite the fact that there’s really only one plot (Popeye must eat spinach and rescue Olive from Bluto) in the Fleischer toons, they are things of beauty in their own right, due mainly to the sheer artistry of the animation and the pitch-perfect vocal perfs of Jack Mercer and Mae Questel (also Betty Boop). With moving images at his disposal, Popeye could also partake of more strenuous forms of knockabout, with more elaborate consequences. I was always wowed as a kid by the way the hero could punch an offensive building so hard it would breaks into pieces, fly through the air, and reassemble in some new and more innocuous form. It’s no accident that the Fleischer studio was also behind the early SUPERMAN cartoons.

Given his violent, profane, anti-social nature, it’s an oddity that Popeye should be adopted by the Disney Corporation in 1980. But everything about Disney at that time was rather odd. They would make dark, disturbing films (SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, DRAGONSLAYER, THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS) and then not know what to do with them. Only an essentially headless entity, or a brilliantly mad one, would hire Robert Altman to make a childrens’ film.

For some time, I think, POPEYE has been considered a low point in Altman’s career, and it did lead more or less directly to his ten years in the wilderness (ten very productive years, it should be stressed) before his mainstream “comeback” with THE PLAYER. These days, POPEYE is regarded with some affection, I think, cemented by PT Anderson’s use of the song “He Needs Me,” on the soundtrack of PUNCH DRUNK LOVE. At the time, the film was seen as a commercial and artistic disaster.

‘To begin with I thought, “This is great, this is going to be my SUPERMAN. By the end I was thinking, “Please God, get me out of here,”‘ said Robin Williams, right around the time the film was opening. Maybe he just didn’t like Malta, where the movie was shot (you can still visit the crumbling hamlet of Sweethaven. I wonder if its wintry opposite number, the town of Presbyterian Church from MCCABE AND MRS MILLER still stands?)

 

With Williams, Robert Evans and Don Simpson involved, it must have been a pretty coked-up shoot. Evans lost a suitcase full of drugs and claims he called his evil crony Henry Kissinger to rescue the lost luggage and transport it to safety in the diplomatic bag. Simpson proved himself a prize asshole by objecting to Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl — the best casting decision in human history. “I don’t want to fuck her, and if I don’t want to fuck her she shouldn’t be in this movie,” he is supposed to have said. Altman’s response to Simpson’s early drug-related death on the toilet: “I’m only sorry he didn’t live longer and suffer more.” (Stories come from Robert Evans and Peter Biskind and therefore may be untrue.)

POPEYE’s greatest asset is a script by Jules Feiffer, a playwright, novelist screenwriter (CARNAL KNOWLEDGE) and cartoonist (Tantrum is a great thing) who admired Segar’s creation and had no truck with any subsequent incarnations. Added to his respectful evocation of the strip-cartoon universe Segar created, we have unanswerably correct casting – Williams becomes the character, with the aid of a little prosthetic enhancing of the forearms; Duvall is absurdly perfect; ditto Paul L. Smith as Bluto (whatever happened to Smith?); and Ray Walston as Poopdeck Pappy, a character reportedly invented by Segar in response to calls to make Popeye less abrasive — Pappy does just that, being even more ornery than his son. “I remembers when I was lickle how he used to throw me in the air,” Williams’ Popeye  reminisces, “only he was never aroun’ when I come down.”

Wolf Kroeger’s Sweethaven design is worthy of a Terry Gilliam film and then some — beautifully wonky and dishevelled. The idea of hiring Fellini’s cameraman, Guiseppe Rotunno, seems inspired. While nothing in the C.V. of Altman’s regular costume designer, Scott Bushnell, would indicate an aptitude for this kind of stylised work, his character designs are crucial in transforming the familiar players into their pen-and-ink counterparts. I would stand that man a pint just for creating Olive’s boat-like boots.

Also: Harry Nilsson’s music and songs. Pretty remarkable! Here we have the lyrical equivalent of Segar’s obsessive repetition. Hmm, maybe they’re a bit TOO repetitive? Still, they’re beautiful.

Altman said of Nilsson, “Everyone said ‘You’ll get in trouble with him — he’ll get drunk; he won’t do it; he’s all washed up.’ As a matter of fact I said all of those things about Harry to Robin myself one day. Then I went home and thought about it and said to myself, ‘Jesus, that’s what some people are saying about me!’ So I called Harry Nilsson, because I had never met him in my life, and we got along terrifically.”

Altman’s biggest handicap as director might be his love of muddle. Slapstick comedy tends to require absolute clarity to work, which translates either into a long-take style that observes the action in a simple long-shot composition of maximum simplicity (Keaton) or a hyperbolic action-movie approach that divides each unit of movement into a brief but legible shot. Altman likes to have everybody talking at once, in a cluttered, busy environment, and his cutting deploys angle-changes almost haphazardly: if the first angle doesn’t show the gag to perfection, the second will allow you another view, from which you might be able to figure out what’s happening. You feel like a reaction shot of a dog cocking its head at some inexplicable human behaviour.

This has the effect of flattening some of the well-staged slapstick, as far as laughs are concerned, but it’s not in itself a displeasing thing. What contemporaneous audiences couldn’t appreciate is that POPEYE isn’t really a children’s film or a comedy or anything normal like that. It’s purpose is not laughter so much as wonderment — it’s a Heath Robinson / Rube Goldberg contraption whose pleasure derives from its beauty and fussy complexity, rather than from anything it actually achieves.

Sadly, such films have a history of under-performing at the B.O.

This Blog is on Drugs

This blog is great when you’re high! LOOK:

Take drugs! Be like Richard Widmark!

Actually, while the flu medication I’m taking “may cause drowsiness”, the hallucinatory feeling I have is probably more due to the illness itself, whatever it is. So, ringing in the ears, sweating and shivering, and a curious heightened awareness, or do I mean UNawareness?

“Everything is strange.”

Dragged myself into work and on the bus back, played odd tunes on my Nano, with the result that the world fell into musical step: Nino Rota’s “Carlotta’s Gallop” from EIGHT AND A HALF caused the whole of Princes Street to move at 16fps, jerky silent movie people all enacting a Jacques Tati pantomime of exaggerated body language in perfect time to the music. As I moved my focus from one person to another they all seemed to snap into character and walk, talk, gesture or even SMOKE to the beat.

As the bus Trumbulled into deepest Leith (TRAINSPOTTING country) the music slowed and so did the people, too unhealthy to actually display actual animation, but the synchronisation remained perfect. I tried looking at my fellow passengers to see if they were also part of this inner movie, but that was just HORRIBLE. Too close!

I’m very very amused by the idea of both Fellini and Otto Preminger taking L.S.D. under controlled laboratory conditions, with teams of medicos on hand to monitor their progress through the doors of perception and presumably somehow prevent their consciousnesses from expanding TOO FAR, until their heads exploded like the guy in SCANNERS, and with tape machines whirring to record all the marvellous psychedelic insights that poured from their blubbering mouths. Fellini, at any rate, recorded his psychotropic experience, but never listened to the tapes. But I think it’s fair to say the experience did have some impact on his work.

Roger Corman took a more informal approach, tripping with friends at Big Sur.

‘I spent the next seven hours face down in the ground, beneath a tree, not moving, absorbed in the most wonderful trip imaginable. Among other things, I was sure I had invented an utterly new art form. This new art form was the very act of thinking and creating, and you didn’t need books or film or music to communicate it; anyone who wanted to experience it would simply lie face down on the ground anywhere in the world at that moment and the work of art would be transmitted through the earth from the mind of its creator directly into the mind of the audience. To this day, I’d like to think this could work and it would be wonderful. I think of all the costs you could cut in production and distribution alone.’

That last sentence may be the most delightfully, touchingly square thing anybody ever said about the L.S.D. experience. And while THE TRIP, which Corman was researching, uses a lot of pseudo-psychedelic movie cliches and doesn’t feel researched AT ALL, Corman’s vision of drug art directly inspires a dialogue scene in his later GAS-S-S-S, OR, IT BECAME NECESSARY TO DESTROY THE WORLD IN ORDER TO SAVE IT, where the hero proposes that movies should be produced quite literally IN CAPSULE FORM:

‘Are you saying that some drug dealers are going to become movie producers?’

‘I’m saying that some of our motion picture studios are going to become drug pushers.”

It’s that light-bulb again.

(Warning — contains the human body.) 

Just wanted to share this opening sequence with you.

Jules Dassin and Marguerite Duras’ 10.30PM SUMMER is available to rent or buy in the U.S. It contains passages of incredible Pure Cinema and the whole thing is pitched at a level too shrill and hysterical even to be called Camp. It’s just Something Else.

Apart from the heightened looniness of Melina Mercouri’s diva performance, there’s a sense that the film looks both back to the intensity of silent cinema melodrama and forward to the more delirious aspects of ’60s art-house. There’s a night drive through narrow streets, lit only by car headlights, that directly prefigures Terence Stamp’s Ferrari jaunt in Fellini’s episode of SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. Almost identical! And there’s the rather surprising nudity and sexual frankness. And this wild opening, which has Giallo tendencies, plus that mysterious symphony of sounds. Watch it, then watch it again with your eyes closed. I mean, LISTEN to it.

The editing is superb, even when it goes into paroxysms of anti-continuity to control the amount of Nudity Level. I love the three quick shots of thunderous sky which make the heavens alive and menacing.

And Gabor Pogany’s lighting is something I can only describe using beatnik parlance (dons beret): he “blows my mind,” “flips my lid,” is “real gone,” etc.

Quote of the Day: Monsignor Ratbastard

 

Fellini had a fondness for untranslatable titles, it seems to me. I VITELLONI has defeated subtitlers for decades now, so that everybody just calls it I VITELLONI and says “Dunno what it means.” AMARCORD means “I remember,” in some kind of babytalk version of a Rimini dialect, and nobody felt comfortable losing those nuances so they call it AMARCORD.

Just ran IL BIDONE, which is subtitled as “The Swindle,” but which really means something offensive but not too meaningful in Italian. When Broderick Crawford’s prosperous pal calls him “Monsignor Bidone,” (referring to the scam he habitually pulls disguised as a priest), I like to think it means Monsignor Ratbastard, and I like to think Fellini would have used that as his title if he could have gotten away with it. The film, like so much of Fellini’s ’50s work, makes a lot of little feints and thrusts at the Catholic Church, without ever quite going for the kill (which could not be allowed).

Anyhow, I ran the film for students and one of them gave me what I think is the perfect sound-byte reaction to the tragic conclusion:

“I felt quite sorry for him at the end, though I couldn’t think of any good reason why I should.”

I think it’s rather great when a film can do that. For all the talk about “sympathetic” characters we can “relate” to, the feat that really increases our involvement in humanity is when a character who ISN’T sympathetic, whom we wouldn’t WANT to relate to, engages our emotions regardless. It isn’t an easy thing to achieve, but it’s surely worthwhile.

A little side-note: some students thought that Broderick was double-crossing his colleagues at the end to get money for his daughter, as he’d promised her. And it’s true, the sum involved would allow him to cover the deposit she needs. But I’d always felt that when he offered to get her that money, while he may have meant it at the time, he probably forgot it moments later. The pressure building on him throughout the film is to escape from this way of life that affords him no self-respect. It’s not that he has any noble instincts, he just can’t live like this any more. But I think maybe I’m wrong…

Anyone else who’s seen it, what was your sense of the ending?

Haynes’ Pandemonium Carnival

 

My head is an incredible jumble! I feel like I have been melted down by the Button Moulder.

I start lecturing again tomorrow (and we’ll see how I keep this blog going once THAT happens) so I started preparing my first lecture, on Jack Clayton. I love THE INNOCENTS especially and THE PUMPKIN EATER and am pretty wild about most of the others, and I’ve never done a talk about him so it seemed like fun. I was looking at THE GREAT GATSBY (featuring the infant Absolute Beginner Patsy Kensit) again, trying to choose extracts, and I got sucked into it and suddenly realised I’d better stop and go and see I’M NOT THERE, as had been my plan for the day.

Off to the Cameo!* This is a legendary Edinburgh art-house/fleapit. My parents saw THE RUNNING JUMPING STANDING STILL FILM along with THE SEVEN SAMURAI here (an unlikely pairing). It used to be run by a wild entrepreneur and showman called Jim Poole, who would turn the heating up for desert films, and other feats of William Castle-style Sensurround legerdemain. Yet I can’t see any obvious reason why, for this film, the auditorium was freezing cold and smelled of wee. These sensations disappeared as the film began though, returning with renewed intensity as the end credits rolled (to the sound of “Like a Rolling Stone”) and I realised I’d been in a state of sensory suspension for the whole film, absorbing only what the film’s makers delivered to me through my ears and eyes. 

I don’t feel equal to delivering any kind of useful thoughts on this film just yet, which is a Phantasmagoric Cavort through various aspects of Bob Dylan’s life and art, because a) it’s pretty complex and b) I don’t know much about Dylan and c) I have managed to amplify the rather weird state the film induced in me by way of artistic overload:

On the bus home, I had the gated drums of Siouxie and the Banshee’s Peekaboo and the lovely Charlotte Gainsbourg singing to me on my Nano, while I read a little memoir by Ralph Richardson (favourite role: Peer Gynt) and the illuminations of the Balmoral Hotel and Edinburgh Castle glowed, and I thanked my lucky stars again for living in the city where W.C. Fields first tasted whiskey.

Then home, lighting a fire and finishing off THE GREAT GATSBY, which has marvellous people and moments, even if it doesn’t entirely grip. Fitzgerald is referenced in Haynes’ film, but I thought on the whole that SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, a marvellous film made by Clayton and partially unmade by the suits at Disneycorps, is closer to Haynes’ film, which has a definite flavour of the Fellini-esque about it. EIGHT AND A HALF is the big stylistic cue for the Cate Blanchett scenes, but then this circus flavour invades the Richard Gere sequence, supplanting most traces of Peckinpah (though the presence of Kris Kristofferson as narrator provides another reminder of PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID). I guess the blend of Americana and the carnivalesque is what brought Clayton’s film to mind.

You can probably expect more on the neglected Clayton, and hopefully some more ordered thoughts on Haynes’ film, which I kind of loved, soon. Or soon-ish.

ONE thought: Cate Blanchett has rightly had much favourable attention for her work here, but I think she has an advantage over her co-stars because drag is pretty well always interesting. Not that she isn’t remarkable. But I want to say that Marcus Carl Franklin as “Woodie Guthrie” is also a true Star — when he’s on it’s like someone pierced the celluloid and let a VERY BRIGHT LIGHT shine through.

*One very nice thing about this picture house is that there’s generally one of my students or ex-students working there. This time it was Clair. Hello, if you’re reading this!

Trans Europ Expression

Reader Elver Loho writes from Estonia:  “You’ve recently blogged a lot about old European cinema and… I gotta admit, with a few rare exceptions, all the names and titles are completely alien to me. Despite being European myself. “The question I’d like to ask you is… What’s currently wrong with
European cinema and how do we fix it? Hollywood is cranking out huge global hits every year, but nowadays only a few European films become popular in USA. (Or in Europe for that matter) Even Asian cinema is way more popular on the global market. What is Europe lacking that Asia and USA have?” 

There are a lot of questions there and they have to be tackled individually. I think the first statement is interesting and points to the problem of finding out about older films: many more of them are readily available to buy than ever before, but it’s not easy to know WHAT to buy, and television doesn’t play the role it used to in introducing kids to old movies. But Elver is obviously more than usually interested in cinema and will undoubtedly find his way to the films that speak to him. The second point has many possible answers, and I can only attempt to offer mine.

At least as far back as the 1920s, European cinema has been dwarfed and dominated by the U.S. Hitchcock suggested that this was partly because the United States was composed of foreigners, so they could easily address the rest of the world. Certainly Hollywood could afford to buy up the best talent from around abroad, enhancing its own output and incidentally disabling the film industries of Germany, Sweden, Britain…  But this isn’t to say that European film has always been in a state of crisis (just Britishfilm). There are clear roles for European films which are both commercially viable and culturally essential. We can and must tell our own stories in Europe, which can sometimes travel the world, or might simply stay within national boundaries and make their money at home. I’ve written already about some uniquely British cultural oddities which haven’t been much seen outside the U.K. All that’s necessary for the above scenario to work is for the European countries to make films which, at the very least, appeal somewhat to their own populations, at a level which allows recoupment. I would expect many of these films to incidentally also have international appeal, as most good stories can stand translation. So, if there IS a crisis, it would mean that European countries are not making popular films. On the whole I think some are, some aren’t. I think some countries, such as Britain, suffer from a rather strong division between purely commercial junk on the one hand and miserable downbeat “serious” cinema on the other.

 

I don’t believe, personally, that “serious” is or should be the same thing as “depressing”, and I find a lot of British film depressing, either because it tries like mad to BE depressing, or it tries to entertain in a mindless and sometimes vicious way. I don’t think either of those are great options for “commercial” or “art” cinema. In Scotland we have a whole, recognised tradition of “miserablism” which is driving Scottish audiences away from their own national cinema.

Note that I have blogged before about extremely dark films like COME AND SEE and SEPPUKU, which don’t seem to me to be depressing at all. 

Roving back to the 50s, 60s and early 70s, when “arthouse” was at its height, we can see that a lot has changed, irrepairably. In those days, art cinema could be sold on sex. Nowadays, people who want sex can get it, in abundant variation, in porn. Sex only really sells if it involves movie stars, since that at least has novelty. And America can buy up all the movie stars.

But looking back at the cinema of those bygone glory years, we also see that art cinema was incredibly entertaining. THE SEVENTH SEAL is a very funny film. EIGHT AND A HALF is funny and dazzling and exciting. DAISIES is sexy and silly and hysterically funny. And filmmakers working in this tradition today are still getting small-but-sufficient audiences because they offer something different, unique. David Lynch’s films freak us out more than any mainstream horror film can. And they also provide sexual thrills far removed from anything likely to be packaged in a regular drama.

  

What I’m not suggesting is that we all go out and make American-styled films. I’ve seen British films with steaming manhole covers, and it doesn’t work. We don’t have that over here. We can by all means steal from the Americans, and from anybody else (somebody, steal from the Japanese! PLEASE!), but we have to be telling our own stories. There needs to be a core of Britishness, Frenchness, Germanity, Czechismo, Turkhood. Something that differentiates our stuff from the Americans’ — precisely because “everybody” prefers American films, nobody wants cheap knockoffs.

  

I’m not a huge fan of NIGHT WATCH and DAY WATCH, but my favourite bits are precisely those that have a Russian flavour. I find Luc Besson’s stuff absolutely intolerable, but there’s a soupçon of Frenchness that I guess stops them plunging forever into a midatlantic chasm like the hero of THE BIG BLUE. They don’t QUITE feel like calling-card films, and indeed Besson has remained a French filmmaker even though I presume he feels quite out of sympathy with the critical culture of Cannes and Cahiers.

This national identity is a delicate thing, hard to pin down. It doesn’t require that all Greek films should be full of people throwing plates on the floor like Jules Dassin’s NEVER ON SUNDAY (though I would support such a move — Angelopoulos’ films have great visual style but not nearly enough smashed crockery for my taste). It just means that a Dutch film, for instance, should be something that could not have come from anywhere else. Paul Verhoeven’s BLACK BOOK satisfies this requirement admirably, whatever else one thinks of it.

One of my Central Tenets is that when a film is successful it’s because it appeals, not because it reflects the society it comes from. But reflecting society is a small but vital PART of the appeal.

I admit this is all pretty vague and on-the-surface. A more nitty-gritty approach to these problems shall be made manifest when I grasp the nettle and blog about producers and funding bodies…

Features.

Barbara Steele, the somewhat-reluctant queen of Italian Gothic horror.

There is, I submit, something we might call a PROFOUND FACE.

Barbara Steele was a graduate of the Rank Charm School, a sort of publicity gimmick/finishing school for movies stars. Armed with the kind of training perhaps more suited to a fashion model than an actor, she pitched up in Italy and appeared in Fellini’s OTTO E MEZZO, as well as a slew of horror films, including Mario Bava’s MASK OF SATAN, the film which really inaugurated this period of Italian horror cinema.

While Fellini was clearly particular about the kind of performances he manipulated and constructed from the raw material of his actors, some of these horror directors were perhaps less scrupulous, less concerned with anything outside the purely visual-aural design of their films and the scarifying effects produced, so the actors were treated purely as elements of mise-en-scene.

Is Barbara Steele a great actress? I would say probably not, though she can be a very good one. But she is undoubtedly a GREAT FACE (and age cannot wither her), which means not just pretty or striking, but iconic. She has the kind of face that haunts cinema, with those massive eyes that are just as good for looking into as for looking out of. A profound face is one which can amplify the emotion of a scene even when it appears to be doing nothing, perhaps by reflecting back the audience’s feelings.

It’s a great injustice, but some players simply don’t have an interesting essence on the screen: they can appear before a camera and think about their dead dog, and though genuine emotions may be rampaging around inside them, nothing photographs. The same emotion that lies across Josh Hartnett’s face like an expired trout will come shooting from Oliver Reed’s laser-beam eyes, down the barrel of the lens and into any receptive audience member. But in addition to this sense of life in the eyes, there is the amplifying effect that a Great Face, acting purely as a sculptural construction, can have on the emotion shared by actor and viewer.

In very lucky instances, a Profound Face can find itself attached to the skull of a truly great actor:

Lillian Gish helped to change screen acting forever. D.W. Griffith found in her an ideal performer to develop the more controlled style of playing he began to favour early in his directing career. Many things come together in Gish: an ability to make a small movement of the face or body read as massively significant, when viewed against a still canvas; an ability to psyche herself up into a state of real hysteria (to the extent that one reporter lost his lunch after witnessing Griffith shoot the climax of BROKEN BLOSSOMS); an ability to use the earlier, more gestural style of silent cinema acting while infusing it with psychological conviction*; and an ability to just stand there and give great face (to use the vulgar parlance or our times).

Of course it’s impossible to separate out entirely that essence that lurks in the eyes, the skills of the performer, and the power that a striking face carries in its contours.

It’s a very mysterious area, this, and if I’m not doing a very good job of shedding light on it, hopefully it’s only 10% because I’m an idiot and 90% because explaining this is like explaining love.

I had the pleasure of nearly working with Lara Belmont once. She had just done Tim Roth’s THE WAR ZONE, which was much-hyped in the biz, and the word was that casting her in our film could help us get the backing, so I was under a certain amount of pressure to like her. I met her and DID like her. She liked our script and the notes she gave me on her character were very intelligent, if practically illiterate from a strict grammar and spelling point of view. Only then did I see THE WAR ZONE.

She looked fantastic onscreen. Her seemingly lidless eyes hooked you into a scene, and you could read great depths of thought behind them. Her steep wall of forehead and impossible four-dimensional lips made her fascinating and surprising from every angle.

All this was somewhat dissipated whenever she parted those lips to give utterance. A newcomer to acting, Lara hadn’t really any facility with lines, which tended to sound like lines when she spoke them. I later heard that Roth and crew had sometimes filmed rehearsals, without telling her, in an attempt to capture the freshness and spontaneity that would vanish when she was self-conscious. I wasn’t convinced this had worked.

Anyway, whore that I am, I offered her the part. I was hoping that the experience of doing Roth’s film, and the confidence she must have gained from the (to me, somewhat inexplicable) rave reviews, would help her out. Knowing how great she was considered purely as a compositional element, and knowing that she was both smart and extremely dedicated (she burned her body with a cigarette lighter during one scene of THE WAR ZONE, something I had no intention of asking her to do), I had some hope that her difficulties with dialogue-speaking could be overcome. I was gambling with both of our reputations, though.

Anyway, Lara’s agent ultimately persuaded her to do a different film instead (”a piece of nonsense”) and our project lumbered on for a few years before dying a natural death. So I never found out if our film could have sailed to glory on Lara’s amazing face. I’d still love to get her in front of my camera though: whether or not I succeeded in getting the best from her as an actor, no film with those features gracing it could ever be entirely ordinary.

*My maternal grandmother saw BROKEN BLOSSOMS on its re-release in the early sound era, by which time both the melodramatic story and performances seemed ridiculous to somebody steeped in the cinematic fashions of 1930. Decades had to pass before the film could be seen without considerations of dated-ness: to us, it is not the product of some obsolete trend, it’s an alien artifact, from an utterly foreign culture which we can nevertheless understand perfectly thanks to our shared humanity.