Quote of the Day: Frere Jacques

“Like Moliere, Jacques Becker died on a strange and terrible battlefield: that of artisitic creation. It was the moment when Caroline bites her finger till she draws blood because she has left Edouard, when Golden Marie (Cristobal’s Gold, or course) forces back her tears as Manda climbs the scaffold. It was Saturday evening. The studio phoned to say that the mixing of LE TROU was finally complete. Our btoher Jacques breathed again. Mortally wounded for so long, he could now give up the struggle without dishonour. And a few minutes later, Jacques Becker was no longer alive. It was Sunday morning, the hour when Max plays his favourite record, when Lupin meets the Princess at Maxim’s when day finally dawns over 7 rue de l’Estrapade.

“There are several good ways of making French films. Italian style, like Renoir. Viennese, like Ophuls. New Yorker, like Melville. But only Becker was and is French as France, French as Fontenelle’s rose and Bonnot’s gang. I happened to meet him during the sound mixing of LE TROU. Already ill, he was more handsome than ever. He talked about Les Trois Mousquetaires and suddenly I understood. That dark moustache, than grey hair … he was D’Artagnan in Twenty Years After. And he was Lupin too. Just compare a photograph of Becker seated behind the wheel of his Mercedes with the opening shot of LES AVENTURES DE ARSENE LUPIN and you will see that Robert Lamoureux was his spitting image.

“So Jacques Lupin, alias Artagnan Becker, is dead. Let us pretend to be moved, for we know from LE TESTAMENT D’ORPHEE that poets only pretend to die.”

~ Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema 106, April 1960. Quoted in Godard on Godard, translated and edited by Tom Milne.

[Includes references to Becker's EDOUARD ET CAROLINE (1951), L'OR DU CRISTOBAL (1940), CASQUE D'OR (1952), TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (1954), LES AVENTURES D'ARSENE LUPIN (1957), RUE DE L'ESTRAPADE (1953). Becker was planning a film of Dumas' The Three Musketeers.]

Surprisingly emotional stuff from Godard, I thought. And a reminder that I need to take a look at some of the Becker films lurking in my collection. I saw TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI back in the ’80s, I think, but don’t remember a thing. But I love that feeling of watching a long-forgotten movie and feeling it all come back.

Fallen on her feet

 

I just read this fine piece on DAISY KENYON by Zach Gallagher Campbell, Dan Sallitt and Damien Bona, and then this nice review by Glenn Erickson, which alleges that Preminger’s 1945 noir FALLEN ANGEL, embodying his long-take, fluid style, has only ten shots in its first fifteen minutes. I was actually surprised, because I know the opening fairly well, I’ve studied it and taught it, but I’ve never counted the shots. It had seemed to me that while Preminger does sometimes go for pretty long takes, what’s most impressive is the way he makes the shots WORK HARD for him, with the camera moving for several different reasons at once. I don’t think the sheer bravado of his his shot duration compares to Ophuls’ monster sequence-shots, but the shots are complex and intricate in other ways. So I was tempted to go back to the scene, not to check the shot-count was correct, because I’m sure it is, but to analyse more closely how and why Preminger moves the camera, something which had distracted me from the actual length of the takes.

I think there are FIVE MAIN REASONS for a director to move the camera in narrative cinema. When I’m working with Scott Ward, a fine cinematographer, we often talk about the camera’s MOTIVATION for moving, in exactly the same way you’d discuss an actor’s motivation for doing something. A director might want to achieve a particular visual effect, but unless a lucid motivation can be devised for the actor or the camera’s action, the result will be phony. So, the FIVE MOTIVATIONS are:

1) Following a moving subject. This seems like the most basic and crude reason of all for camera movement, but it can be tackled in the most subtle and curious ways. It also includes moments where the camera might move COUNTER to the subject, but still in reaction to its movement. When Mifune backs away from his turncoat army in THRONE OF BLOOD, the camera moves FORWARD, following a parallel line but in the opposite direction. A shot that had been looking past Mifune at his men, taking in his POV, is now flipped so that we’re looking AT Mifune from an angle approximating the POV of his men — the camera has changed sides, and now Mifune’s REALLY in trouble.

2) Giving us the POV of a moving character. Again, this seems simple enough, but it’s the essence of much of Hitchcock’s direction, forcing us into the character’s position (but for another view, see Mr. Sallitt again). Taking this to the kind of extreme that Hitchcock rather disapproved of, we get DePalma’s endless subjective stalkercam shots. I’d love to see BDP confronted with Hitchcock’s pooh-poohing of this kind of technique in the Hitchcock-Truffaut interview book. No doubt he’d have an answer, but I’d like to hear what it is.

3) Exploring space. Most common in establishing shots, this use of the moving camera allows the audience to explore the scene in three dimensions. As a scene develops, narrative concerns often force this type of action to a halt, so that the audience can focus more on developing plot points. I’ve always had a suspicion that the Italian cinema has more of an investment in this kind of movement than any other, beginning with CABIRIA and the like, where the camera movement was a necessary device to allow the viewer to take in the size of the sets. Griffith adapted this for the tracking elevator shots of INTOLERANCE — crudely put, the shot’s purpose is to show of the scenery, but this has dramatic values too.

4) Telling the story. The camera can become authorial, prowling around IN SEARCH OF CLUES, as in the opening of REAR WINDOW. Hitchcock’s camera here becomes a curious observer, a character in its own right, gliding from object to object, gathering information that helps to bring us up to speed with the in media res narrative.

5) What am I forgetting? There’s always one… ah yes, the psychological tracking shot. A character thinks, and the camera moves towards them (usually), and their thought seems to acquire real importance. An early example of this might be Jannings reading his letter of dismissal in THE LAST LAUGH. The first Hollywood instance I can think of is in HAND ACROSS THE TABLE. Fred MacMurray smokes pensively and broods, and Mitchell Leisen pushes the camera towards him. Nothing is motivating this camera movement save THOUGHT ITSELF.

There are all sorts of other purposes behind camera movement, but I think of these as side-benefits. They may be incredibly important (adding excitement and animation, increasing audience identification) but they are not sufficient in themselves to actually get the camera moving. As Aki Kaurismaki once facetiously said, the camera’s a big heavy thing, and if you’ve been drinking the night before it’s going to take quite a lot of effort to get that thing moving. Also, I think a director who swings the camera about JUST to “create excitement” is likely to be a dumb filmmaker. See Michael Bay.

So, by way of that massive discursion, we return to the opening of FALLEN ANGEL.

SHOT 1. As the titles end, we find ourselves on a bus, looking at the driver’s back. Noticing something behind us, the driver parks the bus and gets up, passing the camera, which pans after him and follows him down the aisle (Motivation 1). The driver and camera both stop standing over Dana Andrews. The driver then shakes Andrews awake and tells him his ticket “ran out at the last stop”, at which point Preminger restarts the camera movement to get closer to Andrews and let us see his face (Motivation 4). This not only “establishes” the protagonist’s face, it also imparts some special significance to him. It’s some kind of a “hero shot”, you could say. Andrews then stands, forcing the camera back Motivation 1 again) and leaves frame, having retrieved his coat and bag from the luggage rack.

The first cut:

SHOT 2 shows Andrews leaving the bus, and it’s a real beauty. Starting wide and high, we start to close in on Dana, fine fellow that he is, as the bus drives off screen right — that is the sideways bus movement triggers a forwards camera movement, towards Andrews, a weird abstract combination of Motivation 1 and 3 and 4 with maybe even a touch of 5 (I did say Preminger was fluid). Worse yet for my neat distinctions, Andrews, having paused for another heroic photo op, turns and heads off, and now we’re following him in a clear case of Motivation 1, until we reach the town signpost and he pauses to look at it — the camera has now framed Andrews and the sign, in something that could be read as Motivation 2 (POV) at one remove, or Motivation 4 (the authorial move, feeding us geographical info), but which was clearly just Motivation 1 at the time we were actually moving.

SHOT 3. Dissolve to a seaside diner.

 

Andrews walks into shot, forcing a pan, and we start tracking after him, nearing the door of the establishment. Opening the door, Dana gives us a nicely framed little scene at the counter, and we pick up a line of dialogue from proprietor Pop (Percy Kilbride). The frame has transformed into a sort of over-the-shoulder view, which is cut off as Andrews carries on inside and closes the door in our face, forcing a cut.

SHOT 4. So far the film has been nothing but sequence shots, each scene a single take, but now comes a very complex scene of narrative set-up, character introductions and interaction, so the cutting hots up, understandably. The first shot of the scene shows Andrews finishing the shutting of the door, and follows him to the counter where we get another, closer OTS shot on the discussion between Pop and Charles Bickford’s detective. Here we learn there’s a missing person report being filed.

SHOT 5. The first stationary shot of the film — Looking past Bickford and his cop pal at Pop. It establishes Pop’s appearance more clearly, and allows us to momentarily forget Dana, who has been set up as witness to all this but can now by sidelined.

SHOT 6 is a reverse favouring Bickford, but it swiftly develops beyond that. The cop exits and we pan with him to the door, where we find ugly old Bruce Cabot, seen in passing as Andrews entered, who now walks to the counter, necessitating a pan back the way we came. This is all Motivation 1, but it’s made satisfying and complex by the way we lose one subject and find another in a nicely choreographed fashion. Now we’re back on Bickford, who gets some dialogue that establishes him as something of a blowhard, then Cabot walks off, necessitating a Motivation 1 pan, which discovers Andrews again — the Motivation 1 has served the purpose of an authorial move, only more discretely. Andrews orders coffee.

(Pause while Cairns goes and makes some too.)

Mmm, coffee.

Now, that shot on Andrews (still the versatile shot 6) becomes an over-the-shoulder when Pop steps in to take his order, which then allows us to cut to -

SHOT 7, a reverse on Pop, over Dana A’s shoulder (note: this is a different set-up to the previous Pop-shot, which was at the other end of the counter). Now we get a hairy moment — as Pop obligingly walks off to fix coffee and a burger for Andrews, his movement is meant to pull the camera off to one side to end up on a shot looking past Andrews at Bickford. I’m not 100% certain if this is Motivation 1 or Motivation 2, as Andrews shifts his attention to Bickford at the same time. It’s a nice move, but the ambiguity isn’t too helpful: maybe it would have been better to let Pop walk off then have Andrews’ shifting in his chair motivate the reframing?

Jingle! Someone’s at the door.

SHOT 8 and Holy Wow! It’s Linda “What I got don’t need beads” Darnell. A beautiful entrance, and then we follow her to a seat, the camera pivoting around Andrews’ back to keep her in view as she removes her feet. Linda is the former missing person, now the returning prodigal, with sore feet. Cut to:

SHOT 9. Preminger’s desire to make each shot complex and multi-functional becomes almost EXCESSIVE — rather than just have Bickford enter Darnell’s frame, he cuts to a medium-closeup expressive of lust and authority, pulling away from Bickford as he advances right at us, and slipping round the side into a sleazy two-shot. Just as we can’t bear looking at this a second longer, Pop’s voice is heard OS, motivating a cut to –

SHOT 10. Pop practically drops his tray when he sees Linda, ruining a perfectly good medium close shot almost immediately but pulling us into a really useful group shot that situates Andrews as outsider/observer. Linda steals his burger. Preminger reframes slightly after Bickford leaves, almost unnoticed (his sexual menace ignored by the contemptuous L Darnell) and D Andrews swaps seats to get his damn coffee. Then Andrews swivels on his bar-stool to frankly eavesdrop, and Preminger eases in on Linda as she stuffs her face with processed meat (Mmm, processed meat), a camera movement that simulates Andrews’ narrowing focus of attention (Motivation 2 crossed with 5, kind of). When Andrews gets up, the shot pulls back again, a straightforward Motivation 1 reframing. When Linda forces Andrews to break his last banknote paying for the coffee (this is where her unpleasantness of a character assumes strangely ALLURING proportions) the camera pulls back a tiny bit with NO MOTIVATION AT ALL, save a sort of abstract Motivation 1 response to  Pop’s exit, and we don’t seem to mind a bit, discovering only at the end of the move that this pull-back allows Pop to be seen as he works the cash register in the background.

Dana exits.

Appearing in only three shots, Linda Darnell has neatly pocketed the whole movie, which will struggle to stay on its feet when she departs around the two-thirds mark. Meanwhile, Preminger has shown how comfortable he is moving the camera with more than one motivation, frequently creating subtle dramatic emphases while appearing simply to be following characters around…

Oh, I buzzed forward to the ten-minute mark, and I find Mr. Erickson’s shot-count slightly off — there are eighteen shots up to then by my reckoning, not counting the credits sequence which eats up the first of those ten minutes. But the general point is quite correct: Otto milks his shots until they squeak.

Euphoria #46: The fluffer

 

Brick by brick, our towering edifice of magical movie moments reaches towards the skies. When we reach fifty, we will have penetrated Heaven her/him/itself. And then we’ll really be in trouble.

Ace film-maker and hairless German dude Timo Langer supplied a great list of modern movie highs for me to choose from. I spoke to him last week in Blimey Productions’ base at the G.R.V. — an oasis of creativity in Edinburgh’s bustling Museum District — expressing my NEED FOR GLEE, and he just emailed a list which included the following:

“big lebowski anything with john goodman but especially his vietnam and jewish chat, john tutorro’s dance and so many other moments…

“army of darkness. well hello mr fancy pants and hail to the king

“bubba ho tep president chat with ossie davis

“clerks 2 jay does the silence of the lambs dance!

“damn forgot the others.

“I am sure I had more from good films as well but funny bits often come from the more peculiar films I guess.”

All choices I could find something to say about, but the one I particularly felt like honouring was THIS:

“Boogie nights 36 min. in william h macys wife has sex in front of a party crowd and he says my wife has an ass in her cock instead of the other way around because he is angry”

(Contains language [English] and sexual situations. Come to think of it, you never hear about amoeba documentaries coming with a warning: “Contains asexual situations.”)

There’s something engaging about the strategic line-fluffing. It’s always sympathetic and human, even when it feels maybe scripted, like here. I always appreciated the way Ophuls would keep little dialogue mistakes in his films, and it happens more often in long takes, as here. Check Barbara Bel-Geddes falling over her words for one nanosecond in the long take in scene one of Ophuls CAUGHT, or Anthony Perkins getting lost for a moment during the massive shot that more-or-less begins Welles’ THE TRIAL.

The pitfalls lie in the fact that an actor genuinely stumbling over dialogue often sounds different from a Real Person stumbling over speech, and scripted can sound phoney. This one feels a little prepared to me, but it’s still a fresh and interesting way to get the character’s emotion across.

A brilliant, bizarre one, occurs in Charles Woods’ script for THE KNACK…AND HOW TO GET IT. Michael Crawford, a schoolteacher, has been told that his class’s behaviour leaves something to be desired. Defensive, flustered, and suffering from terminal sexual frustration, M.C. blurts back:

“MY class? Her class was doing the behaving! That’s what I behaviour.”

I adore that last line, with the missing word. NOT the kind of mistake anybody would ever make in speech, it feels more like an authorial jump-cut. A surreal quirk that gets the emotion across in a non-naturalistic way, just as with the BOOGIE NIGHTS fluff.

Euphoria #18: Did you ever happen to hear…?

Marlene Dietrich’s Hot Voodoo number from Josef Von Sternberg’s BLONDE VENUS, suggested by David Melville (who writes as David Wingrove). An intravenous shot of pure Silver Nitrate Euphoria (a drug whose addictive properties are well documented).

Where did Josef Von Sternberg’s aesthetic sense come from? It’s like nothing on earth.

Part of the answer may be found, along with much else, in Little Jo’s autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, which serves as a kind of Rosetta Stone to his filmwork, cluing the reader in to sources of imagery, philosophy and incidents in the films. Crucially, Sternberg, as a child, lived next to Vienna’s famous Volksprater:

“Hundreds of shooting galleries, Punch and Judy and the inevitable Satan puppet, chalk-faced clowns in their dominoes, boats sliding from a high point down into water with a great splash, leather-faced dummies that groaned when slapped, pirouetting fleas, sword-swallowers, tumbling midgets and men on stilts, contortionists, jugglers and acrobats, wild swings with skirts flaring from them, proving that not all females had lost their undergarments, a forest of balloons, tattooed athletes, muscle-bulging weight-lifters, women who were sawed in half and apparently spent the rest of their lives truncated, trained dogs and elephants, tightropes that provided footing for a gourmet who feasted on a basket of the local sausages with horse-radish that made my mouth water, graceful ballerinas, grunting knife-throwers with screaming targets whose hair flowed down to the hems of their nightgowns, hatchet-throwing Indians and phlegmatic squaws, double-headed calves, members of the fair sex, fat and bearded, with thighs that could pillow an army, magicians who poured jugs of flaming liquid down their throats, drum-thumping cannibals and their wiggling harems, a glass maze from which the delighted customers stumbled with black eyes and gashed heads, hypnotists who practiced levitation and passed hoops around the dormant females swaying five feet from where they ought to have been, and the central figure of a huge Chinese mandarin with drooping moustaches longer than the tail of a horse revolving on a merry-g0-round to the tune of Ivanovici’s Donauwellen — what more could I have asked?”

When Fiona and I visited the Prater, it was mostly shut for the winter, so we shared the off-season experience of Cotten and Welles in THE THIRD MAN and Fontaine and Jourdan in LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN.

I like to think the fun of the fair, with its gaudy, venal and surreal hubbub, planted a seed in the young Jonas Sternberg.

Of course, a sensitive child in this environment could equally well have turned into Fellini. I tend to think that the interaction of genetics and environment is so complex, nobody could ever predict the outcome upon a single human being. Certainly not a human being like Sternberg. One possibility that occurs to me is that he is recreating this tatty, gaudy and vulgar spectacle in his work, but imbuing it with all the beauty and ecstasy and fear that a child would feel upon being exposed to the funfair for the first time.

Footnote: re-watched NO DIRECTION HOME last night, and Dylan’s childhood memories of the travelling fun-fair are the most evocative thing in it — and directly inform the last sequence of Todd Haynes’ I’M NOT THERE, in turn the most evocative sequence of that movie.

Footfootnote: Sternberg passed on some of his funfair impressions directly in THE CASE OF LENA SMITH (1929), a film which is now lost, apart from stills and a single four-minute fragment recovered by Hiroshi Komatsu of Tokyo’s Waseda University.

 Get it on Youtube, Hiroshi!

Not Of This Earth

 

So, my late friend Lawrie Knight was an A.D. on Powell and Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES. He had an odd set of duties, sometimes assisting Reggie Mills in the cutting room, (”I was the worst editing assistant –all my splices fell apart!”) sometimes helping co-ordinate crowd scenes. When the studio had a Royal Visitor, Lawrie was landed with the job of escorting the Princess around. “Why me?” he protested. “Because you’re the only GENTLEMAN in the unit,” he was told.

 An empty stage had been set aside for the dancers to practice on. As Lawrie showed the Princess in, a tiny figure started to pirouette towards them from the extreme distance. Robert Helpmann.

They watched as, like Omar Sharif in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, which had not yet been made, the minute figure slowly grew, until Helpmann spun to a halt right before them.

“What’s your date of  birth?” demanded the dancer.

“Umm, September 22nd,” stammered Lawrie.

“Oh, another lovely virgin for me!” exclaimed R.H., dancing off.

Lawrie also set up the camera for the official cast and crew photo, setting the timer and running to the back of the group to appear in it himself.

But my favourite story concerns Anton Walbrook. The day after filming the big argument scene where he smashes the mirror, Walbrook asked if he could be shown the rushes. Lawrie took him to the screening room and asked for the relevant takes to be shown.

The film came on, but there was no sound. Lawrie made to go and find out what the problem was, but Walbrook indicated that it didn’t matter. So they sat and watched the footage with only a faint whirrr from the projector.

And, in the dark, Lawrie could gradually hear a whisper. “Marvellous. Wonderful. Oh, I’m fantastic.”

Which he was.

This fits nicely with Moira Shearer’s recollections of Walbrook as an elegant, slightly distant figure, wafting about in sunglasses. Once, as she sat dining in the hotel restaurant in the South of France location, Walbrook strolled by. “Ah, it’s beautiful, but it’s not our world, is it?” he sighed, and wafted on.

Well, Walbrook was a refugee, after all. Even after his death, in Germany in 1967, he had no last resting place: for thirty years his ashes were kept in a jar, before finally being interred in the graveyard of St. Johns Church, Hampstead, as he had requested in his will.

*

In his not-always-factual autobiographies, A Life in Pictures and Million Dollar Movie, Powell claims credit for casting Walbrook in a series of films. His colleague, Emeric Pressburger “didn’t like homosexuals,” — and yet Pressburger wrote some vividly autobiographical material for Walbrook: Pressburger’s experiences as an exile surely informed Walbrook’s unbearably moving speech in the immigration office in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP. Powell obviously responded to Walbrook’s intensity and flexibility: who else could achieve the bitter melancholy of that monologue, the sly wit of his characterisation in OH…ROSALINDA!  and the strangulated angst of his last speech in THE RED SHOES?

“Actors are a third sex,” ~ Orson Welles. Certainly some of the most amazing actors have an ALIEN quality. The Shock of Recognition is a powerful thing, that kind of dramatic deja vu, but jamais vu is pretty amazing too — the Shock of Seeing Something You Never Saw In Your LIFE. Walbrook combines the two.

Maybe Walbrook’s most apt role isn’t in a P&P film at all — his otherworldly grace is perfectly suited to the “Ringmaster” character in Ophuls’ LA RONDE.

The Curtains Close.

This is the last shot of the great Max Ophuls’ last film, LOLA MONTES.

As James Mason wrote:

A shot that does not call for tracks,

Is agony for poor dear Max,

Who, separated from his dolly,

Is sunk in deepest melancholy.

The Divine Max.

Something of a mystery: I’ve been using Edinburgh College of Art library for literally DECADES, and never come across the little B.F.I. book on Max Ophuls I picked up today — yet the book is damn old: the price label says 95p.

It’s a real treasure trove, especially for the erudite and unbelievably poignant interview conducted by Truffaut and Rivette shortly after LOLA MONTES had opened to weak box office. Ophuls is full of plans for the future, discussing the films he’d like to make and the ones he feared he might have to make as a compromise, to prove himself bankable – ’At this point also, I’m telling producers: “I advise you to make my next film, but not the one after that!” Of course, Ophuls would soon be dead, LOLA MONTES his last work.

Apart from the poignancy of films he would never live to make (and tantalisingly, Ophuls speaks of Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais,now filmed by Rivette: “I loved the way he had the people subjected to the pressure of political events,”) there is the poignancy of this description of a film he began but never finished, L’ECOLE DES FEMMES, with actor and theatre manager Louis Jouvet –

‘It was an experiment for me: I had to follow Jouvet and his actors with my camera during a performance, with an audience present and without trying to make a cinematic adaptation of the play. I wanted to show the actor when he leaves the stage and follow him into the wings while the dialogue is still audible. I wanted to profit from the play of light in front of and behind the footlights, but without trying to show the techniques of theatre. I never moved away from the characters, even when they stopped acting, because that didn’t mean they had stopped living. I had scarcely filmed anything except the opening shot: a camera traverses the theatre, over the spectators’ heads, and Jouvet, seated on this camera-platform, puts on makeup, transforms himself, unnoticed by the public in the auditorium, as the lights gradually dim. And as the camera crosses the curtain, it vanishes, and Arnolphe (Jouvet’s character) remains on stage, alone. This first shot was also the last. Three or four days later, I left for America.’

Jouvet had smuggled Ophuls into neutral Switzerland after France fell to the Nazis: Ophuls had been putting out anti-Nazi radio propaganda, full of satire and invective, and would have been arrested if he’d stayed in France. That contribution to art – saving Ophuls’ life — is more than enough to justify Jouvet having a street and a theatre named after him in Paris:

In fact, Jouvet also contributed massively to cinema through his elegant performances for Carnè (HOTEL DU NORD), Clouzot (QUAI DES ORFEVRES), Duvivier (LA FIN DU JOUR), Christian-Jacques (UN REVENANT), Maurice Tourneur, Pabst, Feyder, Allegret, Renoir…

Monsieur Jouvet, I raise a glass in your honour.

Vive La France!

(Not many jokes in this piece, I love these guys too much!)