A One-Way Ticket to Pakulaville

I watched THE PARALLAX VIEW, directed by Alan Pakula — excuse me, Alan *J* Pakula — because I figured it might serve as a surprise entry to Seventies Sci-Fi Week —

— one should always have Surprise Entries. I remember reading the line-up of a season of science fiction films programmed by David Cronenberg, and they were ALL surprise entries, from Robert Wise’s HELEN OF TROY (“Indistinguishable from FLASH GORDON” — nice try, but FLASH goes like a train — maybe SIGN OF THE CROSS would be a better fit) to TAXI DRIVER (“A better version of BLADE RUNNER than BLADE RUNNER.”)

— you see, I was remembering the Parallax Test scene and thought it was a movie about brainwashing, but I think that scene is probably just testing the subject’s emotional responses to words and images. It’s not the full Ludovico. To be a science-fiction film, the movie would have to take the speculations around Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and spin them into an elaborate speculative fiction. And the speculation would have to be based on altering present conditions. The Manchurian Candidate does this. It’s based on the way captured Americans were “brainwashed” — ie tortured into submission, in reality — during the Korean War, but it speculates that somebody could be mentally adjusted and become an unconscious assassin, a human bomb waiting for a post-hypnotic suggestion to trigger detonation. That phenomenon had never been witnessed — so far as we know — so the Condon book and Frankenheimer-Axelrod film could be termed sci-fi.

THE PARALLAX VIEW instead shows an organisation recruiting subjects who would make suitable lone gunmen, based on their psychological profiles, and also supplying patsies. No such organisation is known to exist — apart from possibly the CIA and a few organisations like it — but it certainly COULD exist. No adjustment of present social conditions or our understanding of scientific principles or our mastery of scientific techniques would be necessary for this film to come true.

Now I just scared myself.

The reason I misremembered the movie, which I have seen several times, is that it’s somehow elusive in the memory. And a little hard to concentrate on, as if the Hitchcockian, paranoid thriller were a slightly inapt match for Pakula’s offbeat, observational style (and we should maybe refer to the director as Pakula-Willis, since cinematographer Gordon Willis is such a central, essential contributor to Pakula’s best work). The script is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, with uncredited assist by Warren Beatty’s close buddy Robert Towne.

I had forgotten some good stuff — Hume Cronyn plays by far the best character (almost the only character, after Paula Prentiss’s one scene). I had forgotten there’s a hyperbolic barroom brawl that wouldn’t look out of place in a Hal Needham movie. I remembered that there was a car chase that’s similarly out-of-place. But the good action stuff is when Pakula defies genre by sitting the camera well back and calmly watching, chin resting on knuckles, as a human life is snuffed. The skirmish atop the Space Needle at the start, and the floundering fight in the flooding river, a huge damn venting a wall of spume in the background. The documentary distance adds a sense of reality, and therefore danger. (Obviously Pakula is doing this partly so he can cover up Beatty’s substitution by stunt double Craig Baxley — excuse me, Craig *R* Baxley — but the point is he makes a stylistic feature out of it.)

A different kind of distance afflicts our relationship with Warren Beatty’s character, a classic seventies alienated douchebag — Beatty cheerfully plays his more obnoxious traits to the hilt. The fact that he spends very little time in the movie with anyone he can relate to at all makes it a little hard to see him as other than an articulated shape. And I think the film has a hard job recovering from the Parallax Test in the middle, since it’s such a tour-de-force. We go from a montage masterpiece back into what is merely a very  good movie. And nobody seems to know who is responsible. Don Record did the title designs and seems to have had a role designing it. John W. Wheeler edited the movie as a whole. Did they collaborate or was the whole sequence farmed out to Record?

It reminds me of Chuck Braverman’s amazing opening sequence to SOYLENT GREEN, which IS a seventies sci-fi movie.

Now go do what you have to do.

A Hard’ Day’s Reich

A very  weird thing. In A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, Paul McCartney is filmed with a camera hung from a rope from the stage roof, so that the camera can circle him 360, more or less smoothly — it’s basically a hand-held shot, but the rope adds a degree of stability. And this is a shot invented by Leni Riefenstahl for TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.

In the opening credits, one could reach for some connection between the waving hand gliding across the screaming fans, with the way Riefenstahl films Hitler’s outstretched salute from a moving vehicle, a disembodied hand flying over the heads of the volk.

The fab four’s departure by helicopter at the end, by this logic, reads like an inversion of TRIUMPH’s opening, in which the Fuehrer descends from the skies.

I’m sure there was another connection which struck me but I can’t recall it. I don’t remember a speeded-up sequence of the Fuehrer mucking about in a field. Though John Lennon does attempt some garbled German in the bath (“Heinrich! Headphones! Help!”)

I don’t think too much should be made of any of this. Since Lester and his team were making a conscientious effort to keep their film as light as possible, cribbing from Leni doesn’t seem an appropriate technique. She may be many things, but light isn’t one. And I think the (slight) similarities are not much to do with David Bowie’s theory (“This ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide!”) that there’s something dark and fascistic in rock. See Peter Watkin’s PRIVILEGE, which clones the floating hand shot exactly and pointedly, for that view.

Lester’s approach was to try to be useful — it’s all practical problem-solving, according to him: it’s just because his mind works differently from anyone else’s, his solutions are not those many others would choose. Riefenstahl said that her job was to make Hitler look good, though she denied this had any political meaning (!) — Lester was hired to make the Beatles look good. How can we make a single person performing seem dynamic and interesting when they are stationary> The moving camera is a way of tricking the eye into looking at something for longer than it would normally be satisfied to do.

Right — announcement time — let’s do THE KNACK Film Club on Friday 7th. If you’re able to get the film watched before then, or if you’ve seen it and have strong memories of it, we can all have A Heated Debate on that day. I’ll try to serve up some mini-observations along the way and suggest some possible points of discussion.

The Anachronism, and how to get it

In Robbe-Grillet’s Czech shot early opus, THE MAN WHO LIES, the sixties look of the principle actresses seems like some kind of clever idea — the film seems to be set during WWII, some of the time, and at a non-specific time after WWII the rest of the time. Given that the comparatively youthful Jean-Louis Trintigant (ah! it was all so long ago!) claims to have been involved in said war as a resistance hero/traitor/hero, it doesn’t seem likely that the post-war part of the narrative is meant to be set in the sixties. So it seems like Robbe-Grillet is up to his usual games with time and memory and reality.

In another Czech film of the sixties, CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS, however, experiments with narrative do not seem to account for the wildly anachronistic appearance of the women. Bushy eyebrows, bob, no makeup, a hat that could have sat on Rita Tushingham…

Was it Marshall McLuhan who said that you cannot see an environment when you’re in it? Are we to assume that certain sixties filmmakers were unable to recognize that women had not always styled themselves in beehives and white lipstick? The hair and makeup department of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO likewise let the side down, but was David Lean, the great perfectionist, unable to spot that Julie Christie was being arrayed in a manner that suggested Carnaby Street rather than Imperial Russia?

CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS is an excellent film, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO is at least partly an excellent film. I’m not too sure about PARTY GIRL, because I can never make it through that one. The wilful trashing of any period atmosphere in what is supposed to be a prohibition-era gangster film throws me badly (so does the cast, I admit). And director Nick Ray had lived through the era he was portraying, so it makes no sense. We could blame the studio, but then look at the rather convincing historical sense displayed in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN.

I’d love to hear your favourite examples — not wristwatch-and-toga combos, just period moves where the whole feeling screams aloud the period when it was made.