Essay Time

Essays by other people. The magical appearance of The Community Bookshop on my nearest main thoroughfare (Great Junction Street) has affected me much as the brief flowering of the All-You-Can Eat Bookshop slightly further away on Ferry Road did — I go in and feel obliged to buy something, and it leads to me picking up things I might not otherwise have tried.

There’s almost never anything worth getting in TCB’s film section, but it has everything else a growing boy needs. I picked up Tom Robbins’ Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, a collection of the novelist’s short writings, and will now be seeking out his longer works. This one, in an ode to Leonard Cohen, produces the finest poetic image I’ve ever read, in a completely throwaway fashion:

“Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium, flailing and screeching all the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side […]”

A grisly, hilarious image that imposes itself on the mind’s eye and also still seems like THE image for our times, almost another thirty years on.

Robbins includes panegyrics to Diane Keaton (“a kachina, a wondernik, a jill-o’-lantern”) Jennifer Jason Leigh (“I want to tell you about the Lizard Queen.”), Debra Winger (“She’s walked a tightrope between fire and honey.”) and the films of Alan Rudolph (“Horizontal layers of lust and angst crisscross with vertical layers of wit and beauty.”)

Terrific, terrific.

I’m an unfaithful follower of the wrings of Todd McEwen, who lives in Edinburgh but whom I have never knowingly met. How Not To Be American is a bunch of essays not so much loosely as falsely grouped, though I guess everything in there has something to do with than unwieldy continent. There’s a nice appreciation of HARVEY, in which all the comments apply equally to the film and the source play, but the one that wowed me is Cary Grant’s Suit, which views NORTH BY NORTHWEST from the standpoint of Grant’s grey Madison Ave. attire, once voted the finest suit in film history. McEwen views the suit as a kind of superhero, invulnerable and godlike, and Grant’s heroic quest is to be worthy of it. The suit starts the film empty, with Grant as a vapid streak of hype occupying it undeservingly — by the end he has shown the right stuff and after losing both suit and girl, gets them back in the much-celebrated final scene transition.

Imaginative, funny, and mostly completely CORRECT. He’s not reaching here, about everything he says is accurate and insightful and opens up the movie in fresh ways, even though the movie and the suit have invited a great deal of commentary.

There’s a bit about Godzilla coming up and also a chapter proposing how to film unfilmable books, with suggested cast and crew, eg.

Civilisation and its Discontents 1940 dr. Rene Clair. Fred MacMurray, Greta Garbo, Robert Benchley (as Jung). A timid European doctor is haunted by his own penis.

But I haven’t read those bits yet.

Granta 86, the film edition, is the odd one out, since it came from a charity shop in Stockbridge. They had a stack of Grantas and were selling them at £1 each. I’ll buy almost anything for a quid so I grabbed this one. Some of the literary types weighing in on an alien medium are not as enlightening or amusing as Robbins and McEwen, but Karl French produces a section on Art by Directors, featuring Hitchcock prep sketches, Kurosawa painting-storyboards, Takeshi Kitano’s fun canvases, Mike Figgis’ photographs and sketches, Satyajit Ray’s really gorgeous art in various media, Greenaway abstracts and John Huston paintings and sketches, finishing up with Scorsese’s childish storyboards which don’t really belong in such august company. They’re undoubtedly useful for MS, and so we can be glad of their existence, but it puzzles me that he doesn’t even draw in the right aspect ratio. Never mind the human figures (carefully shaded, blindly staring dwarfs), he can’t draw the right rectangle.

But, as Kurosawa put it, explaining his weakness as a self-pitying golfer, “It is enough for a person to be good at one thing.”

The best article, of those I’ve read, is Atom Egoyan’s Dr. Gonad, documenting the career of Paul Thomas, who played Peter in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, then went on to act in and/or direct over three hundred pornos. it’s an amusing piece, even if most of the hilarity comes from simply naming the films Thomas has been mixed up in. Beautifully structured, too, reminding me that Egoyan used to be quite good at structure.

The piece really calls out for a sequel, though, in which Thomas would consider Egoyan’s equally skew-whiff career (or, as we Scots sometimes say, squee-hook). Whereas Egoyan simply quotes from the Thomas filmography and pseudonyms, and that’s enough to get the laughs, Thomas would have to actually sit through WHERE THE TRUTH LIES and CHLOE. Since I assume he earns a decent living doing what he does, nobody’s likely to be able to pay him enough to consume the Armenian-Canadian eroticist’s oeuvre.

The Sunday Intertitle: A Story of Industry

“Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regarded it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard.” ~ Charles Chaplin on Dziga Vertov’s ENTHUSIASM (1930).

The idea that MODERN TIMES is a rip-off of Rene Clair’s A NOUS LA LIBERTE! is absurd, I think. Nobody credits it nowadays, and I feel bad for Clair that he had friends who urged him to sue. I think Chaplin probably saw it and was influenced a little, but apart from both films featuring conveyor belts, there’s nothing in it.

Given that Chaplin had expressed wild enthusiasm for Dziga Vertov’s ENTHUSIASM, it’s tempting to suppose that he might have been influenced by THAT film, which deals with Stalin’s (rather successful) initial five-year plan, and is set in the Donbas region of the Ukraine, with which we are now all so sadly familiar. Vertov has for too long been seen as a one-hit wonder, with everyone falling over themselves to praise MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (students tend to enjoy it far more than Eisenstein’s silents) and ignoring everything else. Buy the box set, it’s worth it! ENTHUSIASM shows an experimental approach to sound that perfectly compliments Vertov’s use of picture cutting. It’s a sound movie that eschews dialogue in favour of musical use of real sounds, and one can imagine Chaplin being inspired by this to likewise make a full sound film that still relies on pantomime, not verbiage.

However, we are all beholden to the ideas our minds come up with. Chaplin’s film resembles neither Clair’s (whose formal qualities are strongly influenced by its being a kind of operetta-film) nor Vertov’s (which is about montage, whereas Chaplin is about mise-en-scene, and more than that, performance).

Chaplin does, however, start his film with a montage idea, but it’s far more Eisensteinian than Vertovian: the comparison of workers using a subway with sheep being herded (to the slaughterhouse?). Think Kerensky the mechanical peacock in OCTOBER. Rather than going back and forth to create a visual fugue in which man and machine-bird merge into one idea, Chaplin just shows us sheep and then workers. Because once you’ve told your joke and made your point, you want to move on.

Chaplin continues in a vaguely Russian mode for a few seconds more: the factory, a glass painting and then lovely METROPOLIS-style sets, and the boss, monitoring work via 1936-era CCTV (also a METROPOLIS idea, I think), introduced with a cluster of newspaper-cartoon satirical signifiers: he’s doing a jigsaw, taking a pill (digestion, we presume) and reading the funnies. Tarzan features prominently, though Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers might have been more fitting, given the high-tech moderne settings.

And then the film changes mode completely, handing over the reins to Chaplin the actor, who will be the centre of sympathy and interest, rather than the common herd around him, making this not really a communistic film, because Chaplin can’t really get excited about the collective. His American side comes out in his individualism. Which is good, because it stops MODERN TIMES being a polemic — it’s anti-dehumanisation, but it’s not FOR anything, except Charlie. The human element personified.

Teardrops

A weekend double-bill of Powell & Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH and Fritz Lang’s LILIOM provided food for thought, as well as entertainment and awe.

It feels certain that P&P were familiar with the earlier film, and as a cultured Hungarian, Emeric Pressburger was probably familiar with Ferenc Molnár’s source play. But the fact that Lang ends his film with a closeup of teardrops, which then find their way into Powell’s film, makes me think that the movie was at the back of somebody’s mind.

The concept of bells ringing in heaven also recurs from Lang to the Archers, and the whole idea of the afterlife as a bureaucracy, a very specific concept, seems to have been ported over. True, Molnar & Lang portray the place as a police station — the way the film’s carny antihero (Charles Boyer) might imagine it — and P&P give us something more benign, a kind of anticipation of the welfare state.

“Conservative by instinct, Labour by experience,” says Peter D. Carter (David Niven), when asked about his politics. The Archers were nothing if not High Tory, it pains me to admit (I’m indebted to Andrew Moor, author of Powell & Pressburger, a Cinema of Magic Spaces, for the information that Pressburger was in the habit of sending his shirts to Paris to be laundered, even in wartime if memory serves, a detail Moor considered absolutely to absolutely clinch the filmmaker’s arch-Tory tendencies). I imagine, since AMOLAD was originally intended as a propaganda film during the last days of the war, with the intention of demonstrating that the USA and the UK can overcome their differences (“We were all getting along fine,” Powell was told, “until we started winning.”), the filmmakers would have been at least somewhat party to the great secret project, chaired by Sir Michael Balcon at Ealing, to prepare Britain for a Labour government. So the version of the afterlife portrayed, where there are no differences in rank (an enlisted man calls his officer “brother” when he learns this), and where everybody can do the job he likes, might be the film’s fantastical prophecy of Britain’s future. Carter on the afterlife: “I think it starts where this one leaves off, or where it could leave off if only we’d listen to Plato and Aristotle and Jesus, with all our earthly problems solved, but with bigger ones worth the solving.”

We were talking about influences. And not just political ones. I’m struck by the similarities with a work by another writer-director team, Marcel Carné & Jacques Prévert, LES VISITEURS DU SOIR. Both films feature emissaries from the afterlife (but in the French film they come from Hell) who can stop time, a fairly distinctive idea. But it’s far from certain that, with the war raging, P&P could have seen P&C’s film. I guess there was just time: France was liberated in autumn 1944, AMOLAD was shot at the end of 1945. How quickly did the backlog of French movies shot during the occupation get seen in Britain? I would imagine not very quickly and not very completely, but Powell would have been greatly interested and he probably would have had better access than just about anyone. So a direct influence seems possible.

If the influence wasn’t direct, then France should still get some credit because the first time-stop/fermata film I can think of is René Clair’s PARIS QUI DORT of 1925, which I’m certain Powell & Pressburger knew. Powell was actually working in movies in France in 1926. And so it seems not chance alone that explains the fact that Conductor 71, P&P’s heavenly emissary, is a Frenchman.