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Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961, U.S.A.)

This missing noir masterpiece enters the canon in first place

By Tom Sutpen

Wandering through a bleak Manhattan in the midst of its Christmas Eve rush like some hoodlum Holden Caulfield, Frankie Bono (Allen Baron) is positively saturated with hatred for everyone and everything around him. He was supposed to be concentrating on Troiano (Peter Clume), the mid-level mob boss with more ambition than brains who he’s been brought in from Cleveland to send to an early grave. But being back in New York, especially around Christmastime, ruins him with memory and he begins slowly losing the intense focus and passive hostility that brings him these high-paying assignments as a professional hitter. So with Troiano gone home to Long Island for the holiday, Frankie decides to clear his head by losing himself for as long as he can in the vast, indifferent throng, taking a walk around this hated city before it’s time to get back to work.

Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence was dumped like a corpse into a handful of theaters by Universal-International in April 1961 and rapidly vanished without a trace, only to be revived with no real frequency over the ensuing decades. Looking at it from the studio’s point of view, it’s not difficult to see why the film was barely a priority at the time of its release, being a cheap distribution pick-up from a couple of executive producers in New York (one of whom, Dan Enright, had distinguished himself as an especially mendacious figure in the Quiz Show scandals that consumed America for several months in 1958). In fact, Blast of Silence must have seemed downright perverse to executives at U-I, given that its protagonist wasn’t played by a Star, or anyone well-known to the public from either film or television, but by its writer/director; a pudgy, 26 year old non-actor whose prior directing credits had been a couple of Hawaiian Eye episodes and an assistant director gig on that piece of dreck, Cuban Rebel Girls (1959) — a picture that, had it not been for the allure of seeing Errol Flynn hitting the skids on celluloid, probably wouldn’t have been screened anywhere outside a couple of mangy drive-ins in Alabama and Kentucky. But Blast of Silence was a fast, cheap thriller with the requisite amounts of violence and gunplay, and those things could always make a couple of bucks for a studio in the end if the deal was right.

Of course, nobody was thinking in terms of “film noir,” certainly nobody in Hollywood in 1961. By the time cinephiles were busily compiling the noir canon like a pack of faith-crazed monks later in that decade, Baron’s film had already disappeared into the ether without them noticing; a film born obscure that soon passed into the endless night of a still greater obscurity. Which is as unfortunate as it is typical of the mass-market cinephile’s perpetually distracted mindset, for Blast of Silence is possibly the great lost masterpiece of film noir; a twilit, deathward emanation of everything that had underlain the form from its beginnings. No American film before it, made in Hollywood or anywhere else, had trafficked so promiscuously in unadulterated nihilism, or so used the condition of Hate — constant, irritated Hate, with no coherent Other to direct it toward — as its emotional motif. The loneliness and doom and spiritual unease that operated at noir’s core and became more pronounced as the form slowly began shedding its visual trappings in the 1950s, here became its dominant emotional surface, infecting everything, consuming every character in the film rather than simply its protagonist.

In earlier, more celebrated noirs, for instance, no matter how twisted the nominal hero or his adversaries might have been from within, screenwriters always managed to balance out their human landscape with so-called “normal” people, usually in the form of cops, sweethearts, and other assorted bystanders to the gathering darkness of these scenarios. That these characters were usually the least believable of all made them no less necessary to a Hollywood storytelling model that had long ago steadfastly rejected nuance. But in Blast of Silence, Allen Baron ignored the rules and brought forth a dissociated, ugly vision of his fellow man that, unlike its closest spiritual predecessors in noir, Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Irving Lerner’s Murder By Contract (1958), never resorts to either grotesquerie or easy symbology. Throughout the film, Baron’s secondary characters are to one degree or another living through the same moral decomposition his Frankie Bono is, and with as little success: A swinish gun dealer (Larry Tucker) who initially tries to rip Frankie off for the price of a .38 and a silencer, attempts to squeeze even more money out of him through a clumsy shakedown (though it gets him killed in one of cinema’s more brutal scenes of that period); an old acquaintance of Frankie’s (Molly McCarthy) who takes a kind of gleeful pity on his solitude and invites him ’round to her apartment to celebrate the holidays, only to come within an inch of being sexually assaulted. In fact, the character who seems least deserving of Frankie’s hatred is Troiano, the man he’s been hired to kill. We only see Troiano from a distance; through Frankie’s eyes, as it were. Yet despite his regular shack-up with some ardent young thing in Brooklyn, he lives a stable suburban existence for a hood. Which, of course, only makes Frankie hate him all the more.

Frankie Bono’s quiet but no less intense loathing for the world around him — spoken before we ever see him by the film’s ubiquitous offscreen narrator (an uncredited Lionel Stander, acting as the persistent spite-filled voice in Frankie’s head) — not only isn’t portrayed as aberrant, its seems the one trait that renders him such a highly skilled, well-paid professional in his field. As we follow him through every element of the job, the narration reveals more and more dimensions within a damaged psyche that nevertheless appears to aid in his extraordinary competence. Only when Frankie gives in to errant feelings of longing and regret for what his overall disconnectedness and despair have brought his life to, only then do his talents, his great sure-footedness in setting up the hit, begin to falter; getting him in serious trouble when, in a fleeting moment of supreme self-doubt, he informs his contractors that he just can’t bring himself to do the job. But rather than pursue this new perspective and renovate his character in its light — as he might have had Blast of Silence been a more conventional Hollywood film — the regret soon passes and Frankie proceeds with his work; he now has to live with the awful, impending consequences of his momentary weakness, that’s all. It’s a truly odd, depressing posture for an American film. As far as Blast of Silence is concerned, chronic nihilism and despair aren’t debilitating conditions at all. They’re so conducive to success that they become positively therapeutic.

But these conditions, therapeutic or not, had always been at the heart of film noir. The stock situations and visual furnishings that typified noir in its classical form of the 1940s were little more than thematic stand-ins, substitutes for those elements in our nature that Hollywood always made a point of not confronting directly. A film like Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) may have dwelled in Raymond Chandler’s netherworld of moral twilight, but it could only hint at its contours through an interplay of light and shadow, a German Expressionist holdover that instantly dominated the form until its gradual washing away in the next decade. Beyond its creative potential, directors in the 1940s found the visual components of classical film noir to be extraordinarily useful shorthand for character traits which could never be directly represented on-screen for one reason or another. As noir in the 1950s expanded into a larger, thematically much darker vision of American life, directors and cinematographers mostly abandoned the baroque visuals; they were now dolorous, too costly and distracting to be effective as anything more than strategically deployed visual adornment. But that twilit vision of humanity the shadows of film noir were first intended to conceal from its audience, that was never left behind. It remained just underneath the surface throughout the form’s evolution.

Blast of Silence goes further than any previous noir in eschewing a lumbering chiaroscuro in favor of a naturalism closer to something like Cassavetes’ Shadows, further than even a later, comparatively sun-drenched noir such as Gerd Oswald’s Crime of Passion (1957). Having to work within the thinnest of shoestring budgets, Baron elected to use, as few filmmakers had before, the expressive potential of New York City; bringing his camera into the streets of midtown Manhattan at Christmastime, to Rockefeller Center, Harlem, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Whether it was a conscious strategy or the result of having no resources to create a setting for his tale from scratch, this unglamorous, rather desolate photography of the city by Merrill S. Brody (who also acted as the film’s producer) worked immeasurably to Baron’s advantage. Indeed, as a directorial debut, Blast of Silence is an altogether prodigious achievement. A model thriller and character study, it takes us step by step through Frankie Bono’s process in setting up his prey for the eventual kill. And at every turn, Baron’s control of his mise-en-scene remains assured and proficient, with few if any missteps. If the film can be said to have a diminishing flaw, it’s that the wall-to-wall narration at times goes beyond underscoring the action on-screen and becomes simply redundant. There are moments when it tells us nothing that the film’s bleakest images could not have handled on their own. But where one might expect a certain amount of clumsiness in a no-budget film from a first-time film director, Blast of Silence is an unusually expert piece of film craftsmanship, coming as it did from a filmmaker who had no track record at all and, as the years passed, would never really succeed in making a name for himself in his chosen field.

Born in 1935 (and currently still living), Allen Baron had a steady, relatively prosaic career after writing and directing Blast of Silence. He followed it up in 1964 with Terror in the City, another thriller of his own script that also went nowhere, only this time for Allied Artists. In 1972 he co-directed (with actor G. D. Spradlin) a draft-dodger melodrama, Outside In; and ten years later directed his fourth and final feature, a species of Ozark romance entitled Foxfire Light (these films remain, like their predecessor, trapped in the cinema rabbit hole). During this period Baron directed episodic television. A lot of it. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s his name could be found on everything from The Night Stalker and Barnaby Jones, to The Love Boat and the show he directed more episodes of than all others, Charlie’s Angels. If he was known for anything, it was television. And he stopped directing it for good in 1986.

It would be apallingly pat, however — even for those who’ve seen Blast of Silence and know what talents lay within the man — to lament what might be seen as their waste on inferior material in the balance of his career. The reality is that Blast of Silence, masterpiece though it is, was buried alive by its distributor from the moment of its release and any director, regardless of his or her triumphs, has to do something to pay the bills when their finest work becomes the province of rumor. To date there has been no second life for Blast of Silence, only sporadic, errant pulse signs: some festival screenings in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the odd revival house haunting thereafter; nothing of great moment for a film that so warrants a renewed existence. Though Universal still holds all rights and title to this film, it has been demonstrably negligent in its responsibilities, leaving salvation of this essential work in the noir canon to the briny depths of the Bootleg Video Underground, where rumor is king and cinephilia, the kind that also failed to recognize Blast of Silence so long ago, finds no purchase.

this article first appeared on brightlightsfilm.com

Introduction

Many things have already been said about the importance of Cassavetes films, both in the lectures today and in many writings and documentaries about his work. His DIY / Dogma avant-la-lettre style, his emphasis on human values, relationships and love, the influence he has had on filmmakers like Martin Scorcese, Abel Ferrara, John Sayles, and Sean Penn and other independent filmmakers. So, in speaking last at this seminar, I see myself presented with a challenge: what to add to the richness of this acknowledged legacy of Cassavetes in contemporary culture?

Over the last weeks I was thrilled again by the intensity of the sometimes awkward but always ultimately deep rewarding sensations of films like Gloria, A Women under the Influence and Love Streams. Online I saw many Youtube-clips on and of Cassavetes. I felt the bewilderedness and embarrassment of Dick Casset and his audience when John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, invited guests to the famous TV show on the occasion of the release of Husbands in 1970, behave like fools: Cassavetes throwing himself on the floor every three minutes, Gazarra taking of his socks and shoes showing his hairy legs, and Falk ignoring the host of the show only addressing the audience; in another Youtube clip, a 1965 episode of the French film programme Cinemas Cinemas, Cassavetes gives a guided tour in his house while he and his team are working on Faces; and the documentary I’m Almost Not Crazy reveals (in four 10 minutes parts) insights about Cassavetes philosophy of love; In ‘Cassavetes in 60 seconds’ and other clips Cassavetes repeatedly expresses that he thinks the world is very ‘chicken’. However, slowly but surely other images started to impose themselves to me, not from the wonderful Cassavetes retrospective or the DVD-box, not from Youtube’s viral archive, but images from my memories of another film, namely David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Many filmmakers have acknowledged their direct or indirect dept to Cassavetes, but to my knowledge Lynch never did. Moreover, Lynch’s often surreal and dark enigmatic images do not seem to connect easily with the earthly world of Cassavetes. So I wondered, was my own mind playing tricks on me, or is here actually something that is worthwhile exploring? I decided to investigate this unexpected Cassavetes-Lynch connection, the results of which I will present to you in the next 30 minutes. Let me start by proposing the thesis that Cassavetes and Lynch are indeed actually soul mates – although this becomes only perceptible now. By ‘going digital’ with Inland Empire, Lynch’s work reveals more explicitly than ever before similar concerns as expressed in Cassavetes’ films, especially in respect to the role of spectacle and madness in contemporary media culture. Let me explain this further.

Youtube aesthetics
Cassavetes’ films seem a no-budget celluloid precursor to the DIY/Dogma digital aesthetics that are currently common practice both in Independent cinema, European cinema and on Youtube. Lynch on the other hand, is much more known as a ‘celluloid fetishist’ who likes high production values who, arguably, even has set the standards for high production values of contemporary quality television series when he shot in the beginning of the 1990s Twin Peaks, the series, on 35 mm and with budgets of over 1$ million per episode.

However, with Inland Empire he has jumped into the digital with a big leap. Lynch is a fast adaptor. ‘Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit’, he even declared in an interview recently. Inland Empire was shot on a relatively primitive Sony PD-150, a consumer-grade model that was introduced in 2001 at a retail price of less than $4000, a medium of home movies and viral video, a DIY medium indeed. As a reviewer argues, this movie is great on the big screen but its natural home is in fact the small screen: ‘Watch Inland Empire on DVD and you sense that this lurid, grubby fantasy springs from deep within the bowels of Youtube as much as from inside its heroine’s muddy unconscious. (…) And not only does Inland Empire often looks like it belongs on the Internet, it also progresses with the darting, associative logic of hyperlinks. Indeed part of the movie originated on David Lynch’s Website, davidlynch.com, itself a labyrinth of wormholes and worlds within worlds.’ Others have described the film as ‘random access cinema’, typical for the digital age, characterized by a database logic and a digital poetics.

So all of a sudden, this switch to the digital has brought Lynch’s work immediately closer to Cassavetes, if only in terms of a shared frayed aesthetics. In terms of production, with the camcorder, Lynch too, has discovered the kind of freedom it grants to allowing for a smaller crew, and no accountability to the money men. A kind of freedom and independence that have always already been dear to Cassavetes. Let’s see if there are further points that can be made about the aesthetics.

Bodies and Brains
With this suddenly shared aesthetics and production freedom, I absolutely do not wish to argue that Cassavetes and Lynch make the same films. One layer below the surface of the looks of the films that now show some similarities, there is a basic difference in the source from which the their respective films are made, namely the body or the brain. If Cassavetes is a very physical director of a cinema of the body, Lynch is a cerebral director, who makes ‘brain cinema’, so to speak.

As Gilles Deleuze has argued in his book The Time-Image, ‘body or brain is what cinema demands to be given to it, what it gives to itself, what it invents itself, to construct its work according to two directions, each one of which is simultaneously abstract and concrete, each one being equally emotional and thoughtful. But they constitute two different types of cinema: ‘either the body gives orders to the brain, which is just a part of it; or the brain gives orders to the body, which is just an outgrowth of it.’ One could argue that Cassavetes and Lynch are like body and brains of contemporary screen culture.

Cassavetes really works from the bodies of the actors, theatricalizes or ‘spectacularizes’ them – not in the sense of glamorizing them, but in the sense that the characters are brought back to their bodily attitudes that become expressive of a feeling (tiredness, boredom, despair, depression, love) and that constitutes the truth of their character. In Faces bodily attitudes are expressed in the face, in A Woman under the Influence Gena Rowlands expresses and constitutes a housewife ‘under influence’ of social norms and boredom by her bodily attitudes and gestures, in Gloria the abandoned child sticks (literally) to the body of the women who first pushes him away, which constitutes a powerful bond between the two when they are on the run in NYC. Cinema of the body. Full of intense feelings, full of unconscious thoughts.

Lynch on the other hand, has always been intrigued by mind matters. His main inspiration is in surrealism, which insists on the mental sur-reality of dreams, visions and the delirium. And his films have always been presentations of characters emotions by presenting their inner life. In Blue Velvet the passage into the inner and dark fantasies of the main character is still marked very clearly and quite literally when the camera zooms into a cut of ear – and a zoom out at the end of the adventure of the mind. But Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are much more ambiguous about the status of images. And the title of Inland Empire most probably should be taken as inner/mental empire, where the virtual and the actual are completely indistinguishable. Cinema of the brain. Full of intense thoughts, full of unconscious feelings.

As a footnote I have to remark that while Lynch has become more ‘Cassavetian’ in allowing more frays and sloppiness in his aesthetics, It also has to be remarked that Cassavetes in his last films also presents sometimes mental images, such as the dream (or is it a flashback or flashforward) and a delirium at the end of Love Streams. Sarah, the sister, dreams a loving dream of her husband and daughter – Robbert, the brother sees a naked hairy man in his room (‘who the fuck are you?’) that turns into his dog / or turns out to be his dog.

The role of spectacle
So if the source of their filmmaking is so very different, where or how do Cassavetes and Lynch meet – because, as you know, that is what I am arguing. Well, here we have to dive again one level deeper into the worlds of Cassavetes and Lynch and see how they direct their actors and how they see how they conceive role of ‘the spectacle’ or ‘mediation’.

In A Constant Forge, the DVD documentary on Cassavetes, Peter Falk explains how he did not understand at all what he was doing or saying in A Woman under the Influence (for instance on the dinner table when he starts talking about seeing babies everywhere), in any case he never knew what his character’s motivation was. This ambiguity makes that the actors had to rely on their bodily performance. And very often it was only on screen that they saw what this performance revealed.

Laura Dern, the main character in Inland Empire has expressed a similar experience of confusion for her as an actress having no idea what she was doing, why and in what kind of world she was operating (real, imaginary, Hollywood, Poland). In 2007 the Foundation Cartier in Paris exhibited David Lynches paintings, one of which with the title “Bob finds himself in a world for which he has no understanding”. This, Lynch comments in the DVD extra’s, is a common condition for us human beings.

So, although they both have a different starting point to construct their films from, both directors share a basic feeling of ambiguity about the nature of behavior, about the nature of reality, about the possibilities of knowing. Nothing is crystal clear in both Cassavetes and in Lynch’s world. In both worlds characters are quite lost, in identity crisis. Nothing is familiar, so the only reliable way of ‘understanding’ is by intuititive performance or unconscious acting.

Here we see how Cassavetes and Lynch are moving towards each other in terms of an uncertainty of knowing and an ambiguity of reality that calls for ‘a constant forge’ into the unknown territories of life, hidden in either the body or the brain. Moreover, both filmmakers, even though that might be stating the obvious, use ‘the spectacle’ as a form of exploring these territories. For only in ‘the spectacle’ true creativeness can emerge, and some truth about (emotional) life can escape.

We must understand here that this is a very different conception of ‘the spectacle’ than Guy Debord’s critical understanding of ‘the society of spectacle’. In the society of spectacle, mediation (film, television other media) absorbs life and returns it only as a shallow simulation (think of Baudrillard as well; reality, real life disappears in the copy of the copy of the copy in audio-visual culture). The spectacle numbs and dumbs people in this conception of the spectacle. In the way Cassavetes and Lynch look for dramatization, theatricalization, performance, mediation and spectacle, life is constituted or reconstituted in front of the camera. This, it seems to me, is an important insight that is relevant if we look at contemporary mediated culture and see how it relates in different ways to spectacle that both Cassavetes and Lynch show us.

For Cassavetes his life and his films are completely intertwined. In Opening Night he and Gena Rowlands are a couple on three levels: in real life, the film and in the theater play within the film. It is well known that his own house served as location for most of his films. And in order for the husbands in Husbands to become friends Cassavetes, Falk and Gazarra really had to spend time together and become friends. And out of that intimacy and friendship, out of the playing together as performance, something true emerges.

Lynch is much less personally involved in his films, but at several moments he has investigated the opposite borders of the spectacle: where for Cassavetes actual bodies, actual friendships, actual relationships create something genuine in a spectacle that makes you forget that you are looking at a technologically mediated form, Lynch shows precisely the opposite, namely that technology and mediation can create real experiences and emotions. Think of the famous scene in Mulholland Drive in Club Silencio, where the host of the show announces it is all a show, all playback, and yet the performance of the singer Rebekah del Rio of Roy Orbinson’s ‘Crying’ is so moving that it is one of the most really intense and dramatic moments of the film. And in Inland Empire the most realistic moment in the film, where Nikki/Sarah dies among the homeless on Hollywood Boulevard, is revealed as spectacle when the camera is revealed by a widening frame and we hear ‘cut’.

Both Cassavetes and Lynch also know that their own approach of ‘the spectacle’ is not a common one. Cassavetes has expressed his contempt for Hollywood as an industry and repeatedly argued that ‘television sucks’. And Lynch comments on Hollywood and the false illusions of stardom, wealth and happiness it creates in Muholland Drive where the dream career as an actress turns out to be the delirum of a junkie. Laura Dern’s character Nikki in Inland Empire (or Sue in the film within Inland Empire) ends op ‘stabbed in the gut and staggering along Hollywood Walk of Fame, leaving a trail of blood…’ It’s not so difficult to read that image as a commentary on the Hollywood industry.

So again, Cassavetes and Lynch have different approaches but both reveal the reality in and of the performance which makes them so interesting ‘blood brothers’ of the truth of the spectacle – and thus exemplary for a shift of thinking about the spectacle that contemporary culture demands.

Collecting and Connecting
Another aspect of Cassavetes and Lynch late works that relate to contemporary culture has to do with ‘collecting’ and ‘connecting’.
Love Streams is about a brother and sister, Robert Harmon (played by Cassavetes) and Sarah Lawson/Harmon (played by Rowlands). Sarah has just been divorced from her husband who also got custody over her child, and Robert is a famous writer and womanizer. They are both collectors: Sarah collects luggage and animals that she offers to her brother, Robert collects women.

CLIP: LOVE STREAMS
Ch. 9 ex-vrouw met zoontje Alby aan deur → huis vol vrouwen
Ch 12 stukje terug (aankomst taxi met al haar koffers) &
Ch. 21 (aankomst taxi met dieren)

Deleuze describes these collections as the desire for connecting by collecting:
‘How can one exist, personally, if one cannot do so alone? How can something be made to pass through these packets of body, which are at once obstacles and means? Every time, space is made up from these excrescences of body, girls, luggage, animals, in search of a ‘current’ which would pass from one body to the next. ‘

It seems to me that here we have another image – a metaphor almost for contemporary culture, where within the quantity of data, we look for the quality of relations and connections.

In Inland Empire Laura Dern does not so much collect things, objects, or persons, as that we are offered a walk through the seemingly wild and random collection of worlds and images that she enters in her mind. Like Cassavetes’ film, it is hard/impossible even to give a plot summary, or in any case a plot summary just does no justice to the experience of the film. But it is clear that the heroine is emotionally in turmoil by what she experiences when she tries to make sense of the different type of images, among which Eastern European women (prostitutes, women traded?) and double or doubles of herself, a bunny family (‘It had something to do with the telling of time’), shifting places.

How do these collections of mental images connect? Note that Nikki/Sarah regularly sees the word ‘axxonn’ written on walls. (Axxonn is not only the title of an online drama series by Lynch but as you know, also the neurons in our brain that send out signals to other neurons, dentrites – in other words neurons that are looking for connections).

CLIP: INLAND EMPIRE
58 min. Axxonn (also online mysery drama 2002)
1.07.50 ‘Strange what love does’ - 1.12.13
1. 24.56 ‘Locomotion’

As in Love Streams the connections fail for large parts, and yet, something passes through. Something of a current, a connection, a stream passes through the body, passes through the brain.

A Woman in Trouble – A Woman of Mystery
There is one more element that needs to be raised, a strong and striking similar concern that both directors share, which is the image of a ‘Woman in Trouble. Both Cassavetes and Lynch have portrayed more than once women in trouble (think of Mabel in Women under the Influence or Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini) in Blue Velvet).

In an article on Cassavetes Jonathan Rosenbaum describes his experience of a theater play That Cassavetes directs right after Love Stream, which he considered as an afterthought and postscript to Love Streams. The title of the play was A Woman of Mystery and according to Cassavetes himself in his notes ‘About the Play’ the play has to do with an unexplored segment of our society referred to as the homeless, bag ladies, winos, bums. It has been difficult to explore this particular woman of mystery. She is not only homeless (if homeless means without the comfort of love), but she is nameless, without the practical application of social security, or any other identity. Alone, she clings to her baggage on the street. (…) The woman has been permanently disabled by the long discontinuance of feelings of love.”

As such, this nameless woman of mysteries resembles Sarah in Love Streams, the aging actress in Opening Night and Mabel in Women under the influence (who also temporary looses her home when she is put into a clinic). Both in the film and the play Cassavetes brings the image of a homeless women who lives in a state of suspended identity, not knowing where to place her continuing love (love is a continuous flow, it never stops, she says in the film) with such an intensity that this love actually jumps on the spectator, affects the spectator directly. And as such, Love Streams – and other Cassavetes films, restores ‘a belief in the world’ even though this belief is broken by personal disappointments, trauma’s and the incapacities to ‘connect’ (because of jealousies, pettiness, ignorance, or whatever reason). And, as Deleuze indicates ‘surely a true cinema can give us back reasons to believe in the world’, but the price to be paid, in cinema as elsewhere, was always a confrontation with madness.’ As we know, Cassavetes has never been afraid to show this confrontation with madness either.

Interestingly enough, when asked about Inland Empire Lynch responded that it is “about a woman in trouble, and it’s a mystery, and that’s all I want to say about it.” Here too, we can argue that the woman in trouble, the woman of mystery is homeless: Laura Dern, Nikki, Sarah does not where or when she is (she has trouble recognizing the order of things), and the film even suggests that even in her three identities, she could be the dream of yet another women. All women relate to a group of other homeless women, prostitutes, bag ladies. In fact all women are in trouble in Inland Empire, and the emotions are often of panic or despair.

Nevertheless there is also room for more affirmative motions. In any case the lyrics of one of the songs in the film which also features on the Dvd menu are ‘Strange what love does, so strange what love does’. At the end of the film, Lynch with all his dark emotions and scary places, even stages a strange family reunion (was it Nikki/Sarah’s alter ego?), and the film ends with the word “Swwueeet” and cheerfully dancing women (the eastern European smuggled women from earlier in the film) and happy faces even if the whole mise-en-scene is somewhat absurd. Contrary to Cassavetes who is actually less optimistic about the fate of his homeless women, or in any case leaves their fate even more open than Lynch does.

In final analysis it is clear that neither Cassavetes nor Lynch are afraid to torture their audience by presenting emotionally disturbing images, by annoying us with ambiguities in characters behavior and confusion of spatial and temporal references. Both directors undermine all our habitual forms of recognition of place, time and fixed identities. Their unconventional attitude towards the centrality of the spectacle, of filming in a free and independent way, looking for connections and intensities to escape from the spectacle, makes their work very relevant for digital screen culture. When asked about his digital cinema, Lynch frequently compares film to a spiderweb: “We are like a spider. We weaves our life and them move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe”. In the documentary I’m Almost not Crazy, whose title indicates again a confrontation with madness, Cassavetes points towards the importance of the spectacle without the metaphor of the spiderweb. Indicating first that philosophy means ‘to know how to love’, he then says: “You start thinking about life, and you realize everything is a movie.” The spectacle brings love and life. Life itself is not enough.

However different they may be, in digital culture (of which Cassavetes was ahead in spirit, and which Lynch with highspeed catches up), both ‘body’ and ‘brain’ need to connect to others. With their emphasis on the search for love and the confrontation with our emotions, especially (but not exclusively) embodied in the spectacle of the ‘woman in trouble’ both directors show that indeed, love streams in datastreams, or in any case it should…

this paper was first presented at Filmmuseum / Universiteit van Amsterdam
John Cassavetes Seminar
‘Life is not Enough’ -Cassavetes, creativeness and contemporary screen culture
Saturday 31 October, 10.00 – 17.30

“Tease was out, honesty was in.”

By Jack Stevenson

Few Americans remember, but forty years ago Denmark passed a revolutionary piece of legislation that brought an end to image (film and publication) censorship and branded the country as the most liberated society on Earth. (Take that, Sweden!) American film historian Jack Stevenson, a resident of Demark for 17 years, looks back at the chain of events that led up to this groundbreaking legislation, what the end result was and how it impacted sexual culture in America and brought a de facto end to film censorship there. (Stevenson’s book, Scandinavian Blue, is to be published by McFarland in early 2010 and this text serves as a kind of condensation of some of its broader themes.)
* * *

Introduction

That the 1960s was a ground-breaking chapter in Danish history goes without saying. Concepts pioneered at the time such as sexual liberation, gender equality and collectivism have had lasting impact. “Cultural warriors” on both sides of the ideological divide are still today arguing about the legacy of this pivotal era. As witnessed by all the anniversary reappraisals of 1968 that filled the Danish press in 2008, the ’60s is still very much in the public consciousness.

Danes are less aware of the impact their “revolution” had in foreign countries where one specific event, the abolition of censorship in the summer of 1969, quickly led to Denmark being hailed as the most sexually free society in the world. The news was carried to every corner of the globe by newspapers, magazines and especially film. Soon a host of documentaries, literary adaptations and erotic dramas were promoting the mythology of Denmark as ground zero of the global sexual revolution on the movie screens of the world.

This idea of Denmark as a carnal paradise was accepted more readily in America than almost anywhere else, and a handful of movies that are scarcely remembered today ended up taking God’s Own Country (as Danes call America) by storm.
* * *

Summer with MonikaThat Nordic folk were open-minded in sexual matters was not a new concept in the Anglo-Saxon world. This idea went back to the early ’50s when Swedish films like Hun dansede en sommernat (One Summer of Happiness, 1951); Sommeren med Monika (Summer with Monika, 1953) and Ogift Fader Sökes (Unmarried Mothers, 1953) lit up the screens of art houses and drive-ins alike. Through the ’50s and into the ’60s the stereotype of the sexually liberated Swedish blonde became firmly entrenched in American popular culture.

Denmark’s belated contribution to the cause of film freedom came in 1959 in the form of a drama entitled En Fremmed Banker På (A Stranger Knocks, 1959). Set during the occupation, it featured an act of intercourse (obscured by clothing) in which the woman reached climax, and while not a particularly big hit in the U.S., it was to have major impact on the laws governing American censorship. As Amos Vogel writes in his landmark work from 1974, Film as a Subversive Art, “the entire plot pivots on an act of intercourse, during which the woman accidentally discovers the vital clue to the film’s mystery. The complete absence of nudity and total relevance of the scene to the plot posed an impossible problem for the American censors, and led, upon appeals against its prohibition, to the abolition by the Supreme Court of the entire system of American state censorship in 1967. This development later contributed in a major way to sexual permissiveness in the American cinema.”

I, a WomanThe first film to test the limits of this new permissiveness was also Danish: Jeg — en Kvinde: (I, A Woman). Produced by the prolific Peer Guldbrandsen, it was based on Siv Holm’s (aka Agenthe Thomsen’s) best-selling book of the same title from 1961 and would become the first true Scandinavian blockbuster of the ’60s. Shot in the summer of 1965, the Danish press dubbed it the most daring movie ever filmed on home soil, “half pornographic.” When it opened in Denmark on September 17 of the same year, it was ridiculed by reviewers but proved wildly popular with the public. Its review in Variety caught the attention of American distributor Radley Metzger, who flew to Copenhagen and purchased world rights for a paltry sum. He went on to sell the film to 35 separate territories, and profits from the picture allowed him to launch his own filmmaking career. (Guldbrandsen would be derided for years by pundits in the Danish film world for making one of the worst deals in film history.)

This tale of a single woman who insists on having a free sexual life without commitment provoked endless scandal in America where shows were stopped by police in several states and theatre employees were jailed, despite the fact that the U.S.-released print had the four raciest scenes censored out of it. Dragged into court in various cities, the film was invariably cleared by juries. To the dismay of moralists and the film establishment, it went on to play in many “respectable” theatres. It set box office records, becoming the most popular Danish film to date and redefining how female sexuality was depicted in film.

The GiftDebate about erotic freedom was evolving on a more complex level in Denmark than in America, as revealed by the next significant Danish film to deal with sexual topics, Knud Leif Thomsen’s Gift, from the following year. This was the tale of an arrogant young man who insinuates himself into a well-to-do family by seducing the teenage daughter and then confronting her parents with his aggressively hedonist philosophies, a kind of “gospel of the flesh.” It was released in Denmark in late March of 1966 and imported to the States in January of 1968 as Venom. This was no plug for sexual liberation but rather a dire warning about the younger generation’s lack of spiritual awareness and addiction to pornography. Downbeat stuff, that, so the Americans just glossed over its message and promoted it as the latest “sex-sation” from Denmark — even though in its (universally) censored version there was nary a flash of bare skin. Several prominent American critics managed to see through the hype and what they saw they liked. The New York Times found its generation gap theme to be of particular interest and rated the acting first-class, while Archer Winsten, a major critic who wrote for The New York Post, declared it to be one of the best foreign films of the year. Playboy called it honest and clear-sighted, a jolt of “shock therapy.”

It had received very different treatment from Danish reviewers — close to total condemnation, in fact. But crowds were massive, drawn by the widely reported news that Thomsen had intended to incorporate actual hardcore porn into the film. This had touched off a very public brawl with the censorship board, which finally agreed not to cut out the offending scenes but to obscure them with large white Xs. Whatever its artistic merit or lack thereof, Gift managed to set in motion a wider discussion on censorship in Denmark, and ironically a film that was preaching against pornography proved instrumental in ending censorship a few years down the road.

The nuances of these issues were largely lost on Americans, who insisted on seeing sexual liberation as a simple matter of the freedom to fuck, and anyway Sweden still remained firmly branded in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness as the homeland of open-mindedness. This was thanks in large part to Americans’ notorious inability to visualize Denmark on the world map and the fact that Swedish films were much bigger hits. Jeg er Nysgerrig — gul (I Am Curious Yellow, 1967), for example, grossed somewhere between 10 and 20 million dollars in the States compared to 3 million for I, A Woman. Actually most Americans thought that was a Swedish film too, due to its having a Swedish director-photographer (Mac Ahlberg) and star (Essy Persson), and technically being a Danish-Swedish co-production. Denmark was still very much overshadowed by Sweden.

All that changed in the summer of 1969, when Denmark passed legislation abolishing censorship and threw a huge “coming-out’ party called SEX 69, a porn trade fair that attracted 100,000 paid admissions and 200 foreign journalists. Visitors wandered awestruck amongst the forest of dildoes, cascades of dirty magazines, blow-up dolls and other rubber goods Danish producers could now openly offer, while striptease “happenings” sprang to life around them.

In one fell swoop Denmark had stolen the spotlight from its neighbour across the Øresund Strait. Sexuality in Swedish films had always been depicted with naturalism (nude swims in the moonlight, winds blowing through wheat fields, etc.) or via the bleak existentialism of Bergman, most prominently on display in The Silence, and suddenly all of this felt very old-fashioned. What was suddenly modern was hard-core porn; sweaty and unapologetic with all the grunts, groans and slapping bodies intact. Tease was out, honesty was in. No matter that Sweden had been producing hard-core porn for years without a fuss; what was happening in Denmark had the feel of a revolution, and this was a rebellion steeped in philosophy and not just commercialism.

But America wasn’t quite ready for hard-core porn, and the first film to be imported after Denmark passed its landmark legislation was the decidedly soft-core Uden en Trævl (Without A Stitch), which had actually been produced in 1968. Based on the 1966 novel by the Norwegian writer Jens Bjørneboe, it starred leggy new discovery Anne Grete Nissen, who played Lilian, an erotically inhibited high school girl who hitchhikes through Europe seeking sexual experience. It was made by Palladium, which picked Annelise Meineche to direct. They were hoping she could recreate the box office magic of her 1965 hit Sytten (Soya’s 17), but Danish critics deemed it a ridiculous embarrassment to the sexual revolution, one critic even blasting it as “counter-revolutionary.” Bjørneboe was also unhappy. His book had been about open-mindedness and sexual equality, and was intended as a blow against Norwegian-style authoritarianism — and Palladium had turned it into “glad porn.”

Without a Stitch Without a Stitch

Obscenity charges kept the film on ice in the U.S. through most of 1969, but in December a jury found it not obscene and, surprisingly, it was approved for release without any cuts. The uncensored version opened in January 1970 in New York at Loew’s flagship theatre on Broadway, and crowds streamed in to see it. Without a Stitch completed the trend that I, A Woman had started: soft-core films playing in respectable mainstream theatres.

Once again American critics saw things in a completely different light. Here reviewers from The New York Times to the Village Voice to The New York Post and even Screw magazine were won over by Nissen’s good looks and didn’t bother to quibble about nuances like the film’s underlying philosophy. Here, finally, was a sex film that gave the viewer his money’s worth!

Conservative Americans thought otherwise. They found the message and spirit of the film highly offensive even though it was technically a soft-core picture shot in a cheerful style. A judge in California declared that “the English language does not provide adjectives sufficient to describe the utter rottenness of this sordid product of subhuman depravity and greed that portrays every known form of sexual perversion.” Industry figures also railed against it, most notably MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Jack Valenti, who called it pornographic trash unsuited to be advertised in poster display cases.

But advertised it was, and aggressively so. “You have never seen it photographed before!” screamed a full page in the Village Voice. “This is the first film to enter the U.S. from Denmark since its liberalization of permissiveness! Denmark — the country that had already gained a reputation of being the world’s most permissive — has gone one step further . . . American audiences of the ’70s may be astounded and shocked by Denmark’s newest motion picture, Without a Stitch, which makes I Am Curious Yellow instantly obsolete. But more so, it’s a good movie. One that American audiences will like, understand and enjoy. Women will empathize and identify with the beautiful heroine. Men will immediately love her.”

If American moralists thought nothing could be worse than Uden en Trævl, they were in for a big surprise. Ratings boards like the MPAA had less and less power to determine what was shown in theatres, and courts almost always ruled in favour of the films. The last vestiges of American screen censorship, in force since the establishment of the Production Code of 1934, were about to fall, and once again the movies responsible for this came from Denmark.

A number of American filmmakers had travelled to the SEX 69 convention, and, not content to let Danish directors monopolize the field, they had shot reams of 16mm footage from which they would fashion their own films about the sex-mad Danes. These would be tailored specifically for the American market, and most never even opened in Denmark.

Relatively chaste films like Without a Stitch were suddenly out of style as viewers demanded increasingly explicit fare. Soon hundreds of porn films were surfacing with “Danish” or “Copenhagen” in the title. Many were cheap frauds that had nothing to do with the country, but a few would turn out to be deeply influential on American sexual morality and the course of film censorship.

On June 17, 1970, The New York Times’ leading film critic, Vincent Canby, reviewed one such film, Censorship in Denmark, by Alex de Renzy. It was an explicit documentary that mixed footage of Copenhagen tourist attractions with on-the-street interviews and hardcore scenes from the city’s live sex clubs and movies. This was the first time that a major American paper had ever reviewed a movie that contained scenes of coitus, fellatio and cunnilingus — and had even reviewed it sympathetically.

What is obscene? Sexual Freedom in DenmarkFour days later Canby followed up with a larger article headlined “Have You Tried Danish Blue?” It appeared right next to a review of Rudolf Nureyev’s latest ballet, and in it Canby discussed all three of the Danish sex films then playing in New York. In addition to Censorship in Denmark, they included John Lamb’s Sexual Freedom in Denmark and Wide Open Copenhagen 1970. This coverage in America’s most respected daily paper instantly legitimized these movies and made it permissible for middle-class audiences to attend. Porn was no longer just for perverts. By contextualizing it as a Danish social phenomenon, filmmakers were able to equate porn with all sorts of deeper political and sociological rationales and to fashion their movies as serious documentaries, which would help them dodge heat from the law. Tone meant everything. Furthermore, the court cases that Lamb’s and de Renzy’s films were inevitably caught up in set precedents that helped usher in the era of hardcore as a theatrical experience.

These films conveyed to Americans the mythology of Danes as radically liberated and sexually insatiable yet somehow completely matter-of-fact about it all. Americans were only too happy to believe this, and the films also had a certain exotic allure as they were as close as most Yanks would ever get to Copenhagen, a city that many still thought was the capital of Sweden or Holland. For their part, Danes were at best only dimly aware of how they were being perceived since most of these films never played in Denmark.

In 1972, with the production of films like Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat, America’s own porn industry came of age, and the country’s fascination with Danish sexuality began to fade. Danish sexploitation cinema, which lasted roughly from 1965 to 1975, was fuelled by co-production arrangements with foreign partners who hoped to cash in on the sex wave, and when Danish skin flicks fell out of fashion they stopped investing. In fact, when the two above-mentioned erotic films came to Denmark, Danes were the ones being fascinated, hailing them as far more daring and quality conscious than any Danish erotic film to date. Already back in 1970, the American porn trailblazer Mona had forced some Danes in the industry to concede that it was “far better than what has previously been seen from Swedish and Danish producers. . . . The USA is better at porno than we are.”

Denmark was to most Americans still a mythical land of liberation, but now the censorship barriers had been smashed and the yoke of ’50s repression had been cast off. By the mid-’70s, even Catholic countries like France had their own hard-core porn industries.

Yet Danish films like Jeg — en Kvinde (I, A Woman), Uden en trævl (Without a Stitch), Sonja — 16 år (Relations — the Love Story From Denmark), and Det Kærlige Legetøj (Danish Blue), and the above-mentioned films shot by American directors (which also must include Frigjorte Christa, aka Swedish Fly Girls, by the American Jack O’Connell), were critically important to America’s sexual coming of age. Unbeknownst to most Danes, and still disrespected or simply ignored by today’s Danish film establishment, these movies helped make America a much more sexually progressive society.

this article first published on brightlightsfilm.com

a review of John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, which he produced and directed, based upon James Dickey’s 1970 novel of the same name. Dickey also wrote the screenplay, which explains a lot, especially if you are familiar with his ‘poetry.’ The actual look of the film, however, is sensational. The cinematography of nature, by Vilmos Zsigmond, is still stunning after thirty-five years- especially those scenes shot in twilight, dusk, and night, and the first forty-five or so minutes sets the basis of a good tale which could have been something really special. Then, Dickey digs into his own personal bag of fetishes (his most famous poem is The Sheep Child, about bestiality) and latencies and the film becomes an almost nonstop stream of a narrative propelled by the Dumbest Possible Action theory of film.

Although the coinage of that term arrived a few years later than this film, Deliverance is as fine an example of that genre as there is. The term arrived in the early 1980s, when a spate of slasher films from the Halloween to the Nightmare On Elm Street to the Friday The 13th series, to their even cheaper knockoffs, were always dependent upon the early success of their villains stemming from the utter stupidity of their victims, to wit: big breasted cheerleader is alone in a dark house, hears a scream from down an even darker hallway, yet rushes headlong toward the scream, all the while knowing that a serial killer is lurking about. In similar fashion, this film goes from a realistic portrayal of masculine mores to a silly, unrealistic, A to B to C pointless film. The turning point comes when one of the four male leads is sodomized forcefully by a hillbilly and his toothless gun-toting crony. But, let’s back up, here. Let us cue the wavy flashback sequence and see where this film started off.

The film opens up with some gorgeous shots of northern Georgia, at the southern edge of the Appalachian Mountains. There is a voiceover of several men, which grounds the back story without illustrative footage, detailing that they want to canoe down the fictive Cahulawassee River (the film was shot in on the Chattooga River, between Georgia and South Carolina) because a government dam project will soon flood the valley, to make a reservoir, and the river will be gone. They are four middle class white Atlanta suburbanites, and little is explicitly stated about them re: jobs and personal lives. Minor personal information filters through, by film’s end, but it is irrelevant to the action of the film, and all four are all to be taken as representatives of men of their era. The four are Ed Gentry (Jon Voight)- an ad man, Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds)- a macho man, Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty)- a salesman, and Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox)- a family man. At a gas station, Drew engages in a song contest with a mute retarded boy (Billy Redden). Drew plays a guitar and the boy a banjo. The song, Dueling Banjoes, became the signature of the film- in a film largely absent of music, along with the aforementioned sodomy scene (and its catchphrase, ‘Squeal like a pig!’), and won the 1974 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance. All four men are weekend warrior wannabe types, mostly full of guff and bluff, and the worst of them is Lewis, portrayed by a buff, unmustachioed, and pre-national joke Reynolds.

The whole film, in fact, masques as some deep critique of what it is to ‘be a man,’ and concomitant clichés, when really it’s pure male fantasy- sans an appearance by the Swedish Bikini Team and with the presence of the homosexual hillbillies. Yet, as the four meet the locals and get under way, the film opens up possibilities that there could be some depth revealed. All the actors are good- quite good with the little they are given, but then Dickey’s perversions betray them. Instead of there being some accident or nature’s throwing obstacles that cause the men to survive and reflect upon real events, all we get are a couple of perverse homosexual hillbillies (Bill McKinney and Herbert ‘Cowboy’ Coward) with a penchant for Bobby Trippe’s fat ass. Why this occurs we do not have a clue. Were this a horror film or a slasher film, ok, one might be able to get away with the oddity of inbred pederasts prowling the Dixie woods, but the whole scene is so utterly pointless and unbelievable, as well as what follows in the film, that one feels that the film went down an even wronger bend in the river than did the characters within it. Yes, Beatty’s character is demeaned and raped by McKinney’s- and, incidentally, never washes his ass out of cum, while Voight’s is tied to a tree, and then prepped to be forced to fellate Coward’s toothless hillbilly. If not for Reynolds’ Lewis’s ability with a bow and arrow (he shoots and kills the sodomite, who dies very slowly- the most realistic scene in the film) both Bobby and Ed would have ended up killed.

Yet, why did not the two men fight back? There were two hillbillies, but only one gun. I surely would not go off peacefully into the woods with two over the top looking inbred mutants, especially if I had a fifty-fifty chance of survival. There was simply no reason for the hillbillies’ actions nor the duo’s non-action in the film, and at that scene’s occurrence. Then, when the four men have to dispose of the dead hillbilly, Lewis convinces them that the law will not protect them, that the hillbillies’ kith would hang them for murder. Yet, all they’d have to do is report the death, show them the scars and anal assault on Bobby, and the case is over. Certainly homophobic hillbillies would not try to stand by queer rapists in their midst- relative or no? And, even if they did, the fact that four members of Atlanta’s business community were attacked by savages would more than ensure fair trial coverage. And what of moving the trial to a neutral county? Only Drew objects, but his knowledge of the law is at a third grade level. Yet, the film is set in the then contemporaneous 1970s. Were it set a century earlier there may have been a more plausible rationale for the covering up of the killing of the rapist.

So, the four men vote and three of them decide to bury the corpse, since the valley will soon be under hundreds of feet of water, and they assume no one will ever find the body. They do so, but Drew is inexplicably catatonic and guilt-stricken, and when they get back on the river, he decides not to wear his life preserver, then tumbles over the side and drowns. Sorry, but if a friend of mine were raped by a guy, and another friend killed the rapist, I would feel no remorse over the death. Yet, we never see a hint of what is wrong with Drew. Anyway, his fall causes his canoe to veer out of control, and run into Bobby’s and Lewis’s, which causes all four men to fall into the river, at a deep gorge. Lewis’s leg is broken, but he claims that the toothless hillbilly got revenge and shot Drew, perhaps just to keep egging his pals on, and whip them into a testosteronic fury. The viewer can see clearly that this is not so- as Drew was not shot, but Lewis’s manipulations work, for it sets up Ed to climb the gorge and somehow shoot both himself with an arrow, as well as an innocent hunter he presumes to be the toothless hillbilly, yet which clearly is not.

Yet more Dumbest Possible Action. And I won’t even get into how, sans climbing equipment, a tired and injured Ed could scale near vertical rock with bare hands, and a bow and arrow in hand. Then, after killing the hunter, Ed decides to lower the corpse to the river, with rope, and goes down the rope himself. Why would he lower the body and not just leave it, or toss it onto the rocks below? And, as he lowers himself, we see the rope rubbing on rock, and know it will soon snap- Melodrama Alert! When it does, Ed survives the backwards fall of several hundred feet into the water, and neither he nor Billy are sure that the man is not the toothless pervert. They then get Lewis into the metal canoe (the other wooden one was destroyed on the rapids after Drew fell overboard), and paddle to safety, make up a tale to the local sheriff (played by Dickey), and head back to their lives. At the end of the film, Ed dreams of a hand rising from the river- the hillbilly’s or Drew’s- both of whose bodies they weighted down in the river?

The film is just so implausible, even as it has been very influential. Many strains of its themes can be seen in other ‘river’ films as diverse as Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Apocalypse Now, Stand By Me, A River Runs Through It, and Mean Creek. With the exception of the last film (a teen version of Deliverance), all of the rest of the films avoid propulsion by the Dumbest Possible Action. That so few critics, then or now, recognized this fact is typical. I was ready to say amazing or appalling, but who am I kidding? It would have been amazing had more recognized what a crock the film serves up. One of the few that did, surprisingly, was the Chicago Sun-Times’ often stolid film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote:

Dickey, who wrote the original novel and the screenplay, lards this plot with a lot of significance- universal, local, whatever happens to be on the market. He is clearly under the impression that he is telling us something about the nature of man, and particularly civilized man’s ability to survive primitive challenges….But I don’t think it works that way….What the movie totally fails at, however, is its attempt to make some kind of significant statement about its action….Dickey has given us here is a fantasy about violence, not a realistic consideration of it. It’s possible to consider civilized men in a confrontation with the wilderness without throwing in rapes, cowboy-and-Indian stunts and pure exploitative sensationalism.

Exactly. Ebert does not mention the Dumbest Possible Action trope because the term had yet to be coined, but the film is pure fantasy. The characters are soon shorn of realism, and the plot unravels to utter silliness, however gruesome. Dickey’s idea of depth is to have Lewis utter vapid wannabe Bartlett’s quotations like, ‘Sometimes you gotta lose yourself to find something,’ with absolutely no notion of how trite and silly a thing to say that is. That the film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Motion Picture, is a shame. Thankfully, best Adapted Screenplay was not on that list, and The Godfather was also released that year.

Yet, most critics were not as on target as Ebert, and laced countless reviews with claims such as the film’s being about the individual psyche as well as America’s collective psyche, or its critiquing Vietnam Era America, or suburbia, or the white middle class, or how the film resonates with Freudian depth, or waxing poetically on how perfect the title of the film is since men seek deliverance from their ‘dark side,’ and that water must ‘cleanse the soul.’ While there are small moments that could be used to justify some of these points, the bulk of the film is so laced with stereotypes, and so larded with Dickey’s own psychosexual hang-ups and fears that the fact that it comes in at only 109 minutes of running time is one of its best qualities. One of the film’s other claimed qualities- its ‘honesty’ or ‘reality,’ is also manifestly false, for fantasy is never realty. Yes, men can be evil, but the rural types that are shown as perverts or inbreds are so over the top that the movie loses all claims to realism- thus ‘true evil.’ In short, the pederastic hillbillies are no more terrifying than the goofy Freddy Krueger.

The Warner Brothers DVD is rather spare. Its extra features are only a choice between full frame (1.33:1 aspect ratio) and widescreen (2.35:1 aspect ratio) on either side, and a vintage featurette called The Dangerous World Of Deliverance, which rhapsodizes more on Dickey than the film. Its lone bit of inside information is that the film was made without any insurance, since the leads were all doing their own stunts. There are also a few production notes, cast and crew biographies, and a theatrical trailer, which promises a better film than the whole delivers.

Yet, the film finally founders because it lacks real situations, characters, and philosophy. After all, it’s difficult to get truly philosophic after a character’s been torpedoed by a hillbilly, and so a film that could have been a realistic and philosophic exploration of characters, and male character, devolves into a ridiculous melodrama of revenge, deceit, and perversion. Boorman is a noted filmmaker, but he’s never been considered one of the great auteurs, and a film like Deliverance shows why. Some have accused me of gleeing in bad art. I don’t. But needling the bad is a palliative over the depression bad art brings. This is especially true when a work of art could have been good, even great, but actively chooses to demean itself and its audience. This film proves that while James Dickey’s body died in 1997, something far more essential died long before, or was never birthed; and in that I’m not talking about anything to do with morality. When you’ve figured out what that was, you’ll understand Deliverance a whole lot better.

Dan Schneider

this review first appeared on noripcord.com

The world is now dominated not by governments but by images. International media corporations are phantom states shadowing the world, with real political power everywhere more distant and invisible. In another key scene in the film “Guy Debord, son art et son temps” a group of African immigrant girls are reading Zola’s ‘Au bonheur des dames’ with a white middle-class teacher in the Parisian suburbs. When they are asked what century they are living in, they reply in all seriousness that they do not know. This scene has no metaphorical importance, but stands as a literal representation of the fact that, like all of us in the society of the spectacle, the girls are condemned to a perpetual present which they cannot understand or alter.

andrew hussey
the game of war: the life and death of guy debord

Cécile Guilbert, now one of the most important young novelists and essayists in France, was eighteen, bored and wandering around her native Paris on a sweltering day in June 1981, when on a whim she entered the dim, empty cinema on the rue Cujas, which resembled more a porno cinema than any of the glitzy corporate picture houses of the great boulevards. Inspired, moved and disturbed by what she had seen (a programme of 4 films by Guy Debord) she hurried to look for a copy of the almost unfindable Society of the Spectacle, whose arguments struck her with the force of revelation. ‘Debord for me was an adventure and a great discovery,’ she says. ‘Everywhere you read that France was changing and that democracy would solve all our problems, but in the film ‘In girium imus nocte et consumimur igni’ Debord was telling us, in his grave and melancholy way, that the war was not yet finished, that it could not yet be finished whilst the spectacle was transforming life into non-life. I did not know then much about Hegel or )Marx’s) The German Ideology, but I knew that what Debord was saying was true because I could see it all around: the spectacle of politics, the illusion of democratic power. I left the cinema feeling as if I had seen something transgressive, like a porno film or a novel by Georges Bataille, but most of all I knew what I had just seen was not cinema but something else.’

andrew hussey
the game of war: the life and death of guy debord

CINÉMA ABATTOIR

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amour & terrorisme

(performances images et sons)

Karl Lemieux & Hyena Hive

Influx LASN: artisanat

/

Dark Xenakiss

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dans le cadre du 38e Festival du Nouveau Cinema

jeudi 15 octobre 2009

à partir de 23h

Agora H-Q

(175 av President Kennedy)

One of the great gifts of art is empathy. Movies can make us feel for their characters, and great movies can make us understand characters we never imagined we had anything in common with. They extend our experiences and turn us into wiser, more forgiving human beings. The new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad stretches our horizons far enough to include some of the most reviled people on the planet. “Paradise Now” is a shocking, eye-opening attempt at understanding the minds and hearts of suicide bombers.

Abu-Assad, who made 2003’s incisive drama “Rana’s Wedding,” is a sophisticated filmmaker who appears to have absorbed the rhythms of the best American independent cinema. The opening scenes of “Paradise Now” have the quiet, understated feel of Jim Jarmusch, transplanted from the Lower East Side to Nablus, the West Bank city where Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) go about their lives. They half-heartedly work at the car repair shop and chill with the hookah while they listen to tapes nicked from customers’ cars. If it weren’t for the occasional rocket blast in the distance, these guys could be anywhere: mellow, shaggy-haired members of the international brotherhood of slackers.

Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) in “Paradise Now”

All of this changes when Said and Khaled receive word that it is time; they have volunteered for a suicide mission, to slip into Tel Aviv and detonate explosives strapped to their bodies on a crowded bus. Their slacker-like detachment doesn’t come from the ironic distance of a Williamsburg hipster, but from the knowledge that their time will be up soon. Life under the occupation was never livable to them in the first place. When Khaled says, “I am already dead,” his stare is so horribly absent that we have no choice but to believe him. The men are bathed, shaved, put into suits and outfitted with a bomb jacket which they can trigger by pulling on a ripcord. They tape their “martyr videos” and eat a last supper.

These preparations interrupt the barely blossoming relationship between Said and Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a celebrated martyr who just returned to Palestine. Western audiences will find it easy to identify with her outsider’s disbelief at the reality of life in the West Bank. Suha’s vehement opposition to suicide attacks points to a possible way out of Said and Khaled’s dilemma: while the men believe that “the occupation defines the resistance,” she insists that a non-violent alternative is possible. Nonetheless, Said and Khaled slip into Israel as planned, but they get separated at the fence. Faced with their deadly choice by themselves, confused and lost, they have to reexamine the reasons for their murderous plans.

Shot on location under dangerous conditions, “Paradise Now” feels both realistic and fictional. The awful reality of the situation is driven home through conventions we can recognize–the pining mother, the botched mission, the last-minute love affair, and the humor that somehow always finds its way into the most serious moments. “Paradise Now” goes down easy but is difficult to digest. Abu-Assad makes it possible to understand how a person, driven by desperation, hatred, and shame, might end up committing the most heinous acts. But understanding is not the same as sympathy or forgiveness.

this review first appeared on about.com

Kubrick meets King. Both critics and audiences had mixed reactions to Kubrick’s cold, spacious rendering of Stephen King’s bestseller, and his adaptation of the novel - but their qualms are exactly what, to me, make this a masterpiece of suspense. Source-material, much like actors, was merely a tool for Kubrick, a handy instrument to facilitate his vision.

From the opening credit-sequence we know we’re in for something different. The sky’s eye shot of giantess mountains and plunging ravine, surrounding the crisp calm of a vast lake, attain something very much beyond landscape status - voiced by Wendy Carlos’ ominous score the landscape is presented as an aloof, coldly malevolent intelligence: When we spot the speck that is the family car, carrying its unlucky contents toward their fate, it is no accident that it recalls the diminutive insignificance of an ant.

Perhaps more so than any director before him, Kubrick allowed his films’ soundtracks to be more than idle bystanders - before Kubrick music did lend emotive emphasis to key scenes, and served to coax audiences’ expectations and reactions.. but in his films the scenes are infused by the music, the scores lend body to his famously sparse visuals, sometimes claiming center stage. So intimately woven into Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ is the music that it slips one’s conscious attention; it becomes a haunting, a visitation on one’s subconscious - where it goes about patiently notching up our discomfort, our paranoia. If its music is ‘The Shining’s central ghost, it’s other major character, unexpectedly, is not Jack Nicholson’s gleefully demoniacal eyebrows.. it is The Overlook Hotel - the ghost-town-in-a-building in whose menacing embrace the three main (living) characters find themselves trapped in.

His taking on of what was essentially a pop novel surprised many; but in fact Kubrick’s visual style (oft bemoaned by desperately smug critics) - cold, empty, veinless - was tailor-made to convey a ghost story. Rarely has such simple, innocent objects as a carpet, or tennis ball, caused quite as much squirming in seats. Additionally the movie seems to be stitched together by now-classic shots.

All three central performances are spot-on, with Shelly Duval (the wife) going so far as to mirror her character’s mental breakdown in real life (she barely survived filming, and took an extended break from acting after the experience), while Nicholson chompingly feasts on his script, no cutlery required.

A claustrophobic labyrinth; butler-fellated, lifesize teddybear; a psychopathic one-sentence novel; creepy twins; Room 237; and an ax. What more do you need?

[first published in Muse magazine]

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