kagablog

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

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

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

First she won an Oscar. Now her eerie new CCTV thriller is picking up rave reviews. Danny Leigh meets Andrea Arnold, British cinema’s hottest new talent

Andrea Arnold is aware she will for ever be the woman who said “bollocks” at the Oscars. The glorious moment came at last year’s ceremony, where her film Wasp was nominated as best live action short. She was, she recalls, sick with nerves at the thought of having to make a speech. When she was announced as the winner, clutching her statuette, she declared to the assembled beautiful people and a billion live TV viewers that the victory was, in short, the dog’s aforementioned.

1. Red Road
2. Release: 2006
3. Countries: Rest of the world, UK
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 117 mins
6. Directors: Andrea Arnold, Andrea Arnold
7. Cast: Andrew Armour, Kate Dickie, Martin Compston, Natalie Press, Tony Curran

Dartford-born Arnold - affably upfront, quick to grin, red-blonde hair down her back - winces at the memory. “I’ve thought a lot about how that got out of my mouth,” she says, “and the truth is, it was just the most honest expression I could find for how it felt. The whole scenario was so bizarre, so removed from real life, that it was a way of making the moment mine. No one else was going to say it, were they?”

This is true. Yet, not for long is she likely to remain best known for her profanity (or, for those who spent the 1980s watching kids TV, as a former presenter of various Saturday morning programmes). At 45, her film-making is now getting attention, with her debut, Red Road, cementing her status as one of British cinema’s brightest new lights, particularly after winning the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes.

A startling Glasgow-set drama of obsession and revenge, Red Road centres on an operator of the city’s myriad CCTV cameras - emotionally disconnected until a face from the past appears on her screens. Thereafter, her life spirals into a welter of illicit surveillance that finally leads her to Red Road, the grimly iconic clump of tower blocks on Glasgow’s northern frontier, scheduled for demolition but still, for now, a brutalist monster on the skyline.

With its jittery images and free-floating paranoia, the film could have simply been a techno retread of Rear Window. But, among the eerie freeze-frames and grainy knee-tremblers, something far more original emerges - infused with the tension of a thriller, but also depth and complexity.

Animated on almost any other subject, Arnold becomes sober when she talks about her film. Mindful of how the press “muddle things”, her words come carefully. “I try and be truthful. With endings, beginnings, the million choices in between. To me, that’s the point of it all, making those choices honestly. Black coat or brown? Naked or dressed? Films are all about decisions, and that’s what I love.” She hesitates. “I mean, I hate watching mine afterwards, because they’re full of moments that didn’t come off, but I love the trying.”

Indeed, one of Red Road’s most impressive qualities is its sense of identity - although her career is still in its early stages, the film instantly seems like an Andrea Arnold movie - her signature being keeping the story vice-tight while conjuring a succession of haunting images from the most unlikely sources (a beery party in a barren flat, a lava lamp accompanying a fearsomely raw sex scene).

This is all the more remarkable since it wasn’t entirely hers to begin with. Red Road is the first of three films made at the behest of The Advance Party, a Danish project inspired by the mercurial Lars von Trier, who challenged Arnold and two other new directors to create films with the same group of characters. Flattered by the approach and intrigued by the concept, Arnold says she relished developing her characters from the outlines provided by The Advance Party, then folding them into her own story. It was, she says, “invigorating”.

When she agreed to take part, Arnold was simply the maker of three shorts little seen outside the festival circuit, although Wasp - the striking tale of a single mother on a Kent estate attempting to woo back an ex - attracted serious acclaim. Now, post-Oscar, Red Road has stirred expectations, with the world as interested in her as her movie. After leaving school in the late 1970s, Arnold worked as a dancer on TV shows including Top of the Pops. Soon she was presenting children’s knockabouts Number 73 and Motormouth. None of this appears in the publicity accompanying Red Road. There’s no embarrassment about her former career; it’s just that, fatalistic about the public’s response to her films, she’s almost phobic about their gaze falling on her. As soon as the subject is raised, she looks as if a large, pointed stick has been brought into the room: “I’m uncomfortable with it. Yes. I am. Obviously, I want people to know about the film - I just don’t get why anyone would want to know about me.” She laughs and hugs her knees to her chest.

Dutifully, she details her activities after quitting TV in the early 1990s - “I went to film school, I had my daughter, I wrote” - before making the short films that would eventually lead to one of cinema’s slower, weirder overnight success stories. She is, however, not having much fun recounting this. I tell her it’s strange that someone with her background should be leery of the spotlight. She looks at me like I’ve picked up the pointed stick and jabbed her in the ribs.

“It was a long time ago,” she says. “I was very young. I was 18 when I got my first TV job. I’d just moved to London, and I was never comfortable with it. I loved drama and dance at school, so I thought I’d love TV - but it just made me horribly self-conscious.” Dancing, she says, should be “pure escape” - dancing on TV was not. Presenting was worse. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful I did it, because essentially I was paid good money to have a laugh. But the older I got, the more uneasy I became. The whole time I’d been writing, just putting down ideas, until eventually I thought, maybe I shouldn’t do this any more - maybe I should do that.”

Relief colours her face when the conversation returns to Red Road. It’s funny, she says, but when foreign journalists talk to her about the film, they assume she’s invented the massed cameras above Glasgow, that this must be some sci-fi concoction rather than everyday Britain. Yet, for all the Orwellian overtones, her film stresses that the people monitoring us aren’t fascist snitches - they’re underpaid drudges calling ambulances for stabbing victims.

“When I started my research, I was very worried, and I’ve certainly heard a lot of unsettling stories about CCTV. But the people I met watching the screens were the kind of people you see in the film. That was the truth of it, so it was important to reflect that. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?”

Nothing’s ever simple - it could be a subtitle for the whole film. Broad strokes aren’t Arnold’s bag. Moreover, for all the creeping alienation that has seen Red Road compared to Von Trier and Michael Haneke, maker of the acclaimed Hidden, it shares little of their cynicism. A misanthrope she is not. To her, people screw up, but judgment is a mug’s game. “That’s just how I feel,” she says. “Dramatically, I like darkness, I like conflict - but I don’t see the world as defined by them. And why would I pretend to? That’s not who I am.”

She starts talking about shooting in Glasgow, unfamiliar to her beforehand. Filming around the deprived Red Road, she was all too aware this was someone else’s home. “It’s something that’s dear to my heart, trying not to descend on an area and take it over. Film crews are incredibly invasive. I mean, a car went past us one day, and the guy shouted out, “You bunch of fannies!” And all I could think was, ‘He’s right. Look at us. We are a bunch of fannies.’”

She shakes her head: “Again, nothing’s simple. The thing about Red Road is, everyone who sees the film says it looks terrible. Nightmarish. But to a lot of the people there, it’s not so straightforward - they grew up there, raised their families there. It’s hard sometimes to put anything that complex across, but you’ve got to try. You’ve got to try and present the truth, haven’t you?”

There’s a pause. Then she smiles: “Whatever that is.”

this interview first appeared on the guardian.co.uk

Reviewed by Collier Grimm

I’m a big fan of the Western. I’m also a big fan of Film Noir. However, it’s hard to picture a picture that can mix the American splendor of a Western with the cynicism and pessimism of good Noir. Amazingly, however, John Sturges does just that in his 1955 classic, Bad Day at Black Rock. The film reflects the uneasy sentiments of post-war America; filmsite.org reveals, “It can also be seen as a powerful, allegorical indictment of the Hollywood blacklist, created during the climate of suspicion and fear of the 1950s McCarthy era.” Bad Day at Black Rock develops a social commentary on problems of the time and becomes the ultimate revision of two classically American genres.

Bad Day at Black Rock boasts a plot full of deception, darkness, and mystery intertwined with long shots of the great American landscape as well as iconic Western archetypes and iconography. The film is less certain in its Western values, but takes place in a conventional Western town where the Southern Pacific train has not stopped in four years. The set looks familiar–one saloon, one hotel, and boardwalk in tow–and the repetitive long shots of the rail road tracks that stretch into the distance pay homage to Fred Zinneman’s, High Noon. Like many revisionist Westerns, “Bad Day” is emotionally and intellectually stimulating, and much more stylistically complex than your average “shoot ‘em up” cowboy picture.

The film is also a revision on the typical lighting and imagery associated with Film Noir. Hidden within the high-key lighting and typically Western looking landscape is a web of lies spun through the dark and secret lives of the people of Black Rock, Arizona. Tracy is hidden behind the shadows of his hat, and his character, John J. Macreedy, remains a mystery throughout most of the film. The environment in which these characters interact creates a hopeless mood. Their insignificance within nature not only revisits the Western, but reflects 1950s sentiments about the looming threat of the Cold War. The camera is often so stagnant that the production could be turned into a stage play. The compositional tension of each shot works to create uneasiness and a sense of entrapment on and off the screen. As the characters fall deeper into deception and mystery, you may find yourself squirming in discomfort.

As soon as John J. Macreedy, an injured war veteran, steps off the train in Black Rock he is met with hostility from all the people he encounters. Macreedy says that he is looking for a man named Kokomo, but it appears Kokomo has moved and no one is sure of his current whereabouts. We watch as Macreedy is met with ferocity from all the residents of Black Rock and is warned to leave town immediately. Do the townspeople suspect Macreedy has had something to do with Kokomo’s disappearance, or are they hiding a secret? What exactly is Macreedy’s business with this Kokomo character? Will Macreedy be run out of town? Who is in the right, and who is in the wrong here anyway?

I’m not going to give any more of the plot away; I read the synopsis on my Netflix disc before viewing and it revealed many things I would have liked to have been kept in the dark about. Everyone in this film is a mystery, and they all appear to have ill intentions toward one another. Only through the unraveling of the Film Noir-like plot can one begin to make conclusions about the truth. The mysterious supporting cast is full of classic film favorites: Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Walter Brennan, who each add complexity and talent to the film.

Bad Day at Black Rock is sure to surprise and hopefully inspire. It is a wonderful revisionist Wester , and I love every moment that Tracy is on screen. His edginess is startling and refreshing in a genre typically filled with stuffed–shirt cowboys. I highly recommend this film, and consider it one of the best classic films I’ve seen this year.

this review first appeared on sbccfilmreviews.org

review By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

The Station Agent
Directed by Tom McCarthy

In his book Here and Now, Henri J. M. Nouwen writes: “The spiritual life is one of constant choices. One of the most important choices is the choice of the people with whom we develop close intimate relationships. We have only a limited amount of time in our lives. With whom do we spend it and how? That’s probably one of the most decisive questions of our lives. It is not without reason that parents are very concerned about who their children bring home as playmates, friends or lovers. They know that much of their children’s happiness will depend on those they choose to be close to.”

Movies about the choices of friendship are few and far between, a breed apart from action dramas, romantic comedies, horror stories, or murder mysteries. They usually depend on little details that open up new vistas of possibilities in the characters. We laugh and we cry as friends listen deeply to each other or share magic moments that sprout up when they least expect it. Not very much happens, and yet we know that inner changes are taking place. Connection gives meaning to life and banishes dread, fear, and loneliness for a while.

The Station Manager is one of the best movies about friendship we can remember. Spend some time with the three main characters in this drama and you’ll find out a lot about trains, grief, solitude, silence, play, and the mysteries that make human intimacy so endearing and so magnificent.

Fin McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a dwarf who works in a model train store and just loves his job. When his boss dies and leaves him an abandoned train depot in Newfoundland, New Jersey, he is a bit mystified. But he packs up his meager belongings and sets out for this remote country place where he can at least be left alone. He’s had his fill of being ridiculed and treated like a freak.

Arriving at his dusty inheritance, Fin surveys the scene. It’s right next to the still-active railroad tracks. There is a couch to sleep on, no phone, and the water and electricity need to be connected. It will do. But the first morning, he is awakened by Joe (Bobby Cannavale), a sociable young man whose hot-dog truck is parked right next to the depot. Joe is a regular motor-mouth while Fin, on the other hand, is a man of few words. Joe keeps hounding him until they begin to get to know each other. Another visitor is Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a distracted artist who nearly ran over him twice in the same day. She stops by the depot with a bottle of booze to apologize for her reckless driving.

Fin tries desperately to avoid these new acquaintances by taking long walks on the railroad right-of-way and checking the timing of the trains at a bridge. But they manage to wear him down and open him up a little bit more each time they get together. They learn to respect his need for solitude, and he comes to see that they bear their own burdens of grief and pain. Fin also gets to know the local librarian (Michelle Williams), who takes a shine to him, and an African-American grade school girl (Raven Goodwin), who convinces him to talk at her school about his passion for trains.

The Station Agent marks the debut of writer and director Tom McCarthy who has quite a knack for making the foibles and eccentricities of these three characters endearing. Fin is a very slow and centered young man who has a subtle impact on the jazzed up Cuban Joe and the frazzled and burnt-out Olivia. They, in turn, draw him out of his isolation and help him see that he has many fine gifts to share with others.

At one point, Bobby asks Olivia, “What do you do for fun?” and she responds, “I don’t.” Eventually, these three cook up some very fine and fun times with each other that draw out the playful selves they have hidden for far too long. The performances by Peter Dinklage, Bobby Cannavale, and Patricia Clarkson are delightfully entertaining. Here is a film that dares to explore all the curious ways in which friendship can abound, express love, turn us around, and take us to places we never imagined.

this review first appeared on spirituality&practice.com

Review by Kerry Fall

Timing is everything, and for director Norman Jewison, releasing In the Heat of the Night in 1967 proved to be some of the best timing in his career. America was fraught with racial tension, torn by the turmoil of a civil rights revolution. And while on the surface In the Heat of the Night appears to be a fairly straightforward whodunit, at its core lies the struggle between two men, one black and one white, both forced to face their racial prejudices. The movie was a hit and went on to garner five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Rod Steiger, Best Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Best Sound by Quincy Jones, and Best Film Editing by Hal Ashby.

Years ago, when I first saw In the Heat of the Night, I remember being spellbound by the brashness of the story and the head-on way it dealt with the issue of race. When Sidney Poitier’s character slaps the local rich white landowner, I remember gasps from the audience. It was the kind of emotionally moving film that you talked about for days afterwards.

But that was then and this is now — and again, timing is everything. Some films withstand the test of time, while others that are so sensational when released can lose their impact over the years. Sadly, In the Heat of the Night falls into the latter category. It’s not that the race issue is any less important, or that the performances aren’t outstanding (the acting is often superb and never less than solid from all the actors across the board). It’s that the movie feels old and tired. The cinematic style is flat and dated, the pacing (meant to be thoughtful) is plodding, and the murder mystery just isn’t tight enough. When the film moves from the dark intimate settings that foster the personal relationships between characters to the bright, music-drenched daytime exteriors, the effect is jarring, and the movie loses its thread. These weaknesses were overshadowed in 1967 by the compelling racial dimensions of the picture, but they are too hard to ignore today — it lacks punch, and we’ve seen this kind of murder thriller done so much better, and so many times since then.

Based on a John Ball novel, In the Heat of the Night is set in the small town of Sparta, Miss., where on one hot summer night, Sheriff’s Deputy Sam Wood (Warren Oates) discovers the body of a murdered wealthy industrialist. As he combs the town for suspects, Wood finds a well-dressed black stranger, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), at the depot waiting to catch the next train out of town. Wood arrests Tibbs (for what the film Don’t be a Menace would call “being black on a Friday night”) and hauls him in front of the gum-chewing, overweight, blow-hard sheriff, Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger). The officers soon discover that Virgil (”they call me Mr.”) Tibbs is top cop in the Philadelphia homicide department. (Poitier went on to reprise the role of Tibbs in two subsequent films, They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!, 1970, and The Organization, 1971).

Reluctantly, Gillespie asks Tibbs to stay on and help solve the murder. But before long the sheriff seizes on the hubris that is Tibbs’ Achilles heel. “You’re so damn smart!,” he accusses the big city cop. “You’re smarter than any white man. You’re just going to stay here and show us all. You got such a big head that you could never live with yourself unless you could put us all to shame…. I don’t think you could let an opportunity like that pass by.” And Gillespie is right — Tibbs can’t help but seize the opportunity to show up this bunch of bumbling crackers. As Gillespie and Tibbs reluctantly team up to solve the crime, each learns the other’s strengths and weaknesses while facing their own deep-seated prejudices. Through their vast differences, they recognize a commonality in their lonely lives as cops. As Jewison puts it, these men are “great and lonely gunslingers.” But the murder mystery, which forms the film’s second dimension, is both unconvincingly convoluted and unnecessarily complicated, and it is perhaps too frequently interjected with incidences of Tibbs being harassed by the local rednecks. The murder plot seems an aside (though Jewison claims otherwise in the audio commentary) to the main focus of the film — the interaction of Gillespie and Tibbs as they dance around each other’s perceptions of life and humanity. (The brilliant editing of Hal Ashby provides does some subtle work here, particularly in making the most of reaction shots to help emphasize that this is a film more about what is not said.)

this review first appeared on dvdjournal.com

By Daniel Greenwood

This review is depressing (and contains spoilers).

The fun thing about watching a Woody Allen film is digesting it afterwards, chewing it over with the teeth in your head. But many people won’t get to the ‘afterwards’ part of Interiors, a film that is completely overcast. In three years – 1977, 1978 and 1979 – Woody Allen came up with Annie Hall, Interiors, and Manhattan. Holy carp, that’s three films better than any of the trillion some Hollywood directors make. In between Annie Hall and Manhattan, two little charmers, is one great big stinking misery fest. And you know what? I think it’s my favourite.

It’s a film about three sisters – Renata (Diane frickin’ Keaton), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) and Flyn (Kristin Griffith). These sisters are torn apart by the protracted, messy divorce of their parents. Their mother Eve (Geraldine Page) takes the separation badly. She’s clinically depressed, introduced in a scene early on in the film where she obsesses about the positioning of a table lamp against a certain shade of wallpaper in Joey’s apartment. It’s unnerving to see someone so fragile to the colour palette of furniture. These small incidents are impressed against the harsh truth that her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) doesn’t want to get back together with his wife, he wants to marry another woman. Indeed, he does, and this wedding is the grand climax to Interiors, played out beneath the roaring waves of a bitter, Bergman-esque bay.

Renata is a successful poet. Her husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) is jealous of her, claiming her praise of his own work (which the critics ravage) to be lying on her part. The man’s a fool. He’s a drunk and an adulterer, typified by a scene where he pretty much attempts to rape Flyn, the youngest of the sisters, a beautiful and successful actress. But she ain’t happy, furtively snorting cocaine in the garage late into the wedding night. Renata toils with her lifestyle, what does she care if she has some poems left over when she’s dead for other people to enjoy. She’s unhappy with her life, almost oblivious to the small shape of her daughter that seems to flit on the fringes of Interiors.

Allen’s deftest manoeuvre here is his use of sound, the film’s complete lack of music. The only music that’s heard is from a record put on by Arthur’s newly wedded wife Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) – so it’s within the film. It’s quite clever, all the sound is interior. The crashing, early morning waves are terrifying, it’s as if Allen’s layered them over one another, and it gives the effect of fearing the water might come crashing through the screen. The action on screen is unclear and I found myself squirming, edging closer and closer attempting to see what was going on.

You could write a billion-word dissertation on these sisters, every performance is bang-on, every little thing about Interiors is aching and creaking, built on shambolic foundations. In the real world, people can’t get jobs, but here are people with a choice about their lifestyles – people who can make a living from art – forsooth! But man Allen has conjured some desperately unhappy characters in this elegaic, unrelenting piece of cinema.

this review first appeared on atlasfilm

For anyone interested in the 20th century history of Southeast Asia, the pairing of two excellent films, The Killing Fields and Swimming to Cambodia, is an enlightening experience. Although well past their prime, both films have held their cinematic and historic value over time, and are especially relevant in these troubled times on the opposite side of the globe. For those who don’t know what one film has to do with the other, here’s a brief explanation:

The Killing Fields, a 1984 film by Roland Joffé, starring Sam Waterston, John Malkovich, and Haing S. Ngor, tells the gut-wrenching story of the fall of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, under the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge, as seen through the eyes of several New York Times reporters and photojournalists, most notably Sydney Schanberg and his Cambodian protege Dith Pran. The film also features Spaulding Gray in a small but pivotal role credited only as U.S. Consul, the nameless aide to John Gunther Dean, U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia. Three years later, raconteur Spaulding Gray went on to create Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme, an engaging and spirited one-man narrative of his quest for the perfect moment during his experiences while filming The Killing Fields in Bangkok.

The Killing Fields

With its poignant portrayal of the relationships between a cast of real-life characters, and its unflinching depiction of the futility of the U.S. presence in Cambodia amid the remorseless carnage committed by the Khmer Rough, most of whom were mere children playing at very serious games, The Killing Fields is a masterful work that puts a human face on both sides of the conflict in Southeast Asia.

Haing S. Ngor as supporting actor Dith Pran made cinematic history as the first Southeast Asian and the first Buddhist to win an Academy Award in an acting role. The film also won Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing. In other categories, The Killing Fields was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay by Bruce Robinson, Best Actor in a Leading Role by Sam Waterston, Roland Joffé for Best Director, and Producer David Puttnam for Best Picture. And although not singled out by the Academy for his performance, John Malkovich steals every scene with his irreverent portrayal of photojournalist Alan Rockoff.

Yet for all its artistic and historic merits, The Killing Fields leaves as much unexplained as it reveals, especially with regard to the back story of the Khmer Rouge. Swimming to Cambodia picks up where The Killing Fields leaves off.

Swimming to Cambodia

In perhaps one of the simplest movie sets ever designed, Spaulding Gray paints an astonishingly vivid picture of what really happened in Cambodia, interwoven with his equally astonishing experiences during the filming of The Killing Fields in Thailand. Throughout the entire 85-minute monologue, He sits at a utilitarian wooden table, furnished only with a microphone, a glass of water, a retractable pointing device, and a small spiral-bound notebook. Behind him on either side are two pull-down maps, one of Southeast Asia and one of Cambodia.

This might lead one to wonder how one man with a spiral notebook, a glass of water, a pointer and two maps could possibly hold the attention of an audience for 85 minutes, much less for the original four-hour live performance of Swimming to Cambodia. But that’s the magic of Spaulding Gray’s unrivaled gift for storytelling. Music by techno-virtuoso Laurie Anderson adds a palpable dimension, as does perfectly timed lighting effects and relevant film footage from The Killing Fields.

Spaulding Gray’s narrative moves along at a dizzying pace, motoring from one topic to the next, transporting the audience with his mystical powers of vocal telekinesis from his apartment in downtown Manhattan, to the Hollywood studios of Warner Brothers, to the film set at the Victoria Hotel in Bangkok, to the idyllic beaches of Phuket, punctuated throughout with comedic punchlines delivered with Puckish delight, straight into the eye of the camera. And when his ‘Perfect Moment’ finally arrives, be prepared to be right there in the moment with him.

Epilogue as Epitaph

It was a monumental loss to both the film industry and contemporary American literature when the body of Spaulding Gray was found in the East River in New York City on March 8, 2004, after being reported missing in January, when he jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry. As the son of a manic depressive mother who eventually committed suicide, it was no secret that Spaulding Gray also suffered from bouts of severe depression, and at the time of his disappearance, he had been working on a new monologue based upon his recovery after an automobile accident in Ireland.

Spaulding Gray was by no means a big Hollywood star, but will always be remembered instead for his dramatic, and oft comedic monologues in which he shone in the best role of all…himself.

this review first appeared on thingsasian.com

review by mark bourne

Tim Burton’s remarkable Ed Wood (1994) is a “biopic” in roughly the same way that Patton is a “biopic.” Both obviously dramatize selected portions of the lives of men whose singular achievements and eccentricities set them apart from their peers. But in each film the biography is a platform for other ruminations, not an end in itself. Each is ultimately about something more than just the title subject.

It’s clear that Burton had something more in mind while directing Ed Wood, which so easily could have been merely a sniggering hatchet job that points and laughs at a bad, and dead, movie-maker. Instead, Burton, who down to his bones appears to share the late Edward D. Wood Jr.’s boyish wonder at “Hollywood magic,” puts his finger on the guilty appeal of Wood’s films when he has Orson Welles, of all people, buck up a disheartened Wood by proclaiming, “Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”

Burton discovered Wood’s 1950s oeuvre on TV. Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and most famously Plan 9 from Outer Space, with their shaky cardboard sets, lead-balloon dialogue, wooden acting, and pie-plate flying saucers, remain the standards by which all grade-Z crapfilms are measured. For Burton their cross-dressing, zealously clueless director’s distinct style gave those schlocky midnight schedule-fillers a certain intoxicated power born out of Wood’s passion for making them. Burton, with writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, saw in Wood’s story not just an elegiac serio-comedy and a showcase vehicle for actor Johnny Depp. There was also something worth saying about passion, dreams, and talent, and about how having two of those three things isn’t the worst way to go through life.

Ed Wood chronicles Wood’s years after World War II, first as a writer-director of cheap and overwrought stage dramas, then following his bliss as a writer-director of Hollywood features (cheap and overwrought were by now a matter of course). Johnny Depp explodes out of his insular Edward Scissorhands to make Wood a near-manic, yet sincere and likable, showman-huckster-dreamer. One of God’s holy fools. A true auteur, Wood is his own writer, director, producer, and occasional actor. “Just like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane!” he crows with a beaming smile.

Wood is also a nonconformist in 1950s America, where conformity was king. After convincing a low-rent producer (Mike Starr) to back his first opus, Glen or Glenda, Wood gives himself the title role(s) in a deeply personal dud spotlighting his own fetish for women’s clothing, especially angora sweaters. “I’m all man,” he says during the pitch. “I even fought in W.W.2. Of course, I was wearing women’s undergarments under my uniform.” Neither Depp nor Burton plays Wood’s eccentricities for cheap laughs. The laughs are naturally there with no need of shticky embellishments. Rather, Wood is geekdom’s sympathetic Everyman. The producer initially wants Wood to direct an exploitative sex-change flick. Because Wood “even paratrooped wearing a brassiere and panties,” what qualifies him for the job is that he “wasn’t scared of being killed” but was terrified of getting wounded and having the medics discover his secret. “I know what it’s like to live with a secret, and worry about what people are gonna think of you.”

It stands to reason then that he is surrounded by other displaced persons. Gravitating to Wood is his company of misfit actors: camp flamer Bunny Breckinridge (a hilariously dour Bill Murray); “horseshit” TV psychic Criswell (Jeffrey Jones); TV midnight movie hostess Vampira (Lisa Marie), whose gifts are cleavage-oriented; and hulking Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson (George “The Animal” Steele). As Wood’s leading lady and long-suffering girlfriend, Dolores, Sarah Jessica Parker sums them up with, “This isn’t real life! You surrounded yourself with a bunch of weirdoes!” Later, after Dolores storms out of his life in search of normalcy, his next girlfriend, Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette) observes, “Eddie’s the only fella in town who doesn’t pass judgment on people.” Wood nods, “That’s right. If I did, I wouldn’t have any friends.”

Thanks to one of several chance encounters that steer the screenplay, Wood hires his childhood hero, Bela Lugosi. A destitute old man in his 70s, Lugosi is a washed-up ex-Dracula with a debilitating morphine addiction, a head muddled with soured memories of better times, and a hair-trigger foul mouth (especially where Boris Karloff is concerned). He is powerfully played by Martin Landau, who won an Oscar and a New York Critics Award for this portrayal, the finest screen time of his long career. Wood casts the discarded has-been as his company’s “star” attraction. Here’s where the real heart and blood of Burton’s film pumps. The relationship between Wood and Lugosi is touchingly handled, affirming Burton’s ability to imbue oddballs and outcasts with sympathy and warmth. Wood becomes Lugosi’s friend, confidante, and — as Lugosi succumbs to the monkey on his back — his almost-savior.

As Wood channels his ardency into Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space, his travails include recasting Dolores’s role as the Bride with a new ingénue (Loretta King, Landau’s daughter) who could bankroll the entire production; conniving a Baptist church to fund Plan 9 (baptism under fire indeed); finagling funds, actors, and equipment with desperate, even larcenous, abandon; and Lugosi’s death before production of Plan 9. Wood, only briefly inconvenienced, got Lugosi into the movie anyway.

When Wood is at his most despondent, a credulity-stretching encounter in a bar lifts him back to action. It’s an impossibly tidy scene with Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio). Whether the encounter is real or just a useful hallucinatory byproduct of Wood’s beaten-down soul, the master tells Wood exactly what he needs and wants to hear to keep fighting the good fight.

The Welles scene fits only because Burton’s characteristic skewed-reality approach to the material let him magnify the story’s theatricality. Burton and his crew crafted Ed Wood with a well-gauged “this is a movie” self-awareness. It’s shot in screamingly appropriate high-contrast black-and-white, and Burton framed it all by mimicking Wood’s greatest hits, such as Criswell’s inane declamatory addresses to the audience (”Future events such as these will affect you in the future!”). When Depp’s Ed Wood is the focus of a scene, there’s a heightened staginess to Burton’s visual compositions and the cast’s performances. Depp exaggerates Wood’s every gosh-wow expression without quite stepping over the line into caricature. It’s a delicate trick that would have been fatal if overdone. There’s no mistaking Ed Wood for Raging Bull.

But soon after Burton convinces us that he’s playing Wood’s life for a goof, he stealthily shifts the emotional tone with the friendship between the pitiable Lugosi and earnest young Eddie. Both men are affected by their mutual dependency: Wood gets to repay his horror-film hero with kindness, patience, and medical help, and Lugosi leaves this world with a few more good times and some reminders that he hasn’t been forgotten after all. When Burton is in command of what’s on the screen, he doesn’t let us forget that we’re watching a movie. When he turns that command over to Landau, we’re pulled into the reality of his Lugosi. That duality gives Ed Wood its two-tone harmony, and it keeps the film from playing either side too far.

Burton’s affectionate homage ends with a moment of (for Wood) triumph, exulting at the premiere of Plan 9, “This is the film I will be remembered for!” Burton leaves out the subsequent years, which straight bios note were spent as an embittered, broke alcoholic scraping by on exploitation horror-porn films and doomed to obscurity. He died in 1978 at age 54.

Wood’s backhanded fame arrived posthumously with Michael and Harry Medved’s 1980 book, The Golden Turkey Awards, which practically sneered as it crowned Wood the worst director of all time. Plan 9 was awarded the Worst Movie prize. Neither label is meaningful, of course. Our video stores, especially those with “psychotronic” shelves, display worse directors (i.e., less inept but more mean-spirited) and more unwatchable movies, some made with greater resources. But we can fairly call Wood the worst director to become famous. Burton’s film peaked a wave of Wood appreciation that included a book-length biography, Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., which was the source for this screenplay. Interested bystanders are also pointed to three video documentaries, the marvelously titled Look Back in Angora, The Haunted World of Ed Wood, and Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion.

That Burton omits Wood’s depressing slide from bad to worse is understandable. This isn’t, after all, a comprehensive bio-drama like Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin. Burton celebrates not only Wood’s never-say-die (even-when-you-should) spirit. He saw that a film about Edward D. Wood Jr. could be his own jazz-hands dance to the spirit of movie-making. It was a vision worth fighting for.

this review first appeared on dvdjournal.com

Performing the narrative of seduction - Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)

In this detailed look at how Beau travail self-consciously “seduces” us away from our customary conduct as viewers, Elena del Río distinguishes Denis’ cinema from the avant-garde and modernist traditions with which it is often associated.

The films of Claire Denis are often described as sensual, even surreal, in their lack of conformity to narrative and cognitive structures of classical cinema. From Denis’ perspective, the cinema understands itself and the world less through the visual/one-dimensional grid of classical representation than through a multi-sensual prism that is as de-centred and chaotic as it is filled with intensity of affect. The uniqueness of Denis’ cinema does not lie in the dismantling of traditional cinematic representation, a feat already achieved by many a filmmaker before her, but rather in the bold merging of the analytical—the privileged domain of Brechtian counter-cinema—with the physical and the sensual. I’d like to examine the film Beau travail (Good Work, 1999) as an instance of cinema that converts classical narrative into a performative event. Through such performative conversion, the film enacts its most cherished goal: the overt seduction of the spectator without the aid of characters as intermediary agents.

A non-localised sexuality

Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)Beau travail’s loose story concerns a group of French legionnaires stationed in the Eastern African country of Djibouti. By and large, the film’s sensual focus is fixed upon the male body—its movements, gestures, routine habits, rough training exercises, communal ceremonies and communion with the earth and the sea. The height of male eroticism centres upon the seduction/repulsion relationship between sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) and legionnaire Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin). In some of their moments of leisure, however, the men are seen dancing at the local nightclub with native women, and we are even led to believe that Galoup, the film’s protagonist and narrator, is also involved in a steady relationship with Rahel (Adiatou Massidi), a stunningly beautiful and sensual woman.

But for Denis, the film’s primary interest does not lie in sexual exchanges between characters, but rather in “the sexual charge that passes between the actors and the spectators.”[1] Accordingly, the film consistently chooses to orchestrate its sexual seduction of the spectator outside the sexual act itself— by maintaining male and female sexual and sensual activities separate, by placing the spectator in direct rapport with, and at the receiving end of, each of these sensual axes, and, most ingenuously, by displacing the indefinitely deferred erotic charge between Galoup and Sentain onto Galoup’s final and unabashed offering of his body to the spectator. The traditional screen encounter between two bodies, so readily transformed into a fetish or cliché, thus gives way to a less constricted model that endows with sexual significance/sensation events and situations that are not deemed sexual in the vocabulary of classical cinema. In this regard, Denis’ position is akin to Deleuze’s belief that “real cinema achieves another violence, another sexuality, molecular rather than localized.”[2]

This kind of “molecular” sexuality/sensuality results from a transformation of the ordinary image into an image capable of generating extraordinary effects and sensations. The inherent physicality of the legionnaires’ lives offers the ideal ground for this transformation. Not only in the more formal choreographies sporadically interspersed in the film, but also in the sustained erotic intensity underpinning the camera’s look at the legionnaires’ bodies, Beau travail endows the everyday gestures of the male body with a ceremonial, ritualistic quality reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the aura.[3]
The becoming-performance of narrative

Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)Beau travail’s insertion of military life into a performative framework reaches its highest dramatic point in the scene where Galoup and Sentain perform their rivalry in front of their fellow legionnaires. To the sound of Benjamin Britten’s operatic rendition of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Galoup and Sentain walk on opposite sides of an imaginary circle with rather slow and purposeful steps, eyeing each other mercilessly as if to test who might be better equipped to master the evil eye (a theme which resurfaces later in the film after Galoup sends Sentain away to his death in the desert).

Aesthetically, Galoup and Sentain’s formal enactment of their aggressive relationship does not strike us as a jarring oddity, but rather as a smooth continuation of the film’s overall design. If it is possible to integrate such a stylised performative moment within the film’s narrative, it is no doubt because from the outset the film seems intent on downplaying the differences between the more realistic physical activities occupying the men and the moments more explicitly framed and staged as performances. After all, as Denis remarks of the scene just discussed, Galoup and Sentain’s outlandish performance is a real martial arts exercise where the opponents test their psychological endurance by locking eyes with each other.[4]

Even if consistently informed by a sense of performance, the images of the legionnaires’ communal training and leisure activities represent the more straightforward narrative axis of the film. By contrast, the images of Galoup engaged in purely narcissistic acts—ironing his shirt, but also combing and wetting his hair and looking into the mirror, not to mention his last dance—exceed all parameters of narrative design and logic. Galoup’s isolation from the group in these instances, together with the ostensible lack of dramatic purpose attached to his actions, signal in a direction other than classical narrative. Further, the moments focusing on Galoup’s narcissistic acts can neither be situated in the African space of the legion’s communal life, nor can they easily and assuredly be placed in the post-legion world of Marseilles.

Beau travail features a gradual displacement from the everyday body to the ceremonial body. Such displacement may also be understood as a conversion of narrative (eg, the legionnaires ironing their uniforms) into the meta-narrative level of performance (eg, Galoup ironing his “dancing attire” in preparation for his final “date” with us). Several details attest to this conversion: the shirt Galoup is seen ironing several times throughout the film is not the khaki shirt of his military uniform, but a black civilian garment.

Together with its matching black pants and black and white shoes, it is the only civilian attire he wears in the film, and he does so at two peak moments: on the night the legionnaires carry Sentain upon their shoulders (the night Galoup feels the first pangs of the rage to come), and during the film’s closing moments, when he lets his body become a pure vehicle of rhythm and movement. Galoup’s black shirt is thus the sign of his undoing as a military man and of the possibility that, contrary to his belief, he may in fact be “fit for (civil) life.” Galoup’s undoing as a legionnaire begins precisely on the night just mentioned, and the proof of his fitness for life lies in his final explosive performance when, as Denis implies, Galoup escapes from himself.[5]

These two scenes are linked by highly incongruous continuities. That is, although both scenes share certain elements of the mise-en-scene, this continuity is “impossible” from a rational or realistic standpoint. On the night he follows the group of legionnaires carrying a fellow soldier, and then Sentain, on their shoulders, Galoup “changes” clothes halfway through the scene, shedding the military uniform of authority to don the clothes of seduction.

As Galoup enters frame right behind the group’s steps, in the role of unseen and jealous voyeur, he is no longer wearing the khaki uniform he’s seen in prior to this moment in the same scene. Instead, he is dressed with the black shirt and pants of his dazzling solo dance at the film’s conclusion. Interestingly, too, Galoup lights a cigarette and turns away from the group of soldiers with the same sensuous ease and graceful movements that he displays at the beginning of his final performance—exhibiting in both instances a bodily comportment that is inconsistent with his straight-jacketed behaviour in the rest of the film. The fact that the incipient seduction suggested in this scene is only fulfilled, in a displaced manner, at the film’s conclusion, justifies the illogical continuities that link and unlink the two scenes.

Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)Following Deleuze’s notion of the time-image as an image severed from realistic ties to time, space and causality, one might say that the spatio-temporality of these moments is informed by a kind of virtual, rather than actual, reality.[6] These moments belong to other moments in the film, but do not possess a particular spatio-temporal axis of their own. More specifically, the images of Galoup seem to voice the film’s most self-referential pronouncement: its own libidinal inclination to seduce the spectator. That is, only by the end of the film do we get to understand that Galoup has been preparing himself all along for his final date with us.

Galoup will not dance with Sentain, with Rahel, or with any other character in the film, hence his preparations are entirely divorced from a narrative context. In a very real sense, then, it is the film, via Galoup, which has been preparing itself throughout for the unique event of seducing us. Keeping the reason for those preparations a secret until the very end, the film shows full compliance with the element of surprise essential to the act of seduction. Galoup’s “dress rehearsal” exemplifies the easy transmutation of the everyday body, engaged in seemingly inconsequential acts of daily routine, into the ceremonial body of ritual. As Deleuze notes, “In the best instances, the everyday body might…be said to lend itself to a ceremony which, perhaps, will never arrive, to prepare itself for a ceremony which, perhaps, will consist of waiting.”[7]
Affective linkages

The scene just discussed may be said to have openings or cracks that allow parts of other scenes or moments in the film to seep in and inhabit its precarious borders. In so doing, it constitutes a perfect example of Deleuze’s account of the spatial configuration of the cinema of the time-image: “Disparate sets…fit over each other, in an overlapping of perspectives.”[8] In Beau travail, the sets formed by the city streets and the night-club call on each other from the depths of Galoup’s memory and desire, but they also reverberate with each other in an affective realm that goes beyond subjectivity and character to involve the film body as a sensation-producing machine. It is as if the film were sending ripples of affect and thought across a diversity of its moments.

Deleuze speaks of these affective charges as having the function of linking the film’s parts. In other words, affective forces take over situations where space and time are no longer reliable or determinate: “Space is no longer determined, it has become the any-space-whatever which is identical to the power of the spirit, to the perpetually renewed spiritual decision: it is this decision which constitutes the affect, or the ‘auto-affection’, and which takes upon itself the linking of parts.”[9] From this perspective, the film’s final scene takes on a whole new meaning. It indeed becomes the timeless, placeless setting where Galoup’s (and the film’s) decision to seduce and yield to seduction is embodied and performed in the boldest, most surprising way.

Claire Denis’ Beau travail (Good Work, 1999)In its emphatic choreographic dimension, Beau travail conforms to what Deleuze calls “the requirement of the cinema of bodies,” which is that “the character [be] reduced to his own bodily attitudes.”[10] The character becomes a summation of gestures rather than a preconceived and abstract compendium of psychological traits. Gestures and their affective effects build up in time, reinforcing, negating or multiplying each other. In fact, Deleuze refers to bodily attitudes as “categories which put time into the body.”[11]

It is out of this mindful consideration for time and the body and their mutual bond that the possibility arises for a character in a film to work as an element of surprise or as an agent of seduction. And therein lies precisely the seductive power Galoup wields in his final solo dance. When a character is not fixed in advance, it can undo itself without warning. In time, identity becomes other and the body crystallises this transformation. What we thus witness in Beau travail is not straightforward storytelling, but the development and transformation of bodily attitudes in both Sentain and, even more interestingly, in Galoup.

Sentain’s open, spontaneous, slightly cocky, but basically unself-conscious body becomes, through the pressure of Galoup’s judgemental eye, a withdrawn, hesitant and self-doubting body. Galoup’s regimented and productive gestures—his sheltered and repressed military body—give way in the end to a body of jouissance, maddeningly sterile, blissfully dissipated. Following the same bodily turn, Galoup the remorseful, quiet and rusty-muscled narrator becomes Galoup the crazy dancer whose body seems capable of breaking free from its own frame.
“A resurrection from death”

In accord with Beau travail’s consistent use of discontinuous continuities, the scene that precedes the film’s conclusion forms an intriguing bridge with the ending, joining both moments at an affective level while severing all rational ties between them. In this scene, Galoup pulls a gun out of a drawer and lies on his bed. He places the gun right on his stomach. The camera then gives us a close-up look at the sentence tattooed on the left side of his chest: “Sert la bonne cause et meurt” (”Serve the good cause and die”), which Galoup’s voice-over also speaks in an almost whispering, caressing tone. An extreme close-up of his left bicep shows the rhythmical beating of his pulse. Amid an otherwise static and silent shot, the film thereby draws deliberate attention to the pulsing of Galoup’s vein.

Rational thoughts or intimations of suicide thus collide with a life-beat that stands outside control and ratiocination. The opening lyrics of a song (”this is the rhythm of my life”) begin to be heard over this most literal image of life itself, both emphasising the literalness of the pulsating vein and bridging one scene into the next. Situated between the lingering stasis that paralyses Galoup’s body and the incipient moments of his dance, this brief but affectively intense shot fuses a kind of death drive with a most primitive and persistent vitality, thereby confounding such a fundamental binary as life and death. Accordingly, the dance that ensues is neither an inscription of life (as the opposite of death), nor an inscription of death (as the opposite of life). It is, rather, a moment of jouissance dislocated from any intelligible series of causes and effects, intentions and results.

By means of an “irrational cut,”[12] that takes us from Galoup’s recumbent body to his dancing body, Beau travail thwarts the principle of causality— thoughts of suicide/death as outcome— and welcomes the interference of a physical vitality that is capable of overturning the predictable course of the film’s final images. One might borrow Antonin Artaud’s words regarding the power of the brain to “turn towards the invisible” and “to resume a resurrection from death”[13] by way of explaining the way the film’s brain locks into this vital pulse to effect a resurrection from the death of rational linearity—the scripted ending of suicide that would logically follow.

Galoup’s acrobatic dance appears to take place in the same Dijbouti disco/nightclub featured throughout the film— the same back-wall mirror, the same flashing lights. And yet, the space no longer serves the same narrative purpose, nor is it filled with the same crowd. Deleuze identifies the indeterminacy of location in modern cinema—achieved in the proliferation of the “any-space-whatever”—with the ability of space to change co-ordinates suddenly and without apparent justification. In these instances, space may be said to change faces, to disguise itself under an array of masks or cloaks that render it as seductive as it is unfathomable.

During his final performance, Galoup/Lavant increasingly lets his body be overtaken by the rhythm and abandons himself to a kinetic pattern whereby he seems to lose control of everything except his ability to be immersed in the rhythm. Unlike the Lacanian model of specular (mis)recognition, which describes the child as deriving a sense of jubilation from the illusory coordination and wholeness projected in front of his uncoordinated body, Galoup/Lavant seems to derive jouissance from a maddening loss of control, perhaps not so much of a corporeal centre as of a fixed sense of corporeal limits or boundaries.

One of the most compelling features of Galoup/Lavant’s dance is that it doesn’t follow a smooth or consistent rhythmic pattern. Instead, it can be described as a hesitant pattern of fits and starts, and of abrupt, deliberate stops. Such kinetic fragmentation is nonetheless consistent with Galoup’s character, which wavers between a militarised and rigid control of the body and the final, seemingly unaccountable, release of affect.

The most striking contrast between stasis and movement occurs right after the first final credits roll. We see Lavant standing in pretty much the same position a legionnaire might stand in military formation—head and shoulders erect, gaze unfocused yet frontally aimed, arms and hands close to the sides of the body in a relaxed posture. After some twelve seconds in this position, Lavant suddenly propels his body upwards and to his left side, reaching the full height of his body in the air and then landing unscathed and with ease in a recumbent position, only to lift his body immediately up again and continue with his acrobatic demonstrations. Although the juxtaposition of immobility with excessive movement in this scene may be regarded as contradictory, as François Lyotard suggests, “it is only for thought that these two modes are incompatible.”[14] In the domain of the sensual, by contrast, these kinetic extremities work to produce the “blissful intensities”[15] of unmotivated jouissance.

It would be misleading to consider Galoup’s final dance the justifiable outcome of a conventional pursuit of narrative closure/fulfillment (the scene, after all, is triumphant, to say the least). The reason why Denis placed the scene at the end may be instructive in this respect. In an interview with Sight and Sound, she explains: “In an early draft of the screenplay the dance fell before the scene where he takes the revolver, contemplating suicide. But when I was editing I put the dance at the end because I wanted to give the sense that Galoup could escape himself.”[16]

Regardless of whether Galoup commits suicide or not at a narrative level—something intimated, but never actually consummated or shown—his decision is to let his body be carried away by its own vital force. From this angle, the decision stands out of discernible time and space because the possibility lies within him all along. To place it thus at the film’s conclusion only responds to the film’s, and Denis’, own desire to uphold Galoup’s escape as an immanent possibility. As for our desire to know what happens to Galoup’s character from a conventional narrative standpoint, this may be utterly irrelevant. As Deleuze remarks, “We no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask.”[17]
Let the film love you

In its entirety, but particularly in its last scene, Beau travail presents an interesting, and slightly reconfigured, example of what Deleuze calls the “pure optical and sound situations” of modern cinema. In the cinema of the time-image, Deleuze writes, “characters [are] found less and less in sensory-motor motivating situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering or of rambling which define[s] pure optical and sound situations.”[18]

Although Deleuze tends to associate sensory-motor activity with classical narrative cinema—the cinema of the movement-image—it seems to me that the crucial difference between the two kinds of cinema does not lie in the divide between sensory-motor activity versus pure vision or pure sound. Rather, the difference lies in whether these categories of images are narratively or psychologically motivated, or, conversely, whether they dispense with motivation altogether. Thus, while the sensory-motor activity of classical narrative cinema is on the whole dependent upon motivation, we may find other examples of sensory-motor activity in modern cinema completely severed from any motivating links. To borrow and recast Deleuzian terminology, moments such as Galoup/Lavant’s dance unfold as “pure kinetic situations.”

Undoubtedly, Denis’ cinema (and here I’m thinking particularly of Chocolat [1988], Nenette et Boni [1997] and Beau travail) brings about a “disorder of the senses”[19] that places upon viewers a different set of demands than those they are accustomed to— not only in terms of classical narrative patterns, but also in terms of counter-narrative and experimental strategies. The difficulty for the viewer, however, doesn’t lie in coping with a distanciating/alienating agenda that the film may have deliberately assumed, as might be the case in many a modernist or avant-garde film. If Denis’ films, in all their sensuality, are paradoxically experienced as abstract, or even inscrutable at times, it is, I would argue, because of our own cultural alienation from sensual and bodily experience.

From this perspective, Beau travail, as do all of Denis’ films, takes on the project of seducing us away from our “proper” customary conduct as viewers. The film thwarts our dutiful and well-trained desire to “know,” and offers instead to facilitate our entry into a realm of sensation and affect. In so doing, this kind of cinema constitutes itself as the most overt, self-conscious and exhibitionistic form of seduction. No longer, or at least not only, a “fetish that can be loved,”[20] but primarily, and passionately, a body that loves us back.

Elena del Río

Printer-friendly version of this article

Also of interest

* Passion without words: The cinema of Claire Denis
A Kinoeye special issue
* French film in Kinoeye and on the web

About the author

Elena del Río is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her essays on the intersections between film and technology, and film and performance, have been featured in Camera Obscura, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

return to the Kinoeye home page
return to the main page for this issue

Footnotes

1. Claire Denis, “Desire Is Violence” (interview by Chris Darke), Sight and Sound 10.7 (July 2000): 17.return to text

2. Gilles Deleuze interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer, Jean Narboni, et al in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 367.return to text

3. As in Benjamin’s notion of “aura,” the male body in Beau travail enables the opening up of distance and wonder in the midst of the familiar. See Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island, 1980).return to text

4. “Claire Denis interviewed by Jonathan Romney,” The Guardian, 28 June 2000.return to text

5. Denis, “Desire Is Violence,” 18.return to text

6. For a discussion of the actual and the virtual as theorised by Deleuze, see chapters 4 and 5 of his Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).return to text

7. Ibid, 192.return to text

8. Ibid, 203.return to text

9. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 117.return to text

10. The Time-Image, 192.return to text

11. Ibid.return to text

12. Ibid, 214.return to text

13. Antonin Artaud, quoted in The Time-Image, 212.return to text

14. François Lyotard, “Acinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 356.return to text

15. Ibid, 351.return to text

16. Denis, “Desire Is Violence,” 18; emphasis added.return to text

17. The Time-Image, 7.return to text

18. The Movement-Image, 120.return to text

19. Arthur Rimbaud, quoted by Flaxman in The Brain Is the Screen, 12.return to text

20. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier” (excerpts), in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 259.return to text

this analysis first published by kinoeye.org

Year: 1994
Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Cast: Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Valerie Chow Kar-Ling

The Skinny: This breezy new wave motion picture from the beloved/reviled Wong Kar-Wai ranks as one of Hong Kong Cinema’s most winning and lovely experiences. This is quite possibly the Webmaster’s favorite film. Ever.

Review by Kozo:

Wong Kar-Wai’s films have always been steeped in Hong Kong-specific genre. As Tears Go By was a triad drama, and Days of Being Wild was a spin on the “teddy boy” disaffected youth genre. Chungking Express is no different. The protagonists of the film are two cops. Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), also known as He Qiu-Wu, is a plainclothes detective who chases bad guys around seedy Chungking Mansions in Tsimshatsui. Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) is a uniformed constable who patrols around Central and the trendy Lan Kwai-Fong district. The film also has a criminal: Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia as a blonde-wigged, drug-smuggling femme fatale who finds herself targeted for a rub-out.

But that’s as far as the genre stuff goes. Despite these common signifiers, practically nothing you’d expect out of a cop action film occurs. There are a couple of chases, as well as a payback moment midway through the film, but the scenes play more like transitions instead of necessary plot development. What’s more important are the character’s inner lives. In Chungking Express, the standard genre character is fleshed out and humanized, and their inner struggles take on tremendous meaning. Wong Kar-Wai has created a Hong Kong cop thriller that’s about the cops and not the thrills.

Cop 223 may snag a perp or two, but what’s more upsetting to him is his ex-girlfriend May, who he’s still pining over. Obsessed with expiration dates (on love, promises and even canned food), he feeds his heartbreak by ingesting expired cans of pineapple - which isn’t a good thing. Promising himself that he’ll love the first woman he sees, he runs into the tired Brigitte Lin, who’s suffering her own sort of heartbreak. The match isn’t made in heaven, and any sort of physical affirmation of emotion would be unrealistic, but their encounter manages something quiet and affecting. In a sense, their meeting and shared individual pain creates a minor, almost infinitesimal bond between them. The moment passes, but something quietly indelible remains.

Cop 663 has his romantic problems, too. Unceremoniously dumped by a lovely air hostess (Valerie Chow), 663 unburdens himself to his collection of inanimate objects: a stuffed bear, a bar of soap and even a wet rag. Unbeknownst to him, the cute, Jean Seberg-coiffed Faye Wong has silently fallen in love with him across the counter of the Midnight Express deli. Unable to overtly convey her affection, she contents herself with surrepitiously caring for him. She cleans his apartment, redecorates it, and quietly messes with his life. Whether or not he notices seems not to matter - it’s just her personal expression of affection.

The individual is at the center of Wong Kar-Wai’s movie. Everyone has their own private way of coping with loss and alienation, and how each character does it feels both uniquely odd and strangely familiar. Wong Kar-Wai isn’t concerned with happy endings, romantic platitudes or universal truths. No UFO-style pearl of wisdom surfaces in his film. One can identify with the characters or they can find their individual quirks absurd. That’s probably one of the unique joys to Chungking Express - that the characters’ quirks can affect each and every viewer differently. Wong Kar-Wai doesn’t tell you anything with the film. The moments in the film are opaque and seemingly unconnected, but beneath that the viewer just might find something revealingly personal and achingly real.

As you would expect from Wong Kar-Wai, the film is literally dripping with style, but it isn’t over-the-top like his later Fallen Angels (the unofficial third chapter to Chungking Express) nor is it bombastic like Ashes of Time. Chungking Express operates with a quicksilver, almost effervescent vibe, where chances are found and connections made with one barely noticing. The camera (handled by co-cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Andrew Lau) moves constantly and sometimes gives in to jarring step-printing or strange slow/fast motion, but the moments are appropriate. It’s those sequences that convey the interior/exterior experience of each character, be they the helter-skelter chaos of a chase or the noiseless isolation of sudden heartbreak. The style is alternately contemplative and breezy; it’s like the French New Wave with a dash of MTV sprinkled in.

Chungking Express works on many levels. It’s a stunning new wave “art film” that also succeeds as a bouncy pop-culture valentine to Hong Kong. It’s an affecting exploration of personal heartbreak and a uniquely cosmopolitan take on urban alienation. And, probably most affecting of all, it’s a marvelous demonstration of love in and of the cinema. Chungking Express seems to tell us that love and its chances could be just around the corner and out of sight. As much as the film explores the frustration of heartbreak and unrequited love, it also hints at the promise of something magical. Movies can both show and create emotion, and Wong Kar-Wai was able to do both with remarkable dexterity. Even more, he did it in a way that only the movies could - through camera, sound and space, and not through spoken dialogue or printed epiphanies. All the powers of cinema are at work in his understated little masterpiece. Chungking Express might even remind some people of why they grew to love movies in the first place. (Kozo 1995/2002)

this review first appeared on lovehkfilm.com

Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages

Austrian film was having something of a quiet life, bumbling along and not being watched by too many people, when suddenly in 1997 Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games convinced people that watchable Austrian cinema was not perhaps an oxymoron after all.

And suddenly not only was a new star of European cinema born but a whole country’s film industry was given a new wave of optimism. Turning to Haneke’s previous works, film buffs found a richly philosophical oeuvre, tackling some of the most compelling moral questions of our day in a noticeably filmic form.

Now that Haneke has grabbed hold of international attention, he clearly wants to keep it, and his film Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (Code Unknown: Incomplete tales of several journeys, 2000) again tackles a Big Question in the framework of a consciously art house film. Instead of just merely tackling the problems of Austrian society, here he takes on a wider theme to match the new scale of his audience—immigration in a multicultural Europe—and shifts the action away from his favoured middle-class Austrian settings to a famously cosmopolitan environment: Paris.

Diverging threads

In contrast to Funny Games, Code inconnu consists of a fragmented mosaic of only semi-related events (or in more blunt terms: it has little or no plot). It tracks a group of people linked by one chance encounter: an argument on a street corner which blows up when an young man, Jean,Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000) contemptuously throws a screwed-up piece of paper at a woman who is begging on a street corner. From this one point, the characters’ lives follow—as the subtitle alludes to—different paths.

Anne is trying to make it as a film actress while her boyfriend, Georges, tries to make sense of his profession as a photographer (we are presented first with his stark images of war, taken in Kosovo, and then with an arresting series of shots taken of unsuspecting passengers on the Paris Metro). Georges’ brother, Jean, is meanwhile trying to escape from the influence of his father who wants him to take over the family farming business.

Maria, the Romanian beggar at whom Jean callously discards his rubbish, is caught without papers and deported. Back at home she boasts she had a good job as a teacher in Paris and, unphased by the ignominy of the experiences she has gone through, pays money to be smuggled back into fortress Europe again.

The other main protagonist is Amadou, an angry young man of African origin, whom we meet when he takes offence at Jean’s treatment Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000)of Maria. Aside from this street fight, we see him talking to a friend explaining who his father arrived in France and also to his younger sister, who is deaf, in sign language about why their father left.

Finally, these paths converge again for the film’s ending, with its prosaic action dramatically set against drumming music being played by the children at the deaf school where Amadou teaches.

In a mirror of the film’s main opening sequence, Georges arrives at Anne’s flat to find that he no longer knows the security code (presumably the source of the film’s title) and is thus denied entry to the sanctuary he requires—a metaphor for the film’s wider concerns. Meanwhile, Maria is back on her old street corner.

Alienating fragmentation

Code inconnu is in some ways related to the third film of Haneke’s “emotional glaciation” trilogy, 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 1994) which also uses a dislocated mosaic Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000)structure to link characters to a single event (a motiveless killing spree in a Vienna bank by a disaffected student). The return to this style is intriguing. 71 Fragmente is by far the least successful of Haneke’s trilogy, not in box office terms but in its ability to challenge us intellectually.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the criticisms that could be levelled at 71 Fragmente also resonate with Code inconnu. Both are horribly dry exercises in intellectualism and lack what might be termed the “intellectually visceral” quality of Funny Games or the second of Haneke’s trilogy, Benny’s Video (1992), both of which challenge our gut instincts rather than our most abstract thoughts. Moreover, Haneke seems so wrapped up in the formal qualities of Code inconnu that the very human message he is trying to give out is totally lost.

Even discounting this alienating factor, the film somehow fails to work, it sitting uncomfortably in the shadow of 71 Fragmente trying hard not to look like a derivative work. “I’m playing with the Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000)public, and I make them fall into all kinds of traps and show them they’ve fallen into the trap,” the director explained in the May edition of Sight and Sound.

But this is Haneke’s sixth feature film, and he is running out of mechanisms to force us to question the power of film as a medium. He resorts to tactics that are now seemingly commonplace in his films, such as suddenly cutting off the dialogue mid-sentence. Even worse, he employs techniques that are universally clichéd, such as showing the making of a film within the film we are watching and trying to confuse us as to which level we are looking at. This, quite frankly, is old hat.

Pulling apart the definitions

Putting aside such concerns over form, however, the way Haneke pieces together his mosaic with steadfast neutrality is remarkable. Time and time again he seeks to present something as “truth” and then undermine it. His philosophical aims (Haneke studied philosophy at university) are to force us to question first the reality we see in the film and—rather more ambitiously—the reality we see around us. In one scene, Anne and Georges have an argument. To force her lover’s position, Anne tells him she is pregnant, but then denies it. We have no way of knowing which version is true.

As such, Haneke has no answers to give us on immigration or multiculturalism. He merely urges us to question the reality of the issues around it. In this he does, perhaps, have a major point. Immigration is largely a seen as a subject for political debate and a topic that dominates newspaper headlines. Rarely do we stop to consider the stories of the people behind the statistics, who they are and how the single word “immigrant” describes a multitude of experiences.

Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000)If there is anything positive Haneke’s film can achieve it should be to force us to abandon our predefined and narrow definitions of “immigration” and “multiculturalism” and make us find meaning for them again based on what we see, not on what newspapers tell us. “What matters is the end result,” Georges tells us in one of his monologues, and that could be a kind of motto for the film, urging us to look at each situation anew and not fall into the trap of placing things in predefined pigeon holes.

But curiously, if anything, the film’s analysis of the lack of community and communication in multicultural Paris seems to have had the opposite of the intended effect. In France, at least, the film has attracted the admiration of the right, as opposed to the usual left-wing gang who admire Haneke’s brand of philosophy.

Send this article to a friend

Perhaps all this explains why Haneke’s most recent film La pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001), which just last week scooped three awards at Cannes (including the Grand Prix), returns to the visceral style that characterised Funny Games. Indeed, the director seems to have gone from one wild extreme to the other, and La pianiste has been criticised for being pornographic, degrading and too reliant on excessive violence. It will be interesting to see distributors wrestle with the conflicting desires to appease public good taste by keeping the film off our screens and to make loads of loot by cashing in on a major prize.

Doubtless, in the meantime, Code inconnu will receive something of a boost from its successor’s fame (Code inconnu opened in the UK on 25 May) and some punters will be attracted merely by the presence of art house pin-up Juliette Binoche in the cast list. However, it is unlikely that the film itself is going to turning much of the cinema- going public into a new wave of Haneke fans.

Andrew James Horton, 28 May 2001

this review first appeared on ce-review.org

L’Enfant (The Child) (2005) Shows a Thief Who Eventually Finds Redemption
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: March 24, 2006

FOR the past decade, the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been building one of the most passionately engaged bodies of work in contemporary cinema. Characterized by an insistently moving camera, their films move fast even when the brothers do not. Since the release of their breakthrough film “La Promesse” in 1996, they have made just three other fiction titles: “Rosetta,” “The Son” and now “L’Enfant” (”The Child”), stories about men and women engaged in a struggle — for money, shelter, a break in the fence, a way into the world — that is inscribed on the very surface of their restlessly beautiful images.

Like the Dardennes’ other recent films, “L’Enfant” takes place in an industrial town far from the tourist cathedrals and squares. The story opens with Sonia (Déborah François), a pretty young blonde with a newborn son, Jimmy, in tow. Dressed in a mini and boots, clutching the infant awkwardly in her arms like an unexpected gift, Sonia is anxiously searching for the man we soon learn is her boyfriend, Bruno (Jérémie Renier, the young hero of “La Promesse”). When she finds him, he greets her warmly but barely registers the mewling bundle in her arms. For this penny-ante thief, who lives by his wits and willingly plays Fagin to two very young accomplices, a baby, even one he sired, has no meaning because it serves no purpose.

Once reunited, Sonia and Bruno retreat to their private bubble, laughing and teasing like the squawking, rambunctious, sexed-up teenagers they more or less are. Everything else, including the inconvenience of sleeping in a homeless shelter (Bruno subleased Sonia’s apartment while she was having the baby) and the inconvenience of the preternaturally quiet infant in their distracted care, feels like an afterthought. And then, the next day, while Sonia’s attention is directed elsewhere, Bruno sells Jimmy on the black market. With breathtaking deliberation, he places a few phone calls and after a long bus ride and a climb up some stairs to a vacant apartment, he exchanges his son for an envelope of cash. And then he saunters back to Sonia with the empty stroller.

The Dardennes know how to build a scene for maximum tension: you yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill. But because they make moral thrillers, what matters isn’t only actions and events but their emotional, spiritual and psychological costs. The tragedy of “Rosetta,” for instance, isn’t that the title character is poor, but how poverty has made her an exile, separating her from the rest of the world. Bruno’s outsider status initially seems more of a choice than Rosetta’s. “Only suckers work,” he tells Sonia, though his actual language skews more aggressively potent. With his sporty leather jacket and cigarette, hooded eyes and scheming, he might almost be mistaken for someone who’s the master of his life.

For Bruno, Jimmy has no meaning beyond what he brings on the market. But then, for most of the world, Bruno has even less value. Sonia loves him, though her passion seems more capricious and flighty than profound, and the two younger boys he uses for his larcenous schemes rely on him only for jobs, not meaningful companionship. But the support that these three provide is as flimsy a shelter for Bruno as the cardboard box he sleeps in one night not long after selling his son. And it’s only after he racks up a debt to some local gangsters, who first beat him to the ground and then carefully tabulate his value down to the last cent, that Bruno becomes truly valuable to another human being.

Why make a film about Bruno? The same might be asked about Raskolnikov. Like Robert Bresson, whose “Pickpocket” informs “L’Enfant” and is itself a loose reworking of “Crime and Punishment,” the Dardennes are not interested in passing judgment on a grievously flawed character; that’s why God and Hollywood were invented. Since there is no moral ambiguity in the act of selling another human being, there would be no point in such judgment, other than to indulge in some self-satisfied finger-wagging. Rather, what interests the Dardennes — what invests their work with such terrific urgency — is not only how Bruno became the kind of man who would sell a child as casually as a slab of beef, but also whether a man like this, having committed such a repellent offense, can find redemption.

Few other questions — how we live and whether our lives have meaning — are as important, which is why it’s unsettling that few filmmakers bother to raise them. The Dardennes started out making documentaries about strikes and factories, and that may help explain why they are so comfortable asking such basic questions. Some of their critics are rather less comfortable with their subject matter, and it’s instructive that the brothers’ work is often lumped under the rubric of the social-issue film, probably because their characters are working class or poor. Implicit in this thinking is that poverty is strictly a social problem, an abstraction you read about in the papers or gingerly step over on the sidewalk, rather than a collective falling down on the job of being human.

The Dardennes’ background in documentary also partly explains their astonishing visual style. Working with the cinematographer Alain Marcoen, who shot all four of their last features, the brothers have developed an instantly identifiable naturalism, unsparing in its attention to detail. Their camera maintains an intimate, at times uncomfortably claustrophobic proximity to the characters, an approach that feels attentive rather than instrusive. In “The Son,” the camera often seems to hang off the back of one of the lead characters’ necks, almost as if the filmmakers were struggling to keep up. The Dardennes initially keep Bruno at arm’s length, perhaps because they want to give us room to discover him for ourselves. That they will eventually move closer to him by the end, folding him in their embrace, should come as no surprise.

“L’Enfant” (”The Child”) is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film has some rough language, but nothing that anyone over 10 hasn’t heard before.

L’Enfant (The Child)

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Written (in French, with English subtitles) and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; director of photography, Alain Marcoen; edited by Marie-Hélène Dozo; produced by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and Denis Freyd; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 100 minutes.

WITH: Jérémie Renier (Bruno), Déborah François (Sonia), Jérémie Segard (Steve), Fabrizio Rongione (Young Thug), Olivier Gourmet (Plainclothes Officer) and Stéphane Bissot (Receiver).

this review first appeared on the nytimes.com

The Bank Dick stars W.C. Fields as one Egbert Sousé (final accent significant), an irritable and irritated family man who spends his spare time and money at the Black Pussy Café (and Snack Bar), telling tall tales to Joe the bartender (Shemp Howard) and anyone else who will listen. When he bluffs his way into a directing job on a one-reel short and accidentally foils a bank robbery, his fortunes begin to improve; a series of improbable coincidences follow, making him a hero and a happy, wealthy man, having earned the respect and love of his wife, his daughters and his mother-in-law.

Written by Fields under the improbable pseudonym of Mahatma Kane Jeeves, The Bank Dick is filled with Fieldsian situations and character names—bank inspector J. Pinkerton Snoopington (Franklin Pangborn), Sousé’s son-in-law Og Oggilby (Grady Sutton), and a bank robber named Filthy McNasty (Al Hill). Most of the humor derives from Fields’ classic persona, a bumbling, boastful drunkard who somehow manages to succeed on his own terms despite the annoyances imposed on him by his family, self-appointed moral guardians and any child who crosses his path. Fields isn’t afraid to poke fun at himself, either, and he generously gives some of the film’s funniest lines to his supporting characters. As noted in the disc’s liner notes by Dennis Perrin, The Bank Dick is short on plot, playing as a series of situations with Sousé at the center that somehow meanders to an ending. But as one who thinks Fields did his best work in short films, I found the film’s loose structure comfortable and refreshingly anarchic. Edward Cline directs with competent, straightforward composition and editing, wisely letting the camera roll while Fields works his 80-proof magic.

This was Fields’ last feature film, and it appears that he was sober enough to be on the set when needed (avoiding the production problems that plagued some of his other films)—he died 6 years later at the reasonable age of 66. Fields in his prime was a vital, outrageous comedian, counteracting the wholesomeness of his Hollywood contemporaries with a joyful depiction of the boastful, overblown, selfish, darker side of the American character. I always watch Fields’ work with the same mixture of emotions that colors my viewing of John Belushi—knowing how incredibly funny he could be, and wondering how much his addictions limited his life and career. But The Bank Dick is by no means painful to watch in and of itself—Egbert Sousé is a classic Fields creation, ignoring the idiots and overriding the pompous in his endless quest to be left alone with his vices.

this review first appeared on digitallyobsessed.com

From the beginning, director John Huston insisted that The African Queen be shot on location. To find a river identical to the one in C. S. Forester’s novel, he logged 25,000 flying miles criss-crossing Africa until he settled on the Ruiki in the then Belgian Congo. At a time (1951) when on-location shooting was nowhere near as common as today, traveling 1,100 miles up the Congo to make what is essentially a filmed dialogue must have seemed fanatical. And subsequent encounters with blood flukes, crocodiles, soldier ants, wild boars, stampeding elephants, malaria, and dysentery were hardly reassuring.

Yet The African Queen is more than a simple encounter between a man and a woman. It is a story of two very different people growing to love and respect one another after sharing and surviving severe hardships. Huston maintained that on-location shooting was the only way to make that suffering and subsequent romance believable and authentic. At Huston’s insistence even the scenes shot off location were filmed under realistic conditions. For example, although Humphrey Bogart actually emerged from London rather than Ugandan waters (after pulling the African Queen), the leeches that covered him were the genuine article. Bogart’s revulsion and shivering during that particular scene are convincing arguments for Huston’s point-of-view.

Indeed, The African Queen’s main strength is the acting of the two principal players—Humphrey Bogart as the seedy Canadian boat captain, Charlie Allnut, and Katharine Hepburn as the “Psalmsinging skinny old maid,” British missionary Rose Sayer. According to Huston, although Bogart initially resisted and didn’t like his character, after mimicking the director’s gestures and expressions, “all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man.” Hepburn, too, had trouble at the beginning; her portrayal was brittle, cold, and humorless. However, once Huston suggested that she play her part as if she were that Grand Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she became both funny and refined, and a humor inherent in neither the novel nor the screenplay emerged between the two characters.

The humor is essential to the success of the film not because it makes the film more entertaining, but because it arises out of the equality and individuality of two eccentric and strong-willed adversaries. They may end up falling in love, but not without an often hysterical struggle. Bogart’s character begins as a self-indulgent drunk who mimics the missionary’s prim ways; she, on the other hand, frowns upon his drinking and cowardice, disagreeing with his lax views on human nature: “Nature is what we were put on earth to rise above.” But in courageously facing and solving problems together, the two head towards a middle ground. Allnut stops drinking (Rose has thrown his gin overboard) and shaves, while Rose changes her mind about human nature. After encountering her first rapids, for example, she ecstatically exclaims, “I never dreamed any mere physical experience could be so stimulating! . . . I don’t wonder you love boating, Mr. Allnut.” Finally, after escaping both the Germans and the allegedly uncrossable rapids, the two impulsively embrace and fall in love. The humor does not stop here, however. After their first tender night together, Rose shyly asks Allnut, “Dear, what is your first name?” Their mutual delight in his response is completely captivating.

Our captivation with the two characters allows us to accept many of the film’s more improbable moments—the quick dispatch of Brother Samuel Sayer, the sun shining in the eyes of a German sharpshooter as naively predicted by Rose, heavy rains freeing the mired African Queen after Rose prays to God, and the deus ex machina ending. In fact, the ending had been changed several times. Writer James Agee hadn’t written it yet when he suffered a heart attack, so Huston tried to write one with Peter Viertel; before the fourth and final ending was conceived, three others were apparently considered: (1) a British warship rescues Rose and Charlie after a heroic battle with the Louisa, (2) Rose proposes marriage before the first available British consul, (3) Charlie remembers the wife he had left behind in England and hadn’t thought of for 20 years. The first and second endings combined were similar to what occurred in the original novel (that is, Forester’s second ending—even he had problems resolving the plot).

Huston’s fourth and happy ending—which miraculously saves Rosie and Charlie from their postnuptial death by hanging—is atypical, as are other elements in the script. Many of Huston’s previous films had a bleaker view of humanity and ended unhappily (e.g. The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). Both Charlie and Rose exhibit an honesty and integrity at odds with such Hustonian liars and tricksters as Sam Spade, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Rick Leland, and Dobbs. The two survive because of an internal nobility that Huston’s seedier characters outwardly lack.

Huston’s new optimism/idealism struck the right note with the public. The African Queen became one of 1952’s top moneymakers, having been nominated for Best Actor (Bogart won), Best Actress, Best Direction, and Best Screenplay. British readers of Picturegoer voted Bogart the year’s best actor, and Hepburn experienced the greatest box office hit of her career. A film that began as a vehicle for Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, and later Bette Davis and David Niven, had found the perfect couple for its improbable romance.

—Catherine Henry

first published on filmreference.com

Adam’s Rib represents a climax in the evolution of the classic Hollywood screwball comedy. In the 1930s, screwball comedies united antagonistic couples whose clashes revolved around egos, class conflicts, and attitudes about money and values. In the 1940s, screwball comedies replaced these conflicts with ones that revolved around egos and career-marriage decisions. In such films as His Girl Friday, Woman of the Year, Take a Letter, Darling, and They All Kissed the Bride, the comic crises hinged on the heroines’ decisions regarding their professional careers and domestic roles. In 1949, George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib took the familiar marriage-career crisis formula of the screwball comedy to its logical conclusion—a comic study of sex role stereotyping and the invalidity of narrowly defined sex roles.

The film reunited Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who had previously teamed on Woman of the Year, Keeper of the Flame, Without Love, and State of the Union, and whose successful on-screen romances seemed to radiate some of the genuine love and affection of their off-screen relationship. The film also features a brilliant screenplay by the husband-wife team Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. All the principals—director, stars, and writers—had proven track records, and in a financially bad year for Hollywood, their combined box-office appeal led to the three-way teaming on a film project that otherwise might not have been possible.

The movie is about Adam and Amanda Bonner, husband and wife lawyers who find themselves on opposite sides of a courtroom case. The legal case in question concerns a woman (Judy Holliday) who has shot her adulterous husband (Tom Ewell). Defense attorney Amanda Bonner views her case as a woman’s rights issue, and she bases her defense on the premise that the husband would have been exempt from prosecution if the roles were reversed. In front of her district attorney husband, she turns the courtroom and the trial into a hilarious forum for a public debate on the “double standard” and the narrowness of sexual stereotypes. In the meantime, the courtroom competition begins to threaten the Bonner’s marriage.

Much of the film’s humor arises from the many sex-role reversals. Through such reversals, the movie simultaneously comments on how traditional social roles are defined by stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. The film literally takes this notion to its extreme when it depicts what the unwitting husband, wife, and lover (Jean Hagen), who are the subjects of the trial, would be like if their sexes were reversed. Meanwhile, the Bonner’s crumbling marriage, one based on mutual respect and liberation from sexual stereotypes, requires a series of further role reversals to be put back together again. Adam wins his wife’s sympathies by crying; Amanda apologizes by sending her husband a new hat.

Amanda ultimately wins her case and husband without giving up her principles. Adam learns about humility without losing his masculinity. But when the reconciled Bonners finally fall into bed together behind a curtain, the on-screen veil and their final unresolved argument about sex roles, competition, and sex differences cinematically deny their absolute integration as a unified couple. Like many screwball comedies that preceded it, Adam’s Rib ends with a marital reconciliation that establishes the couple’s unity without resolving the individuals’ ongoing differences.

The writing, acting, and directing team that made Adam’s Rib a success reunited in 1952 for a screwball comedy about a manager and his professional female athlete in Pat and Mike. The successful story formula from Adam’s Rib further inspired a 1973 television series with the same name.

—Lauren Rabinovitz

this review first published on filmreference.com

HOTEL RWANDA - GENOCIDE IN A GUN FREE LAND

Hotel Rwanda is an important and carefully crafted film well worth seeing. Set in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, during the genocide of April and May 1994 Hotel Rwanda is a sensitively made film. Unlike many Hollywood films it is neither gory nor distasteful. This film focuses on the incredible true story of Paul Rusesabagina, the assistant manager of Milles Collines Hotel. By ingenuity, good connections, bribes and bluff, Paul managed to save the lives of 1238 Tutsis from the genocide.

This is an engrossing, gripping and ultimately uplifting film showing how one person can make a difference even amidst the worst conditions. Over 500 000 Tutsi Christians were systematically slaughtered in the Rwandan Genocide. More people were killed with machetes in Rwanda in 6 weeks than have died of atomic weapons in all of history!

MEDIA MANIPULATION

Hotel Rwanda sets the scene with the ominous radio broadcasts of RTLM. Incredibly all these outrageous and incendiary hate-filled statements in the film are what was actually broadcast, daily, on the national radio: “Why do we hate the Tutsis? They are cockroaches…Rwanda is Hutuland. We are the majority. Tutsis are the minority. Hutus must kill all the Tutsis…Stay alert – watch your neighbours.”

WHEN THEY CRY “PEACE! PEACE!”

A United Nations colonel confidently announces: “Negotiations have replaced conflict in Africa” and officials drink toasts to “Peace!” in front of a huge banner declaring: “PEACE, LOVE and BROTHERHOOD – UNIMAR 1994” Meanwhile, radio RTLM hisses “a message to our president – Beware! Do not trust the Tutsi rebels…”

Paul Rusesabagina is well connected moving easily from a corrupt Hutu businessman who keeps the hotel well supplied with anything – for a price – to the UN colonel and a general of the Rwandan Army. In his office the businessman urges Paul to show some interest in politics because “Politics are power! Hutus power.” Paul sees a container full of machetes in the warehouse.

When a mob of Hutu MRND government supporters dance past the hotel combi they threaten the driver who they recognise as a Tutsi. Paul gives the clenched fist salute and utters their “Hutu power!” slogan to escape from the volatile mob.

When his neighbour is arrested and beaten by the army in the middle of the night, his wife urges him to intervene, to “do something” to help him. Paul insists that there’s nothing he can do: “Someone who didn’t like him, denounced him as a rebel spy – it happens all the time…He is not family. Family is all that matter.”

As fear begins to rise people are reassured: “The United Nations are here. The world press are watching. Don’t worry.”

STRATEGIC TIMING

Actually there were only two foreign journalists in Rwanda at that time and the Hutu government had planned the genocide to co-incide with the much awaited first “one man, one vote”, all race elections in South Africa. With virtually every foreign African journalist, war correspondent and photo journalist in South Africa to focus on Nelson Mandela’s anticipated accession to power, the MRND government of Rwanda knew that they had a window of opportunity when they could kill as many Tutsi Christians as possible without the world media being able to report it, nor any Western government being willing to respond to it. (For some reason the film does not mention this strategic timing of the genocide. The statement in the film: “lots of foreign press are arriving for the peace signing…” is not accurate. There were only 2 journalists in the whole country).

A TIME OF MADNESS

As 6 April dawns the state orchestrated systematic slaughter of the Tutsi is unleashed. As part of the planned strategic deception the Hutu government created chaos, cut the phone lines, cut electricity and released disinformation: “Tutsi rebels have killed the President!” Actually, the Rwandan government had shot down the presidential jet with a French missile. This was the pretext for the long planned extermination of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda.

Tutsi neighbours flee to Paul’s home. Hutu soldiers arrive to kill them. Paul pleads for their lives and offers bribes to the Hutu officers for sparing his Tutsi wife and neighbours. On the way to the hotel they drive past burning tyres in the streets, scenes of massacres in front of suburban homes, Hutu roadblocks, people being herded out at gunpoint, scenes of looting, jubilant Hutus dancing in the streets and crawling condemned prisoners awaiting the final blow.

At the Hotel Milles Collines, one of the Hutu employees has checked himself into the Presidential Suite and threatened to use his political connections if Paul tries to interfere with his hedonistic indulgence: “There is the smell of cockroaches here…why can’t you smell them…I can cleanse it!”

PARALYSED PEACE KEEPERS

A British Red Cross worker arrives at the hotel with Tutsi children from the St. Francis orphanage. Paul takes them in. The Canadian Colonel with the UN is being interviewed by a journalist:
”We are here as peacekeepers – not peacemakers. We are ordered not to intervene.”

After the Belgian manager was evacuated, Paul faces the frustrations of trying to motivate the hotel staff to work. When he finds them standing idly in the kitchen engrossed in listening to the hateful propaganda of Radio RTLM, Paul demands: “Turn the radio off and get back to work!” The response of one cook is: “There’s no more work! The boss has left!”

One of the journalists rushes in with the video footage of massacres by machete. Paul encourages them to have the film evidence broadcast: “How can they not intervene when they see such footage?”

A mob of frenzied Hutu Interahambwe militia drive up to the hotel gates and taunt the UN soldiers on duty by throwing a bloodstained blue UN helmet at the their feet. Several in the mob are wearing bloodstained UN uniforms and helmets and they lift up pieces of flesh on sticks. This scene referred to the massacre of 10 Belgian UN soldiers who had been trying to escort the Prime Minister, a Tutsi woman, to safety.

Amidst such scenes and sounds of savagery, Paul attempts to protect the growing number of Tutsi refugees seeking sanctuary at the Hotel. He strives to maintain the dignity and 4 star standards of the hotel, creating an oasis of safety in a wilderness of mass murder. He hopes for a speedy international intervention to stop the slaughter and provide safety for his “hotel guests”.

FALSE HOPE

As jeeps laden with UN troops drive up to the hotel the refugees are ecstatic: “We’re saved!” Then the exasperated UN Colonel has to break the news to Paul: “They’re not going to stay. They’re not going to stop the slaughter.” UN troops declare: “No Rwandans – only foreign nationals” as they check passports before hotel guests can board the buses. The Rwandans are devastated: “We’re being abandoned!”

It is at this point that the film digresses from the truth and very offensively depicts the UN failure to intervene and stop the genocide as racially motivated. The clearly angry and overwhelmed Canadian colonel is portrayed as saying that it’s because “You’re black…You’re an African” that the West would not intervene. But that is plainly not true. Just the year before, in 1993, US troops and later UN troops had intervened to save Black Muslims in Somalia.

CHRISTIANS CONDEMNED

The head of the UN peace keeping operations, at that time, was Kofi Annan – a Black man from Ghana. It is quite irresponsible and untrue to suggest that the Western superpowers do not care about black Africans. What would have been more honest and accurate would be if the film had pointed out that the UN was not going to stop the slaughter because the Tutsis were Christians.

As I heard all over the country when I was doing research for my “Holocaust in Rwanda” book – the West is quick to intervene to help Muslims – but not Christians. They’ll help Muslims in Bosnia, Muslims in Kuwait, Muslims in Somalia – but not Christians in Rwanda or Sudan. “It’s not that the UN is against Africans, they’re just against Christians!”

WITHOUT A PRAYER

This is a glaring weakness of what is otherwise a good film. Hotel Rwanda completely lacks a spiritual dimension. They accurately depict what happened but the film fails to inform its viewers as to who was being targeted and why. It is an insult to our intelligence to suggest that 1200 Tutsi refugees could have sought sanctuary in the middle of a genocide without any prayer, worship services, hymn singing or any other expressions of faith or turning to God! One also wonders why the Marxist and Animist motivations of the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide are not identified. Most Tutsis were killed in the churches, schools and hospitals where they had fled to for sanctuary.

CENSORING HISTORY

Why do Hollywood directors and scriptwriters feel they have to censor history and distort reality by cutting God and vibrant Christian faith even from the most desperate situations? Do they really think everyone in Africa is as secular and godless as their pagans in Sunset Boulevard? Or are they trying to conform the world to their atheistic ideals?

DISARMING THE VICTIMS

The United Nations also comes off quite lightly in this film without reference to the Tutsi refugees in their custody whom UN troops handed over or abandoned to the mass murderers. Nor was the role of the UN in helping to disarm the population in the months preceding the genocide referred to. The role of gun control in enabling the genocide doesn’t get a mention in this film but the fact is that Rwanda was a gun free zone.Genocidal governments, like criminals, prefer unarmed victims (For the full story of the roles of gun control, media manipulation, liberal church leaders and the United Nations obtain the book: “Holocaust in Rwanda”).

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

However, the film is well worth watching. Based as it is on the remarkable true story of one man’s courage and ingenuity to save lives in the middle of a holocaust, it offers many invaluable insights. Such as the scene where the Hutu Army arrives to drag all the Tutsis out of the hotel. Paul phones the owner of the hotel chain in Belgium. “Who can I call to stop this?” he asked. Paul answers: “The French, they’re the ones arming and supplying the army.” Within minutes the Hutu general receives a radio call to leave the hotel alone.

“Who did you call?” asks the incredulous Hutu general as he orders his men to stop and withdraw. The hotel owner phoned Paul later and tells him that he personally spoke to the French President.

The film does not expand on this extraordinary influence of the French government with the architects of the genocide but as “Holocaust in Rwanda” documents the French sent in an expeditionary force of paratroopers when the Tutsi resistance movement turned the tide and began to defeat the Hutu government. Unable to forestall defeat the French military secured a “safe zone” to which the Hutu could flee to escape justice at the hands of their victims. To this day Hutu architects of the genocide are residing under government protection in France.

CALCULATED CARNAGE

Paul is told by his businessman contact: “Soon all the Tutsis will be dead!” Paul is astounded and challenges him: “You don’t honestly believe you can kill all the Tutsis?” The man responds confidently: “And why not? We are half way there already.”

Paul sees burning homes, and an overturned Red Cross ambulance, he hears gun shots at night and sees tracer in the distance over the city. He hears that 500 000 have died already. He urges his hotel guests “There will be no rescue, no intervention. You must phone anyone you know overseas…you must shame them to action.”

VERBAL GYMNASTICS

He hears US President, Bill Clinton’s press secretary doing verbal gymnastics over the radio: “Acts of genocide have taken place…but it is not genocide…it does not meet our criteria for a genocide…”

Meanwhile the RTLM radio keeps whipping up hate against the Tutsi Christians: “Those Hutus who shelter Tutsi cockroaches are the same as cockroaches…the graves are not yet full…gather up your weapons…”

A RACE AGAINST TIME

As all water supplies are cut the hotel staff and guests are forced to start using the water from the swimming pool for drinking, cooking and washing needs.

The crisis races ahead at a fever pitch as supplies run low, Paul runs out of cash and items to bribe off the Hutu army and fighting in the streets with the Tutsi resistance from neighbouring Uganda comes closer.

You need to see this film. It offers a rare glimpse behind the scene of one of the most courageous and effective rescue operations in the midst of one of the worst genocides in recent history. Despite the desperate backdrop the film is ultimately uplifting, inspiring and heart-warming. If you view this film in conjunction with reading “Holocaust in Rwanda” which gives the essential background and the rest of the story – then you will receive a tremendous education and insight into the dynamics behind the worst slaughter in Africa in recent years – and how one person can make a great difference.

“If you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength! Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.”Proverbs 24:10-11

I trust that one day we will also have similar films made on the incredible Christian courage against all odds in the Killing Fields of Mozambique and Angola, The Nuba Mountains of Sudan, Resisting Sharia in Nigeria and Christian Courage amidst Communist Carnage in Zimbabwe. We know there is a market for true films on Africa, but are there Hollywood producers and directors with the courage to tell these stories on the big screen? Let us pray and work for that day.

Dr. Peter Hammond

this review first appeared on frontline.org.za

“There Is No Sixth Generation!”
Director Li Yang
on Blind Shaft and
His Place in Chinese Cinema

by Stephen Teo

Stephen Teo is a writer who has contributed many articles to Senses of Cinema and other film journals. He is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997), and is now preparing his next book, Wong Kar-wai, also to be published by the BFI. He has completed his PhD candidature at the RMIT University.

Director Li Yang, 43, is the latest Chinese director to make his mark on the international film festival scene with a film that he shot underground, both literally and figuratively, in China entitled Blind Shaft. The film is Li’s first feature since graduating in 1995 from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. Before this, Li’s only work was in the field of the documentary. He had spent his early years in Beijing as an actor while many of his film-oriented classmates from middle school (the equivalent of ‘high school’) went to university and later, the Beijing Film Academy, eventually forming the ranks of the so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers in China. Li himself eventually enrolled at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute to study film directing in 1985, and his “generation” of film students would become known as the Sixth Generation. Li however did not remain in China after graduating in 1987. He went to Germany in 1988 to further his studies in drama and directing (he also worked as an actor on German TV), and later took out German citizenship.

Li Yang’s acting experience and all that training in film schools have rubbed off on Blind Shaft, an ambitious work characterised by Li’s urge to become a filmmaker with something to say and his assured handling of both professional and non-professional actors. It is set against the background of China’s mining industry, which is the world’s largest and most corrupt, with thousands of workers killed each year from accidents. The story centres on two miners and their criminal devises to claim compensation money from the mine owners for accident victims. These accidents are staged and the victims are passed off as relatives but they are in reality strangers used as unsuspecting pawns in the murderous plan of the two lead protagonists. The film, fervently realistic in the manner of G. W. Pabst and Jia Zhangke, throbs at the same time with questions of a social and existentialist nature. The two protagonists may be evil beyond redemption but Li’s underlying message is that their harsh environment and China’s turnaround from socialist to capitalist development are factors complicit in their moral decline.

Li’s broad concern is for those Chinese who have grown up “under the red flag” (see interview below) and who are now waylaid in their mature years by the thrust towards materialism in present-day China. On this broad theme, Li is therefore perched somewhere between the Fifth Generation’s preoccupation with the Cultural Revolution and the Sixth Generation’s focus on the problems of contemporary China. Li himself is ambivalent about his own status, illustrated by his adamant claim that “there is no Sixth Generation”. I take this as a sign of Li’s self-awareness of being on the margins as a Chinese filmmaker working illegally in China and basing himself outside the country. Li has the mind of an outsider with the heart of an insider. His outsider’s persona is marked by a keen desire to be a part of China’s filmmaking scene, to express his side of the story of China’s destiny.

Li’s status is still somewhat uncertain despite the praise that he has garnered for Blind Shaft (I interviewed him in Hong Kong where his film won the silver prize in the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s main competition; before that, it had won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival). As a Chinese filmmaker living overseas, Li is open to suggestions that he could work anywhere that welcomes him. He keeps an office in Hong Kong but knows he can’t really be a part of the mainstream Hong Kong film industry, though if there were offers he says he would consider them. He’s not recognised by official channels in China; and as for Taiwan, Li’s lament, sounded by many others as well, is that the film industry there is practically non-existent. Such indeterminate status as a filmmaker doesn’t mar his achievement in Blind Shaft. Li is so self-assured that it would be hard to believe that his is a talent that came from nowhere. It would be hard to believe that it is not going somewhere either.

keep reading this interview on sensesofcinema.com

by Marc Lauria

Marc Lauria is a F.C. (Freelance Cinephile) whose other obsession is writing. He has two scripts in development, with producers having options on both. Hopefully one will get made. He has two cats.

Pixote (1981 Brazil 123mins)

Source: ACMI/NLA Prod Co: Embrafilme Prod: Paulo Francini Dir: Hector Babenco Scr: Hector Babenco, Jorge Duran, from Jose Louzeiro’s novel Infancia dos Morto Phot: Rodolfo Sanchez Ed: Luiz Elias Art Dir: Clovis Bueno Mus: John Neschling

Cast: Fernando Ramos da Silva, Jorge Juliao, Gilberto Moura, Marilia Pera, Jardel Filho, Elke Maravilha

Hector Babenco’s Pixote has as its antecedents such works as Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933), Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959); the gun-toting youth of Barbet Schroeder’s Our Lady of the Assassins (2000) would certainly have been influenced by Pixote. The script was written by Babenco and Jorge Duran, from Jose Louzeiro’s novel Infancia dos Mortos.

The film begins as a documentary. Babenco addresses the camera, and states that 50 percent of the population in Brazil is under 21, and this includes three million homeless children. Brazilian law prevents anyone under the age of 18 to be prosecuted for criminal offences; older criminals thus prey on these youths. Babenco, standing in front of a slum area, then introduces Fernando Ramos da Silva, who lives there, as ‘Pixote’ in the film proper. Los Olvidados had a similar documentary beginning: it is used as a foregrounding of events to come, a merging of the real and fictional, so while we are witnessing events in the fictional story, we must, in fact, take them for truth.

Pixote is divided in two parts. The first details Pixote’s ordeals in a juvenile reformatory. He witnesses violence, rape, humiliation. As in the Hollywood prison genre (except in this case, the protagonists are children), the point of view is exclusively of the inmates, and emphasis is placed on power structures operating within personal relationships. Those in power (the guards, the police chief) are corrupt and violent. It is only when the lover of a 17-year-old transvestite, Lilica (Jorge Juliao), gets killed, that escape is necessary.

The second part of the film is set in the urban world outside of the reformatory. The narrative follows four of the protagonists (Pixote, Lilica, Chico and Dito) as they survive by pick-pocketing, drug-dealing, pimping for the prostitute Sueli (Marilia Pera), and robbing the johns whom Sueli brings back. Both Lilica and Sueli act as mother figures to Pixote. Both also sleep with Chico, the father figure and principal breadwinner. Possibly the most disturbing scene in the whole movie is when Pixote discovers Sueli’s dead fetus (aborted by her) in a waste-bin in the bathroom. This is directly linked to Pixote suckling on Sueli’s breast, at the end, after he accidentally kills Chico. This Oedipal triangle results in her pushing Pixote off (stating that she does not want a child), thus precipitating his aloneness in the universe.

Though Pixote was rejected by the American Academy’s Foreign Language Film Award Committee, the film garnered excellent critical reviews in the United States, winning best foreign film from the New York Film Critics Circle. Perhaps it was a reaction against the over-produced and over-budgeted U.S. epics at the time, which seemed to indulge Hollywood directors whilst only inviting critical derision (e.g., Heaven’s Gate, One From the Heart). Pixote, on the other hand, seemed to be influenced by Italian neo-realism, with its casting of actual people to play themselves, that is, non-professional actors (Marilia Pera was the only professional actor in the film), and then shooting on the locations where they lived and worked. Babenco used the children’s ideas to form almost half of the script. Critics such as Pauline Kael were also impressed by its raw, documentary-like quality, and a certain poetic realism:
Babenco’s imagery is realistic, but his point of view is shockingly lyrical. South American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, seem to be in perfect, poetic control of madness, and Babenco has some of this gift, too. South American artists have to have it, in order to express the texture of everyday insanity. (1)
The film seemed to capture the spirit of the ‘arthouse’ cinema of Hollywood of the late ’60s and early ’70s, itself influenced by European art films and Italian neo-realism. Incidents in Pixote don’t seem to be set up for the cameras; the film seems to follow the characters no matter what they do or say.

The ending is genuinely tragic, more so because in reality da Silva was actually killed by police bullets in 1988, when he was 19. And so the ending seems to foretell his real death – after being rejected by the mother figure of Sueli, Pixote/da Silva is walking along a railway line, gun in hand, away from the camera, his figure disappearing in the distance, out of the film (documentary or fiction), and out of our lives.

© Marc Lauria, February 2003

Endnotes:

1. Pauline Kael, “Pixote,” Foreign Affairs: The National Society of Film Critics’ Video Guide to Foreign Films, ed. Kathy Schulz Huffhines (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991) 498.

this article first appeared on sensesofcinema.com

The mix of Delbert Mann’s repertory style direction and Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay, developed from his own teleplay (Mann also directed the 1953 “Philco-Goodyear Playhouse” television version with Rod Steiger in the lead) works well although no-one anticipated its huge critical and commercial success, not to mention 4 Oscars for Mann, Chayefsky, Ernest Borgnine and the film itself, let alone the Palme D’’Or at Cannes. Emanating from the independent production company of Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster and symptomatic of 50s American taste for “realist” films (including here some nice location photography), it tells an endearingly sentimental story of the search for love by a lonely and good-hearted 34-year-old Bronx bachelor butcher (Borgnine). Whilst Chayefsky’s script strikes the right note with its simple everyman story and well-turned, naturalistic yet slightly intellectualized dialogue (there are some nice lines such as the one about college girls being “one step from the street” and Marty’s mates critical evaluation of Mickey Spillane’s writing) it is Borgnine’s performance that wins the day.

Steiger turned down the role because he didn’t want to sign a long term contract with United Artists but one feels that he would not have been as perfect as Borgnine, hitherto best known for sleaze-ball bad guy roles in Westerns, in the role. Less convincing is Betsy Blair, who plays the Plain Jane, being nowhere as plain as the script claims her to be (she was married to Gene Kelly at the time) and having little to do than to be a maidenly (and fairly unlikely) beau for Marty. BH

this review first appeared on cinephilia.net.au

Seven years passed without a directorial return by Zinnemann. Finally in 1973, the director’s next film “The Day of the Jackal” hit theaters. While it is often his most maligned piece, the film serves as an excellent suspense story and in some ways is a precursor to the highly successful “Bourne” films.

The film, atrociously remade in the 90s as “The Jackal” with Bruce Willis and Richard Gere, features a cast of still little known actors. Edward Fox stars as the titular Jackal, a man with no inner struggle or moral conscience. “The Day of the Jackal” strays far from Zinnemann’s thematic canon of work, yet it still has many tones in terms of its suspense that reflect his earlier works such as “Act of Violence” and “The Seventh Cross.”

The Jackal, a dashing young Englishman, is hired by a group of disgruntled French liberals to assassinate President Charles De Gaulle. The Jackal’s tale then progresses as he hides through the European countryside, plotting and working to the day of his unscrupulous task. He is pursued by Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), a likable detective whose wits are tirelessly beaten by his opponent.

One stipulation that the film should have problems with is the fact that the De Gaulle was not famously murdered. In fact, he died of an aneurysm a year after his resignation as the leader of France. Fortunately for the viewer, Zinnemann still manages to create a film that is both convincingly mysterious and offers tension that builds up to the very end.

Fox delivers a wonderful performance, and proves an underrated status. For a protagonist without the previously mentioned Zinnemann characteristics, Fox’s natural charm is what provides likability and gains our attention. The best part about the Jackal is the gray area of his personal reasons for his career of choice. Does the Jackal get anything out of his job, like a sick blood lust? Is it ecstasy or pain? The film remains open about this, and in this sense it stays true to Zinnemann’s style.

Lonsdale is also great as Lebel, adding a “teddy bear” quality to the role of the gristly detective which brings both loathing and empathy to Fox’s Jackal. Their cat-and-mouse style of chase is classically directed using both drama and humor (Lebel is informed by his superiors that he’s not needed on the case anymore and is then later brought back, through a very humorous cut).

Although in many ways this is Zinnemann’s weakest film, it certainly has merit. One particular scene – the centerpiece and best part of the film – is the scene in which the Jackal tests the weapon he plans to use to kill De Gaulle. The scene takes place in an open field, miles away from civilization. The setting is ablaze with life, from the naturalistic sounds to the profuse ultra green of the environment. The Jackal hangs a watermelon between two trees, takes aim, and after a few shots the melon blasts into pieces. The visceral sequence is excruciatingly metaphoric and wildly affective, and while Zinnemann is famous for not creating political implications, one can’t help but realize who a 1970’s audience would perceive as the doomed melon: J.F.K.

However, the film does have its problems. For one thing, it’s just too long. There are surpluses of seemingly pointless scenes that are either too long or completely out of place. One of the Jackal’s many victims, a rich woman with whom he shares a bed, is realized to be dead and the chain of events that lead to this realization is just too stretched. The film earned an Oscar nomination for Best Editing. Maybe it would have won the award had the film been cut a bit shorter and felt just a little more organized. Nevertheless, with “The Day of the Jackal” Zinnemann further proved that he still had the directorial panache for creating exceptionally captivating tales.

this review first appeared on indiebum