During the time that we were distributing foreign films, we won more Best Foreign Film awards than any other company in the business. I did it partially to make money but also because I really wanted to distribute those films. I loved those films and thought I could do well by them. Major studios weren’t geared to properly distribute them and the afficionados hadn’t the clout to get good terms. I was able to give them more personal attention. For instance, there was a rose, I think a yellow rose, that was significant to the plot of Cries and Whispers. We had a charity screening at one of the art houses in Westwood and two of my assistants, dressed in long gowns, gave a yellow rose to the women who attended the screening. Normally we played off the art houses and that was the end of it, but we put Cries and Whispers into the drive-ins. Not many but a few. Everybody said we couldn’t do that. Ingmar Bergman thanked me when I met him at the Cannes Film Festival. I’d given him a bigger audience for his films.
When directors complain “Somebody recut my film,” it’s not as if somebody totally desecrated it. It is that you have a rhythm in mind, a certain way that you’re going to tell your story so that slowly, slowly it picks up velocity and then, boom!, it reveals itself. If somebody comes in in the middle of that velocity, while you’re building it, and says, “That’s too long, let’s speed it up here,” well, if you speed it up here, you’re robbing from the end. Everybody thinks that film is made up of little pieces. Actually film is one piece — one experience — and if you change that experience here, you change it, inevitably, there.
Peckinpah: I think the role of the critic is very important to films, and that’s why I get so goddamn angry when the critics don’t pick up on good films and go along with bullshit, as they did on Bogdanovich’s film, The Last Picture Show, which was a crashing bore, and ignore something like Two-Lane Black-top, which I thought was a potential work of art. The Last Picture Show was artsy-craftsy, jacksy-offsky and a real pain in the ass. I was supposed to have dinner one night with Ben Johnson, who was superb in it, but I knew Peter would be there and I’d have to hit him right in the fucking mouth, so I didn’t go. I really hated that film.
Playboy: What films have you liked recently?
Peckinpah: My own. I make marvelous films. I think Junior Bonner, which I shot in 40 days, may possibly be my best picture. I’m truly delighted with it. And I don’t think McQueen has ever been better, which is saying a lot. The picture’s about three days in the life of a bull rider, a loner on the rodeo circuit.
Playboy: What about The Godfather?
Peckinpah: Haven’t seen it — but I hate Coppola, too.
Playboy: Why?
Peckinpah: Because I hear the film is great and the only movies I want to like are my movies. I don’t want any other son of a bitch making good movies.
The Tree of Life is an American masterwork, despite its simplistic, cowardly embrace of Christian meaning as an answer to the inciting incident /question: “How do we justify the death of a child? What meaning is there in death and loss?” The easy answers offered still don’t negate the fact that the film renders the quite specific dynamic between a father/son and family in a physical visual manner that is, quite simply, pure cinema.
— Mike S. Ryan, “THE TREE OF LIFE: Film Print vs. Digital Print”
Mike Ryan’s Hammer to Nail piece is ostensibly about the superiority of film projection to digital projection vis-a-vis his multiple encounters with The Tree of Life, but, as indicated in the excerpt above, he goes on to address aspects of the film that are as far from technical as you can get. The breadth certainly doesn’t offend me — I value Hammer to Nail in part because editor Michael Tully allows his writers (among whom I count myself) a lot of elbow room. However, when I linked to Ryan’s piece on Twitter, I took exception to two of his most prominent assertions, inadvertently igniting a marvelous, revelatory exchange between Ryan Stewart and Eli Daughdrill. This showdown, which I’ve reconstituted and preserved below, is Twitter at its late-night best. (Please bear with the abbreviations and idiosyncrasies that are necessitated by the limitations of that fleeting form.) In an unprecedented move I’ve opened the comments on this post, as I find these matters highly discussable. So let’s rumble.
Alejandro: A) I don’t know how you can like Tree of Life without embracing its Christianity; B) It looks better shown digitally.
Ryan: That’s one of the dumber pieces I’ve read lately. A ‘masterwork’ and ‘cowardly’ at the same time?
Eli: art can’t b profound & problematic? art not same as rhetoric
Eli: ‘Masterwork’ might b hyperbolic, but the response is valid. I embraced the imagery but cringed at the intended significance.
Ryan: No one with a command of English would call something a “masterwork” then attack it as “cowardly.” High praise and
Ryan: withering criticism can’t be offered up in virtually the same breath.
Ryan: The whole piece is sub-intellectual. No one with even a glancing knowledge of art history would attack a work of art for
Ryan: for having a religious dimension. Most of history’s great art is grounded in religious devotion.
Eli: yes, because the Church often commissioned much of that work. in a secular culture, removed from the demands of such a patronage
Eli: it would seem Malick, as intelligent as he is, might b willing & free 2 define nature of existence beyond these antiquated ideals
Eli: therein lies the disappointment. but author’s intent does not define art. spectator can reject intended meaning & find their own
Eli: or create their own profound meaning.
Ryan: He’s a religious man. This is known. He goes to church regularly. You find Christianity antiquated? Fine, but attacking what
Ryan: is essentially the *stated* meaning and making up your own is just a flight of fancy. Grapple with what it is there.
Eli: so the pleasure of camp & unintended meaning is only reserved for “trashy” fare? that seems rhetorically & intellectually specious.
Ryan: Teaching philo at MIT isn’t ’secular cred’ enough to abate your high-handed dismissiveness of his true artistic intention?
Eli: not dismissive of him at all; I think he is brilliant. But when one makes something that attempts to define nature of existence
Eli: & uses Christianity/god as the final arbiter, I think it quite reasonable to protest, while not rejecting the work as a whole. &
Eli: this debate over intent has long been hashed out. The author of a work has no more claim to its meaning than any spectator.
Ryan: The piece in question doesn’t object politely, it accuses the filmmaker of being a philosophical simpleton and then
Ryan: assures the reader that he (the writer) can appreciate it on a level that the filmmaker himself would find dubious. It’s a
Ryan: childish and transparent attempt by the writer to bend everything to his will. Better to be J. Hoberman and say “it sucks.”
Eli: think we’re getting away from real issue here; to me, M. Ryan’s review is perfectly reasonable, because it’s not beholden to false
Eli: binary (the either/or of good/bad) that plagues most film criticism.
Eli: Can one be moved by an image, or a sequence, without seeing God in it, as Malick intends us to?
Eli: Can one appreciate Kanye West while detesting the Misogyny of his lyrics?
Ryan: No articulation of any such alternative reading is presented in the piece in question. It’s a straight dismissal of the
Ryan: film’s obvious philosophical underpinnings followed immediately by out-of-nowhere blanket praise. And no, I wouldn’t listen
Ryan: to anything I found to be distractingly misogynistic. There’s a lot of music in the world without that problem.
Eli: fair enough. I think we are ultimately talking about two different things. U are attacking the prose, ethos, & rhetoric, while I am
Eli: reacting to (& perhaps reading into) the response. This is where the rhetoric of criticism often falls short; it often fails in
Eli: capturing/explaining the equivocations & contradictions because criticism/rhetoric must b consistent & cogent. art often isn’t.
Josef von Sternberg is a director I came to admire fairly late. I saw a restored 35mm print of The Devil Is a Woman at the Stanford Theater last year — probably one of the best theatrical experiences of my life — and have also marveled at the fastidious technical bravado of Morocco and The Scarlett Empress and the inexplicable curiosity Anatahan, which I encouraged Criterion to release several years ago, along with bonus features I’d produce myself if necessary (my letter was…replied to).
As I’ve indicated in recent months, I’m a proponent of digital exhibition and proud that my theater is standardizing on Sony 4K projectors. Last night I had the opportunity to project a 16mm print of The Blue Angel and as charming as the experience qua experience may have been, I found the physical media cumbersome and the projected image horribly degraded to a degree that would have been difficult for me to fetishize with a straight face. The photos below were taken with my iPhone, which “improved” contrast considerably. The print seemingly represented by these images is one I would have preferred to the one I actually had my hands and eyes on.
Look of the Week host Sara Vizcarrondo was interviewed extensively by Dennis Willis of KGO radio earlier this week. Dennis expressed his fascination with the show in no uncertain terms, prompting Sara to reveal how it all began and outline my involvement, in terms shocking even to me. She also discussed her attempts to produce short films and documentaries after film school. The “he” Sara mentions at the beginning of this excerpt is, well, I’m blushing:
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Kevin Lee has asked me to write a monthly column at Fandor and I’ve obliged him. I’m honored to be writing for such a conscientious but visionary editor — I’m not surprised to find more than a few writers I’ve long admired in the Fandor stable. Here’s an excerpt from my first post, which concerns the behavior (or not) of Terrence Malick and Lars von Trier at (or not) Cannes:
That press conference is not only something [von Trier] controlled but something he gave birth to, a quasi-corporeal being unleashed to stalk and terrorize the Croisette. But this isn’t remarkable. No significant artist is contained by the bounds of his medium or by some 9-to-5 schedule during which he makes his art. He is always dynamically engaged, always making. The press conference video is just another exuberantly inventive experiment by Lars von Trier, not so different in spirit from The Five Obstructions. Really, it should have been eligible for the Palme.
From Noisemaker: Malick, Von Trier and the Right Kind of Wrong Publicity
For a few months now I’ve been butchering the TV talk show format as creator-producer of Sara Vizcarrondo’s Look of the Week. On episode 7, below, I make an appearance to discuss Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life.*
* May hurt the audience feelings.
Sometimes I self-assign my slogans (“Punching the quirk out of independent film since 2006″) and sometimes others assign them to me (“Choked with win,” “hilariously self-aggrandizing” — what a circular pair!), and here’s one I’ll appropriate from the conscientious organizers of the Cannes Film Festival: “May hurt the audience feelings.”
(Photo by Mike D’Angelo.)
I saw this 1965 Canadian National Film Board documentary at San Francisco International Film Festival. Leonard Cohen’s disarmingly candid self-scrutiny in the last few minutes is the only thing I’ve seen that rhymes with the self-deconstructing approach of my Caveh Zahedi project (begun in 2005 and currently limbo-lost). In our era of “brand-building” and carefully crafted public personae, Cohen’s coda is surprisingly instructive. “I’m a different style of man than I thought I was,” he says, studying his physique as it’s projected on the screen before him. And, yes, he’s shown in a small hotel bathtub asking himself in voice-over why he’s allowing someone to film him taking a bath.
Scan the frame from left to right: the flame-kissed knife, the forcibly intoxicated monkey, the chopping block on which the sailors will lop off the monkey’s gangrenous tail. Curious children look on.
Don’t be deceived by the fact that the producers originally had Hayley Mills in mind for the role of Emily. They needed a Deborah Baxter (above center) and after seeing 2000 girls they found one. Dry, lost, affectless, a frighteningly ambiguous and internalizing thing. I wonder though how much more duplicitous a work it would have been with Mills in the role — this is not a children’s film.
Pirates Quinn and Coburn, never so charmingly nefarious, never so indelible.
The guileless morbidity and irreverence of children at play, as in this mock burial-at-sea which offends the pirate. Bullet-point juxtapositions of various religious practices, varieties of corruption and depravity. Kids’ casual appropriation of religion and superstition reinforces their power. The pirates are unnerved. Though their lives depend on the literal — ropes, water, sails — their superstitions are strictly observed and not to be trifled with.
It’s okay to be shocked at what a fifty-year-old man and ten-year-old girl convey here. (Quinn inscribed Baxter’s sister’s autograph book “To my future sister in law!”)
And it goes on; there are nuances. Say what you will about the release of sexual tension in the scene where Emily’s leg is impaled by a spike.
The song “High on a Gallows Tree” which opens and closes the film grossly contradicts what Mackendrick accomplishes with a pathos hewn from more durable substances.
Children are usually made out to be such sentimental creatures, but here their pragmatic efficiency seems at times to register as more cynical and brutal than what the pirates are capable of. When Emily asks if her eldest brother is coming back, not knowing he’s dead, Coburn answers coldly, “He’s not coming back, he had an accident,” almost daring the child to have an emotional response. She says, “Edward wants to know if he can have his blanket.” Coburn is nonplussed. Survival requires terse negotiation. Neither Emily nor the viewer has time for tears — that suppression of emotional payoff is Mackendrick’s most sophisticated technique.
It’s useless to talk about what the film could have been, how much was cut, what Mackendrick actually intended. Shipwreck analogies are too easy.
I have now for more than a year, I believe, ceased to write in my journal, in which I formerly wrote almost daily. I see few intellectual persons, and even those to no purpose, and sometimes believe that I have no new thoughts, and that my life is quite at an end. But the magnet that lies in my drawer, for years, may believe it has no magnetism, and, on touching it with steel, it knows the old virtue; and, this morning, came by a man with knowledge and interests like mine, in his head, and suddenly I had thoughts again.
The biographer is a clerk. He lives with the growing archives of the materials of the life he studies. He goes out only to drag home the papers of another’s life. At home, these papers crowd out the prospect of his own life. He reads, refers, compares, eliminates; he deals in proof, veracity, likelihood. He wants to make chronology of his subject’s life so that he can properly narrate it as a life. So he tries to establish when, how and why this Orson Welles moved, say, from Munich to London to Barcelona to Marrakech…only to find that the maps and timetables do not fit. Welles does not travel coherently…He has no purpose except that of hoping to shrug off pursuit. He has no home, no archive, no library…
I despise excellence.
So said the fake Alejandro Adams Twitter account that upstaged the real me for ten days or so last summer, largely by quoting sometimes ill-advised tweets I’d lobbed in haste over a year before and had long since forgotten. “I despise excellence” is a more or less fitting surtitle for my top ten of 2010 list, in as much as I hated the following films:
The Social Network
Carlos
Dogtooth
Four Lions
Another Year
Black Swan
I Am Love
White Material
Amer
Everyone Else
Inception
Cyrus
Greenberg
Enter the Void
The Town
I’m Still Here
Vincere
Lebanon
The Kids Are All Right
Biutiful
True Grit
De gustibus non disputandum est, they say. Why the armor of Latin? So its ancientness will settle the matter. But we argue about taste because we have a sense — or maybe only poets do — that aesthetics — and by extension taste — is a moral thing. Thus these lists are not sport but a sanctified performance.
My Ten:
10. Etienne!
This is an appropriate place to mention that I’m adhering to the rules that confer credibility to lists of this kind: I’m talking only about films that had some manner of US theatrical release in 2010. This restriction illegitimizes festival fare, unfortunately. Etienne! screened at Cinema by the Bay 09 (my third feature Babnik screened as part of this SFFS program in November) but it wasn’t until September of 2010, nearly a year later, that it had a one-week booking at reRun in Brooklyn. Etienne! feels like one of those films you might have encountered at a festival between 1987 and 1991 — which makes you ask yourself whether it’s trying to feel like that, doing a ironic impersonation, oozing some rancid hipster fetish. But like Exit through the Gift Shop, Etienne! functions as a dialectic — the tension between this ethos and that ethos forges a third ethos, rather an anti-ethos, a taker of no sides. The ultimate intention of this work is inscrutable, maybe even to the author. The premise is posited sincerely yet prodded ironically — its maker is also its undoer; YouTube parodists will find nothing to scavenge. It sounds like a game — as many said of Exit through the Gift Shop — but it doesn’t matter which way is up, really. If it’s a postmodern puzzle, nothing is gained by solving it. Indeed, some may titter at Etienne! over their cans of PBR, but the shots of our chubby, mustachioed, ethnically-indeterminate hero huffing his bike over San Francisco hills with his cancer-stricken hamster lapping up air from its basket are emotionally exhilarating. Irony, we see you and raise you.
9. I Love You Phillip Morris
Four Lions denies its characters humanity for seventy minutes, then concedes in its final twenty. By the time pathos arrives, it’s way too late. The bumbling terrorist routine is rat-a-tatted at us until it feels like the film itself is an act of terrorism. This is the TV writer’s Sysiphean curse: writing the same joke over and over in order to create familiarity without escalation or payoff. I Love You Phillip Morris knows what Four Lions doesn’t, apparently — that there are only so many ways you can laugh at sensitive subjects like terrorism and homosexuality. And so Phillip Morris wisely provides its object of derision with an escape hatch. How about the scene where Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor slowdance in their prison cell while their neighbor is beaten by guards for piping out the song Carrey’s quasi-real-life sociopath has bartered for? We hear the off-screen mantra “My word is my muthafuckin bond” as the batons fall loudly on his thick body. Who’s laughing now? Here and there, when its montages aren’t too busy brilliantly skewering other montages, Phillip Morris is a striking and convincing tale of amour fou. With its vast irreverence, this film relieves the pressure some of us have felt since Philadelphia was an Oscar-winner with a song by Bruce Springsteen — that mid-nineties apotheosis of gay suffering is struck down mightily as Carrey’s character fakes the symptoms of AIDS in order to slip out of prison for the dozenth time. (Am I making you uncomfortable? Try watching the film.) And who hasn’t missed the broadest iteration of Mr. Carrey? This film gives us Ace Ventura “living high on the gay hog.” The resemblance of I Love You Phillip Morris to Chameleon Street is regrettable as that earlier, better film deserves far more recognition than it gets — another deliciously subversive comedy.
8. Lovers of Hate / Audrey the Trainwreck
These two micro-budget films contain trace elements of mumblecore, as both were made by fringedwellers of that movement. Audrey’s Frank V. Ross (never leave out the “V” or you’ll hear from him) made the best film of the first wave of mumblecore (Quietly On By) and he continues to out-do his brethren, though I’m sure they’ll tell you it’s not a competition. Lovers of Hate nobly makes the most of a single location — a “compound” film, I call it (I’ve made two myself). This one goes through the motions during its setup, but once its three characters are stuck in that house, the film’s unique brand of tension never lets up. There’s a lot in here about masculinity and what’s left of it in our culture. Can a cuckold recover his dignity or satisfactorily extract revenge through elaborate passive-aggressive games? No, but boy is it cathartic to watch him try. Audrey stars the pliable, reliable Anthony J. Baker (call me a fan) as a guy who, against all odds, uses a microwave, does laundry and gets to work more or less on time. There’s some online dating. Inventive sidebars abound, but Ross isn’t trying to be cute in a 500 Days of Summer way. Little things mount and people suddenly feel cornered. Ross can make small-stakes confrontations and fallings-out register more deeply than they should. He’s uncannily observant and quite good at telling you things about yourself that you probably should have known already. He’s like “Your elbow hurts when you move your arm like this, right?” and you’re like “…How did you know…?”
7. Tangled
Look, smarty-pants critics like Michael Sicinski, Richard von Busack and Adrian Curry (Pedro Costa made his favorite film of the year) admitted to liking this Disney-does-Rapunzel cartoon. As a New Yorker critic said, “There are no unnecessary pop references here, just fluid, graceful storytelling.” I parry with this information because I know how incredulous you are right now. Surely How To Train Your Dragon was better than Tangled, you say. Maybe in some ways. But Tangled takes a step backward in the most refreshing way — Mandy Moore voices Rapunzel without once referring to a Mandy Moore concert for instance. So that barnacle-like buildup of meta crud is on the wane, or Tangled is a lovely aberration. Either way, admiring a film’s throwbackiness is not the same as enjoying it. But I assure you that the songs, the one-liners, the sight gags and the supporting characters (particularly Maximus) are as entertaining as anything this worn out studio has done. I’ve seen this film in 3D seven times. I’ll see if it holds up in 2D and get back to you.
6. Somewhere
There are instances of my forgiving a film its massive flaws because it does a few things so right that they seem to have been bestowed by God. I didn’t get Lost in Translation at all. I think I got Marie Antionette but I was mostly so-what about it. Somewhere is too obvious in a lot of ways. Coppola’s emo leanings seep into the edge of the frame, coloring moments that want to seem as if they’re presented with a European yawn — she’s unimpressed by everything she depicts and thoroughly seduced by it at the same time. Fanning isn’t what I want in this film, even if Dorff is everything and more. The opening shot is like arm wrestling with someone who slams your hand to the table before you’re ready. The slow zoom on the plaster mask drying may be the best shot in any American film this year. Shot qua shot. A shot that risks being vapid, being about nothing. Maybe it is about nothing. Maybe the whole film is about nothing. Nowhere is somewhere, after all. Like I said, emo is in here. But so is the bit where a father apologizes to his daughter while a helicopter drowns out his impuissant voice. Uncomprehending, she smiles at him as she climbs into a car that will take her away for a while. They’ll go on together. Intermittently.
5. Le Amiche
Minor Antonioni? No such thing. If you think this guy was an unfeeling bastard more concerned with composition than people, FUCK YOU. I mean, watch Le Amiche and see if you still feel that way. (Thanks for inventing cinema, you unassuming badass.)
4. Exit through the Gift Shop
Marwencol is one kind of documentary, Inside Job is another. Exit through the Gift Shop joins F for Fake as…something else entirely. Banksy’s “street art” is known to exist only as a result of this so-called documentary — there is no hard evidence that his “pieces” ever actually appeared in any public place, despite the allegations of this film. Which I happen to have written and directed in 2005.
3. Jackass 3D + DBOX
The opening extravaganza. The finale. And about a third of what’s in between. All hail DBOX.
2. Alamar
I wrote about this elsewhere. Which is too bad. I’d like to answer its profound silences with profound silence.
1. Secret Sunshine / Mother
Those Koreans are a goddamn genius. Secret Sunshine is the film A Serious Man wanted to be — though it ends with something like Christian uplift instead of Jewish downpush. These films feature two of the best roles for women anywhere, ever. I wept.
Yep.
Orson applauds my interview with Vadim Rizov.
“I love talking to actors but I don’t want to talk to them when we’re shooting. When we’re shooting, we’re shooting. I care a great deal about the image, and I’m involved in all the technical decisions, so at that point I’m having a relationship with the camera rather than the actor and it had better be evident on screen. Too often in films you can see the director having a relationship with his actors at the expense of the camera or a relationship with the camera at the expense of the actors. My films are not made of compromises. I want a certain thing from the actors and I want a certain thing from the cameras and I’m going to have both or I’m not going to bother making the film.”
One afternoon I went to Soho and met my old boyfriend. I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a dozen years. He took me to his gallery and pulled out some paintings from the storage racks in back. The room seemed familiar. I realized it was the gallery location used in the film An Unmarried Woman.
Something inside me started to laugh. I was standing in the exact fantasy of my girlhood. There I was in a big gallery with this artist, an intellectual cowboy with a sense of humor, showing me his paintings. Telling me about them. Other people were crowding around.
He took me to lunch. We talked. He remembered all sorts of little details about things we had done together. I don’t have that kind of memory. Francis does. As he talked, I realized that he is the same kind of romantic as Francis, with the same kind of obsession about his work, same vivid, visual fantasy life. A person easily bored, continually setting impossible goals, stimulated by risks and crises.
Perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world…
A headmaster of my acquaintance sent me an article commenting on the loss of heroes for today’s youth. The article concluded, as all such articles must, with a solution to the problem, in this case a strategy for presenting George Washington, of all people, in some way that was guaranteed to secure the admiration of students. I barely glanced at it. There is no such strategy. Just talking about “how to present” is already hopeless capitulation…
The central irony is that we don’t have heroes anymore because the are too real, representations of them are too rich and detailed. There is no space for our imaginations to occupy, no room for us to supply them with mythic life. The old-style heroes had an intimidating kind of greatness that could make you feel like not bothering to develop your own average greatness. We no longer approve of that demanding kind of greatness; what we want now is a supportive and inclusive kind of greatness.
Pauline Kael was particularly gifted at sensing differences among directors, often making brutal distinctions when appraising a given vision or stylistic predilection. The following excerpts, taken from reviews of Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning and Huston’s The Bible, present a unified aesthetic front. I find these passages both instructive and inspiring, as I’m afflicted with the kind of cinematic wildness she meticulously congratulates here. (I also happen to like the phrases “screen artist,” “movie-making sixth sense,” “sinfully extravagant” and “Promethean temperament.”)
“Boudu is a more leisurely film than we are used to now, not that it is long, or slow, but that the camera isn’t in a rush, the action isn’t overemphatic, shots linger on the screen for an extra split second — we have time to look at them, to take them in. Renoir is an unobtrusive, unselfconscious storyteller: he doesn’t ‘make points,’ he doesn’t rub our noses in ‘meaning.’ He seems to find his story as he tells it; sometimes the improvisation falters, the movie gets a little untidy. He’s not a director to force things; he leaves a lot of open spaces. This isn’t a failure of dramatic technique: it’s an indication of that movie-making sixth sense that separates a director like Renoir from a buttoned-up-tight gentleman-hack…He lets a movie breathe…Renoir’s camera reveals the actors as if they were there naturally or inadvertently — not arranged for a shot but found by the camera on the streets, in the shop, on the banks of the Seine. The camera doesn’t overdramatize their presence, it just — rather reticently — picks them up, and occasionally lets them disappear from the frame, to be picked up again at a later point in their lives.”
“John Huston is an infinitely more complex screen artist than David Lean. He can be far worse than Lean because he’s careless and sloppy and doesn’t have all those safety nets of solid craftsmanship spread under him. What makes a David Lean spectacle uninteresting finally is that it’s in such goddamn good taste. It’s all so ploddingly intelligent and controlled, so ‘distinguished.’ Lean plays the game of spectacles like a sane man. Huston tests himself, plays the crazy game crazy — to beat it, to win…
Huston shoots arrows all over the place; he pushes himself too hard, he tries to do too many things. [The Bible] is episodic not merely because the original material is episodic but also because, like Griffith in Intolerance, he can find no way to rhythm together everything he’s trying to do. Yet the grandeur of this kind of crazy, sinfully extravagant movie-making is in trying to do too much. We tend, now, to think of the art of the film in terms of depth, but there has always been something about the eclectic medium of movies that, like opera, attracts artists of Promethean temperament…I don’t mean men like DeMille who made small-minded pictures on a big scale — they’re about as Promethean as a cash register. I mean men like Griffith and von Stroheim and Abel Gance and Eisenstein and Fritz Lang and Orson Welles who thought big, men who’s prodigious failures could make other people’s successes look puny.”
As a too-cerebral writer I found relief in a medium — film — that curtailed my ability to express ideas. I aspire to thought-as-organism.
Antonioni is mistaken for cerebral because of his formal rigidity — but his treatment of themes is inconclusive, childlike, “discoverist.”
The perfect cinematician knows what he wants to talk about but not what he wants to say. Thematic clarity and tendentiousness are not the same.
Antonioni and Bresson, for instance, arranged people and staged events in order to look at them, in order to reflect and discover.
The barbaric certitude of a Bergman or Godard offends — in them I see only SIGNS of that testable, quantifiable commodity we call intelligence.
There are dangers, too, in characterizing intelligence as dynamism and adaptability, using words like “organic” and “vital” and “intuitive.”
We might be more intimidated than inspired by the dynamism of some of our heralded broncos — Welles, Cassavetes, Coppola, Carax.
I’m particularly concerned about the limitations — even dangers — which beset this strain of filmmaker. Enfant terrible? Genius? Just labels.
The apotheosis of Cassavetes at the hands of Ray Carney is largely fraudulent and has tended to produce cultish behavior in acolytes.
[Thursday, June 24, 2010, from Twitter]
Bertolucci builds a structure that supports improvisation. Everything is prepared, but everything is subject to change, and the whole films is alive with a sense of discovery… And Brando knows how to improvise: it isn’t just Brando improvising, it’s Brando improvising as Paul… His performance is intuitive, rapt, princely… At a more complex level, he helps Bertolucci discover the movie in the process of shooting it, and that’s what makes moviemaking an art… Acting involves the joy of self-discovery, and to improvise, as actors mean it, is the most instinctive, creative part of acting–to bring out and give form to what you didn’t know you had in you… A director has to be supportive for an actor to feel both secure enough and free enough to reach into himself…
The camera is only a dumb machine; it makes no claims to authority. Indeed, the camera is capable of making no claims, no assertions about the world, at all. Everything revealed by the camera has been revealed to the camera, revealed by its subjects in the camera’s presence. And there is no such thing as a revelation that is not true…
Documentaries are not inherently more direct or truthful than other kinds of films. But from this fact it does not follow that documentaries are too naive to take seriously unless they repudiate the aspiration of revealing reality. What particular documentary films reveal about reality, how they achieve their revelations, are questions to be addressed by acts of criticism, not settled a priori by theoretical fiat.
I won’t make a speech, but I’ll be glad to answer any questions. If I make a speech I’ll be fifty percent wrong, and if I answer your questions I’ll only be a little wrong…
In the first place, improvisation is a silly word because when you have a scene to do, you don’t really know anything about it until you see the people that are going to act in the picture. I’m more interested in fitting the story around the actors. A script is an important basis, but it doesn’t have to be followed exactly…A good example was a week before starting a new picture with John Wayne. I was down in Mexico on location and found a Mexican boy who I thought was awfully good. I made a test for him for a small part and gave him the lead opposite Wayne…
Actors per se I don’t give too much a hoot about, but personalities I do. I can take a personality and make something out of him, though I’ve worked with a lot of personalities who were both personalities and good actors, like Gary Cooper.
The adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass without impunity.
Movies always belonged to one man — the director — and early movie-makers like Griffith and Chaplin knew it. Then along came talking pictures. Words are something else again, and they frightened the boys who didn’t know many, so they brought out good writers like Faulkner and Fitzgerald. But such people can’t and don’t take, or even understand, fiddling and mangling, and so they were lost or went away. Right then and there it should have been obvious that a new method had to be found…Why not a new kind of script? A kind of outline of action, the sequences in order, the characters loosely defined, the end in view. Beyond that — and that, of course, is a great deal — you would write only the first few lines of each scene, leaving the rest to be improvised, going loose with what is there, or throwing it out if something better came along…That’s the kind of script I’d like to try someday.
Jarrod Whaley and I discuss Canary and our respective filmmaking processes in the following audio clip, which is largely interviewesque. (We were drinking heavily and eating popcorn, and so should you.)
“What you’ve done with Canary is a con job,” begins Whaley, forcing me to “map the distinction between effect and intention” and to lament the general vulnerability of the film in question. Later we discuss Whaley’s new feature film, which is nominally adapted from Flaubert’s Un coeur simple. Elisions in the recording are marked with bleeps.
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(Clip details: MP3, 24 minutes)
These days, we look down on physical comedy; critics like to say that movies “descend” into slapstick. Physical comedy has gained a reputation for being cheap, an easy way out for directors and performers when their ideas run dry…Early movies didn’t descend; they rose to the occasion of a speedy, febrile art that was itself founded on the spinning of a reel, whereas the physical gags of today (what you can find of them) come across as mean and tired.
In the context of Soviet revolutionary thought, any film which betrayed the socioideological matrix on which it was produced, which was not devoted to the betterment of man within the social context but was rather a function of the director’s special interests, was presumed to indulge in the luxury of decadence or narcissism. It placed individual interest above the collective need. Moreover, nihilism in the Soviet film could be depicted as an assault on human fulfillment, but to have portrayed it as an ultimate human condition was to presume an elitist omniscience which by definition impoverished humanity and deterministically alienated the artist from the people.
Under the influence of dialogue, camera angles are devalued and individual scenes are lengthened, thus doing away with montage; how the travelling shot predominates; how the actor usurps the space in the image; and how the exterior plot atrophies in favor of the spoken word…What [we see] is no longer film at all.
I love his work and I love him as a person, if he is a person, which I doubt, because he has no limits; he’s just like quicksilver — all over the place. I have never seen anybody like that before.
He is enormously intuitive. He is intuitive; he is creative; he is an enormous force. He is burning inside with such heat. Collapsing. Do you understand what I mean? The heat from his creative mind, it melts him. He suffers from it; he suffers physically from it.
Amity
