Category Archives: Movies

FORTY GUNS

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If you haven't seen it, there's no way I can convey to you how strange this 1957 Samuel Fuller Western is.  I can tell you it's about a mythically powerful woman who rides the territory of her ranch with forty hired guns, like an escort of armed valets.  She is a primal variant of the femme fatale, wreaking havoc on a world of collapsed males.  Her type is not unknown in films of the Fifties, especially in film noir, but here she takes on the dimensions of a Greek goddess, terrible and timeless.

Her power is contested, and ultimately overcome, by a man willing to stand up to her, reducing her to a state of pliant femininity — which rarely happens in film noir — but at the same time she's such a vivid embodiment of the nightmare of the collapsed male that the triumph of the hero here feels provisional.  She might have been vanquished in last night's dream, but she'll be back in tomorrow night's dream — you can count on it.  The threat she poses is eternal.  (Fuller had a darker fate in mind for his fatal femme but the studio vetoed the idea.)

What I can't convey is the American-Gothic vision of the Old West Fuller has concocted — it's as though Poe has lit out for the territory and found the same sickly-sweet decay in the Western myth that he found in the European myths back east.



Fuller deconstructs the classic beauty of the best-looking Western films, of Ford and Wyler and Hawks, by pushing their methods into realms of extreme self-consciousness.  His camera travels endlessly on tracks, swoops deliriously on cranes, exaggerating the conventions into a new form, one with no restraints on style.

This is a Rococo Western, in which style breaks loose from narrative goals and serves only archetype.

It's a very odd and very beautiful film, and not like any other I know.  By the time directors like Godard began to embrace Fuller's daring methods of self-conscious filmmaking, they were ready to abandon genre itself, except as an ironic referent.  (It's worth noting, however, that Godard quoted a shot from Forty Guns in Breathless — it was clearly on his mind as he began to forge his own style.)

Fuller stays inside the Western genre in Forty Guns but lays waste to it mercilessly from within.  Only a man who loved the form could have done this, just as only a man who loved women could have feared them as much as Fuller fears the commander of the forty guns, the high ridin' woman with the whip.

DYLAN AND GODARD

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Jean-Luc Godard always had a strong identification with Bob Dylan, a sense that their careers, their artistic journeys and even their lives were somehow linked, even though they never worked together.  The idea is not as strange as it sounds.  Both were artists steeped in tradition, the tradition of cinema in Godard's case and the tradition of American music in Dylan's.  Both were looking for ways to bring what they loved from those traditions into the present, to give them a form that would be alive for the future.  Both were re-mixers, who made startling recombinations of old things that they then inflected with a purely contemporary resonance.

Both also had serious motorcycle accidents that resulted in periods of seclusion.



In the late 70s, each artist began to lose touch with his traditional audience — Dylan wasn't making much of a showing on the charts anymore, Godard was finding it harder and harder to get financing for his films.  They weren't cutting the same figures on the cultural stage that they had in previous years.



Godard took an interest in Dylan's fortunes, kept track of his successes and failures — since they seemed in some ways to mirror his own.  It wasn't just a question of sympathy with a fellow artist in a similar predicament — it was a question of an almost mystical identification with one of the only artists of the 20th Century operating at his level of genius and accomplishment, and thus one of the only artists of their time who could possibly understand what it felt like to be Jean-Luc Godard in commercial and cultural isolation.



Most surprisingly, Godard has reported that when Dylan “turned to Christ” in 1978, he said to himself, “That will happen to me, too.”  Then he forgot about it, until he made Hail Mary in 1984.  “Look,” he said.  “Dylan warned me.”

MICRO MOVIE ESSAY: CHAMPS CONTRE CHAMPS

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                                                                                                                                                                   [Photo by Jae Song]

Another micro movie essay on cinema, from the usual suspects, Kendra and the three J's — Champs
Contre Champs, French for shot-countershot, one of Jean-Luc Godard's
bêtes noires. Find out why!

Micro Movie Essay #4 — Champs Contre Champs:

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Prescription for the future of cinema — go back to the beginning and rethink everything.

OFFSCREEN

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André Bazin (above) wrote some of the most penetrating analyses of how screen images work, but, as I’ve suggested before, he had a blind spot in his obsession with a movie’s connection to visual fact, its function in providing “evidence”.  He was saying something important about the psychological effect of the camera’s intimate relationship to physical reality, but his theories can’t explain why the imaginary spaces created in animation, for example, can have the same emotional and psychological power, the same cinematic power, as spaces recorded photographically.



This blind spot also led Bazin to draw a misleading contrast between stage space and screen space.  With stage space, he argued, we’re always half aware of the backstage machinery that creates theatrical illusion, while a screen image gives the illusion that it’s only a window onto a wider, complete world.

This is not always true, even — perhaps especially — in the work of one of Bazin’s heroes, Orson Welles.  I recently ran across a passage from the critic Chris Fujiwara which sums the issue up nicely:

In radio, all space is “off” and is evoked by sound, which alone has
materiality. From his experience in radio, Welles sometimes brings to
film a purely vocal offscreen space, as in the scene of the dying Major
Amberson contemplating something that “must be in the sun.” But
offscreen space as conjured by the looks and movements of characters to
impose an imaginary spatial coherence – this is something Welles has
little interest in. He prefers to leave offscreen space unfilled, to
reorganize the world with each cut, or to deny the offscreen by
enfolding all space, all revelation within a single shot. Welles’s
cinema is a forgetting of offscreen space, a denial of its potency.

This strikes me as quite true.  The amazing long take in The Magnificent Ambersons of George eating strawberry shortcake in the kitchen as he talks to Fanny and then to Uncle Jack behind him in a deep onscreen space, seems to me to represent a precise and wholly self-contained theatrical environment.  Even though the shot records a convincingly “real” place, I still feel that Uncle Jack enters the scene in the far background from “the wings”.

Welles has thoroughly theatricalized that space — we have no appreciable sense at all of a wider, complete world beyond it.

[The Fujiwara quote comes from a special issue of La Furia Umana, an online cinema magazine, devoted to Welles — which I found via Wellesnet.  The issue contains articles on Welles in English and in other languages.]

MICRO MOVIE ESSAY: TRACKING

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Kendra, James, Joe and Jae return in a new essay on cinema — Tracking!
— which critics are already calling the greatest micro movie ever
made.  Personally, I don't see how it can ever be surpassed.  Craig
Schober records sound and helps move the platform!  David Ure assists! 
The screen explodes with excitement!

Micro Movie Essay #3 — Tracking:

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Prescription for the future of cinema — go back to the beginning and rethink everything.

COMANCHE STATION

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Budd Boetticher's Comanche Station might just be the greatest film ever shot in twelve days.  It's lean and mean, with a small cast, absolutely no interiors and only two exterior sets that needed dressing.  Its script is short, with terse dialogue that suggests much without going into detail about anything.

As a model for how to shoot landscapes, with people and horses moving through them, the film cannot be bettered, even in John Ford's Western oeuvre.  Some of the long tracking shots of people riding and talking are like self-contained lyric poems.  The action sequences are choreographed with unerring skill, a sure sense of the drama inherent in complex movements through space — beautiful without ever becoming glamorous.

Horses are not props in this film, as they are in almost all modern Westerns — they are true characters in the story, shot with admiration and respect for their magnificence and grace and power.  Boetticher knows that a horse and rider crossing a deep river is among the most beautiful things it's possible to witness on this earth.

One could almost call this a chamber Western, except that there are no chambers in it — only rugged country and big skies and people trying to stand out against them.  In Boetticher's universe, they do this by acts of moral, not physical, heroism, although the latter tend to flow inevitably from the former.  It's a small work by Hollywood standards, but it's bigger than Avatar in its mastery of storytelling and cinematic form — it gets its 3D effects the old-fashioned photo-chemical way.  It dazzles, blows you away, by its simple, elegant perfection.

RIO GRANDE

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Rio Grande, from 1950, the last film in John Ford’s cavalry trilogy, isn’t really about the cavalry, it’s about marriage, and like any serious work about marriage it deals with the subject of boundaries — boundaries respected, boundaries transgressed and boundaries transcended.

“Love is the mutual respect of two solitudes,” says Rilke, but in a marriage those two solitudes interpenetrate, in the partnership of daily living, in sexual intercourse and in the not unrelated phenomenon of bringing children into the world.  To say that it gets complicated is to put it very mildly indeed.

The river that gives this film its title is itself a boundary, of course, between two countries.  Its very name embodies its divisive nature — on the Mexican side, the river is called the Rio Bravo, reminding us that people don’t always have the same names for the things that separate them, complicating communication considerably.  The river is problematic for the film’s protagonist, Colonel Kirby Yorke, played by John Wayne, because Apaches living on the Mexican side are raiding into U. S. territory and he can’t follow them back to their refuge below the border.

He is compelled to respect the boundary and also to find a way out of the dilemma this places him in.  He offers to put his command under the authority of the Mexican army for the purposes of a punitive expedition against the Apaches, who are bedeviling Mexicans as well, but national pride prevents the Mexican army from accepting help.

This is a fine set-up for a Western adventure film, but it’s only a metaphor for the film’s real drama, which concerns Colonel Yorke’s marriage.

Yorke has been estranged from his wife for seventeen years, ever since, under orders, he burned down her family’s Virginia plantation during the Civil War, after which she came to hate soldiers, the profession of soldiering, and him.  She took their infant son with her when she left him, but the son has become a soldier himself now, seventeen years later, against her will, and has been assigned to serve under his father at the remote fort near the Rio Grande.

Kathleen Yorke, played by Maureen O’Hara, shows up at the fort to purchase her son’s release from the army — but neither the son nor the father is prepared to sign the necessary papers, as they stare each other down across another kind of chasm, the awful chasm that exists between a father and son who don’t know each other.

Here, then, is one spectacularly dysfunctional family.  Proximity saves them — proximity and the ritual etiquette of military life, of gallantry between the sexes.  With personal passions roiling beneath the surface, they treat each other with respect, obeying the outward forms of civility, long enough to get to the bottom of things, to transcend their personal passions — bitterness, suspicion, resentment, shame, wounded pride.

The outward forms of civility, military and courtly, are all about respecting boundaries — establishing a border between people across which they have a chance of seeing each other as individuals.

But these borders exist to be crossed — and this is the ultimate profound and paradoxical message of Ford’s film.  Yorke’s commanding general finally orders him to cross the Rio Grande in pursuit of the Apaches, in violation of international law.  Yorke finally hauls off and kisses his wife, transgressing the line she has drawn between them.  His wife offers to clean and repair his uniform — his soldier’s uniform, the symbol of everything she despises about him.  The son crosses his own boundary into self-sufficient manhood, and the parents allow him to do it — and their re-established love for each other gives them the courage to do it.

People who see this film as simplistic, as an old-fashioned celebration of gallantry towards women, of military life, completely miss the point.  The darkness in Yorke’s soul, the existential loneliness of his wife and son, are as devastating as any portraits of despair in a film noir.  The rituals that save them are also the rituals that imprison them.  There is no simple way to cross the Rio Grande — the cost of the crossing is enormous, almost more than the characters can bear.  But the only salvation lies on the other side of the river.

Rio Grande is a film often damned with faint praise, but it’s one of the greatest of all American films, and in its deceptively simple, elegiac way, one of the deepest and wisest films ever made about marriage.

It’s a film whose sublime artistry is disguised by hiding in plain sight.  Take for example the remarkable sequence in which Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr. put on a display of Roman riding — galloping around a ring and taking a jump while standing on the backs of two horses running together.  It’s a display enacted mostly for the Yorkes’ son Jeff, who must then try it himself, with mixed results.

Jeff has to learn a similar skill in life — finding a footing in the world of his mother and the world of his father, before he can come into his own as a man.  And they must relearn how to work as a team in order to give him a chance to find that footing.  The whole interior psychology of the film is thus summed up in a series of stunning visual images that on the surface read as a throwaway action interlude.

Cinema just doesn’t get any better or more eloquent than this.

[With special thanks to Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans for the illustrations.]

UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME

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Une Femme Est Une Femme was Jean-Luc Godard’s third feature film and first in widescreen and color.  It’s a work of narrow but intriguing ambitions.  Godard said that it was a film about the tragic fact that life is not a Hollywood musical.  It evokes the surreal effects and moods of a Hollywood musical without the virtuosity of dance and vocal performance Hollywood could provide, resulting in an unsettled and unsettling tone.

On one level the film is an attempt to imagine Anna Karina, Godard’s muse at the time, as a creature of the mythic territory of the great MGM musicals.  Godard even has his actress, in character, say that she wants to star in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly.

Karina has the charm and beauty and screen presence for this but not the dancing and singing chops.  So the silly romantic comedy plot, and the somewhat dimwitted bourgeois characters caught up in it, keep dragging the film relentlessly back into the mundane.

This can be read in several different ways — as a critique of bourgeois culture, enchanted and misled by an illusory screen world it cannot ever be a real part of . . . as a hopeless fantasy by Godard about his lover actually inhabiting such a world, or about himself actually creating one cinematically.  One suspects that Godard was in part just covering himself with the notion of the film as a critique — that his own fantasies played as much a part in the film’s creation as his theoretical deconstruction of the musical form.

This dynamic haunts all of Godard’s cinema — he came to hate the part of himself that was enchanted and misled by Hollywood, but it remained a part of him.  For Godard, celebrating and reviling the Hollywood cinema were two sides of the same coin, reflecting a singular passion for and contentious dialogue with American films.

By deconstructing the odd conventions of American musicals, pushing them into a new mode of self-consciousness, Godard teaches us a lot about how these Hollywood films seduce us, move us half-consciously into a cinematic dream.

Karina’s petulant, amoral femme is not a terribly appealing character, but when she sings, however amateurishly, in one of the film’s fractured production numbers, when she smiles sweetly at the camera, to let us know she’s in on the joke, she wins us over — transports us out of the banal narrative and dialogue into a world where wonders might be possible.  She can’t keep us there, or transcend the mundane world her character inhabits through virtuoso dancing or singing, but she shows us how the door into transcendence is opened.

Although this film has a fairly conventional story, and a lighthearted tone, it is in some ways the most severely theoretical of Godard’s early films — or perhaps one should say it is best appreciated on that level today.  As a “documentary” about Karina behaving in front of the camera the film bears too much evidence of Godard’s self-indulgent obsession with the woman herself.  The film’s whimsy hasn’t aged at all well.

There are no moments of genuine movie musical magic — such as can be found in the Madison dance in Bande À Part, for example, which, modest as it may be by MGM standards, was achieved the old-fashioned way, by a month of daily rehearsals before shooting.

As a meditation on, as a hopeless love letter to American musicals, the film rewards close investigation, however, and is a fascinating case study in Godard’s problematic relationship with American cinema in general, which ravished and horrified him in equal measure.  American cinema is the real femme of the film’s title, the real subject of its final punning lines.

“Tu es infâme,” says the Brialy character to his lover — you are despicable.  “Non,” says Karina’s character, with a last irresistible wink and smile, “je suis une femme” — I’m just a woman.  From somewhere in between these two views, of women and of Hollywood, all the contradictions of Godard’s own practice of cinema arise.

STILL BREATHLESS

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In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its release, I just watched Breathless again, in the fine DVD version by Criterion.

I first saw it in the mid-Sixties, when I was teenager.  I don’t remember thinking of it as revolutionary, just fun.  In retrospect, this seems odd, because the film was revolutionary in its transgression of the technical norms of telling a story on film.  I was delighted when Belmondo’s character addressed the camera at the beginning and said, “If you don’t like the French countryside, then fuck you,” but somehow it didn’t take me out of the story, which worked as a drama and as a critique of the medium simultaneously.



What this must mean is that film lovers of my generation were already so steeped in cinematic conventions that we were becoming self-conscious about them, at least on some level — Godard’s self-consciousness as a filmmaker resonated with our own perception of those conventions, as a collection of clichés.  We didn’t have to move towards Godard’s radical vision — he was moving towards ours.

The film seems much more revolutionary today than it did when it first came out — because cinema has still not caught up with it.  Visionary filmmakers like Charlie Kauffman and Quentin Tarrantino are still trying to wrench us out of our enchantment with studio-era conventions, without losing sight of their virtues, but they’re using a sledgehammer to do it — screaming about it.

Godard just did it, as though it was no big deal.  Filmmakers appropriated his techniques, like the jump cut within scenes, but only as elements of a style, missing the depth and grace of Breathless as it pointed the way towards a future that we’re still waiting for.