Category Archives: Movies

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

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My friend Cotty writes to recommend the film The Edge Of Heaven and to record his disappointment at the small size of the audience he saw it with.  He concludes:

Strange times in the movie business. Five independent distributors have disappeared or been absorbed or are under severe threat, all within the last sixty days. Warner Independent, Picturehouse, New Line, Vantage, and ThinkFilm all going or gone. Who will make and distribute movies that rely on audiences caring to leave the house just for the sake of the experience of the emotional connection that only movies can bring?

Despite complaints from disappointed or estranged film-makers, the fault, I think, lies not in our stars, or their managers or their studio enablers, but in ourselves. If we don't go, why should they build it?

Perhaps the Obama candidacy can revive a sense of connection, can remind us of a common experience of America's great strength in diversity, her powerful e pluribus unum past and the blunt necessity of shared response to global problems. But it will come too late to help Strand Releasing [distributor of The Edge Of Heaven] in its attempt to bring you a lovely and cinematic time in the darkened common room that is a movie theater.

Good thoughts for these bad movie times, but I'm inclined to play the Devil's advocate and argue that the public is never wrong — that if good people shun good films, then there's something wrong with the films, at least as works of popular art.  Films can be good and still not be works of popular art, but why are there so few good popular films?

The example of Obama's candidacy does, I think, point to the answer.  Four years ago the American public rejected, by a slim margin, John Kerry, who would (I think we can all now say in hindsight) have been a better President than George Bush . . . but he wasn't the sort of President most Americans wanted.  His candidacy reeked of Democratic Party caution and calculation, his case to the public was cast in Senatorial, which is to say, conventional Washington, rhetoric.  He was a new version of the same old thing, so why not stick with the familiar version of the same old thing already installed in the White House?

If John Kerry and George Bush really are the same old thing, fundamentally, why not choose the guy you'd rather have a beer with?  If the latest art-house release and the latest action-hero extravaganza are just variations on outdated paradigms, why not go see the one with the loudest explosions, the one everybody at school is going to be talking about next week?

One can come up with rational arguments against these propositions — like the war in Iraq, for example, or the mind-numbing boredom of too much CGI — but culture, political and artistic, is not a purely rational thing.  It's too easy to convince yourself that George Bush might have known what he was doing when he invaded Iraq, or that the next Spiderman film is going to kick ass.

When politics and/or popular art don't reach something higher in us than business as usual, than commodity merchandising, we tend to rebel and refuse to make sensible distinctions between good and bad products.  We often act against our own best interests out of a kind of unconscious rage . . . because we don't want politics or popular art to be about “products” at all, or not only about products.

I think this explains why Republicans have been able to persuade lower-income Americans to vote Republican against their own economic interests by pushing “values” buttons — by suggesting that gay marriage, for example, is an assault on “the traditional family”.  It's irrational, but to such Americans even an irrational vote in favor of “the traditional family” makes more sense than pretending that one corporate-sponsored political product is better than another.

On the left, the phenomenon would explain all the votes for Ralph Nader in 2000, which may well have cost Al Gore the Presidency.  More importantly, it explains the millions in the last two elections who voted with their rear-ends by planting them firmly on their couches and staying away from the polls altogether.  Again, it seems irrational, contrary to self-interest, but in fact reflects, at least on one level, a perfectly rational disgust with the whole system.

This year the Democratic Party machine, with its support for Hillary Clinton, tried to offer Americans an even newer version of the same old political product — a female political product! — and came very close to putting it over on us.

Obama beat her not because he had a more effective mask covering his political product-ness — a black political product! — but because his whole campaign, everything about him, felt genuinely different.  He spoke in a new kind of language which we've hardly ever heard from Washington, he raised money from small-time donors which made him independent of the Democratic Party machine, he sent out an army of organizers who didn't look or act or talk like party hacks.

And yet . . . he spoke to old values, to popular concerns, to the shared e pluribus unum past Cotty mentions, one that is still with us, still capable of inspiring us.

The lesson in this for me, as it relates to movies, is that the mass of people don't really want anything that has the stink of current movie logic on it — neither wonderful little art-house movies nor committee-made would-be blockbusters.  They'll settle for them, if they can't get anything better, but in smaller and smaller numbers and with less and less enthusiasm.

They want something that feels different on a molecular level, the way Obama's campaign feels different on a molecular level.  They want a change, a fundamental change — even though that change, like Obama's rhetoric, may take us back to old, forgotten truths.

Movies, like Obama, don't have to choose between an isolated integrity and pandering to the tastes of the masses — they can choose another path . . . honoring the tastes of the masses, as Obama has honored the aspirations of a broad public.  The key is believing that the aspirations of the broad public are worth honoring, and trusting the broad public to respond.  It requires a leap of faith, a violation of all conventional wisdom, a wild kind of hope.  It requires, in short, something as improbable as Barack Obama's candidacy.

So my question to filmmakers is, as one Obama bumper sticker puts it — Got hope?

THE CLOCK

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THE FILM

The genius of Hollywood in its Golden Age was in glamorizing simple virtue — the most famous case in point being Casablanca, which managed to make the sacrifice of true love for a higher cause seem unspeakably cool.

Another film made during and about WWII is in some ways even more impressive and certainly more moving.  In Vincente Minnelli's The Clock Judy Garland plays a Manhattan secretary who meets a serviceman, played by Robert Walker, on 48-hour leave in the city before heading overseas.

What “heading overseas” suggested when the film was made (1944) has to be kept in mind while watching The Clock today, because it's crucial to every moment of the film, which takes the full measure of what it means to fall in love in the face of mortal peril.  In some ways the gravity of the lovers' predicament in this tale is what allows Minnelli to pull off the miracle at the heart of it — giving the story of two totally ordinary people the grandeur of the most sublime romance from legend or myth.

James Agee wrote a beautiful appreciation of the film when it came out, which can be found in his collected criticism, Agee On Film, and can't be improved upon, but check out this interesting view from a contemporary blog, The Sheila Variations.  It's worth pointing out, too, that this was the first non-musical film directed by Minnelli and produced by Arthur Freed, who had the previous year collaborated on one of the greatest movies ever made in Hollywood, Meet Me In St. Louis, a musical also starring Judy Garland.

Garland and Minnelli were in love during the making of these films, and Minnelli's feeling for the actress informs every frame of them — she is a radiant being in these movies, glamorized, certainly, but in a down-to-earth way that suggests the way ordinary people glamorize a new love.  Minnelli seemed to find everything about her enchanting, which is why he could present her in such simple roles without feeling a need to “sell” her charms in any way, to make her larger than life.  For him, clearly, she was already larger than life, even when she walked across a room or ate some soup.

Garland doesn't behave like a star in The Clock — she doesn't need to.  The state of being loved relieves her of the need to appeal to any outside authority for approval.  The result is paradoxical.  She grows as an actor, becomes more fascinating as a screen presence, even as she retires into herself, makes us comes to her.

Like James Cameron's Titanic, The Clock manages to convey the narrative of a life-long love in a very compressed period of time — the awareness of death in both stories allows us, as it forces the characters, to read immense import into the simplest gestures, the most modest acts of sympathy and kindness, the plainest impulses of physical attraction.

In The Clock, as in the beginning of any real love affair, less is more.  The way Garland adjusts Walker's tie at the train station before saying goodbye to him tells us more about the wedding night they've just shared than any dramatization of it could have suggested.  Its very discreetness evokes the privacy of genuine intimacy, and yet we share it, not as voyeurs but as privileged participants in its magic.

As Garland leaves Walker's train the camera follows her and then rises up inexorably, in one long, tracking crane shot, until she's lost in the crowd at the station — her story, which is our story, too, now, becomes one story among many, and no less extraordinary for that.

THE VISUAL STYLE

Although the tracking crane shot described above is one of the most beautiful and effective single images in all of cinema, The Clock is not a consistently interesting film visually.  Set in New York but shot almost entirely on the back lot of MGM in Culver City, it relies very heavily on backscreen projections, which cumulatively produce a claustrophobic effect.  This doesn't hurt the story too badly, since part of Minnelli's strategy in telling it is to focus our attention closely on the growing intimacy between Garland and Walker, which he charts with great delicacy.  The body language of two strangers falling in love has rarely been evoked with such precision and sympathy.  It's a “visual effect” which, more often than not, trumps cinematic style.

The sound-stage recreation of the train station is spectacular, consistent with its crucial role in the drama, as is the recreation of the subway stations where the lead characters lose each other, in a brilliantly shot and choreographed passage.

Citizen Kane, made just a few years earlier, contains this same mixture of spatially seductive choreography on sets and relatively alienating process photography.  In Kane, the mixture is weighted towards the former, in The Clock towards the latter, though  Minnelli demonstrates his mastery by reserving the “set” pieces for passages where he really needs them — where a visceral appreciation of the space the characters inhabit is crucial to the emotional effect of the scenes.

But there are moments when the process photography undercuts the emotional effect — as in the scene where Walker runs after Garland on the bus.  It's a cute gag played against process screens — it would have been heart-stopping played on a practical set or a real location.

THE CONTEXT

“Glamorizing virtue” was part of the commercial calculation of Hollywood, especially at MGM, where studio boss Louis B. Mayer insisted that MGM films promote “family values”.  These were values that Mayer touted but did not practice.  In middle age he dumped his aging spouse for a more glamorous trophy wife.  He treated his stars like farm animals — pampered farm animals, admittedly, ones he expected to win him blue ribbons at the county fair.

Mayer copped feels from the teen-aged Garland at every opportunity, even though he wasn't especially attracted to her —  he was just exercising the greengrocer's prerogative to squeeze the produce.  MGM plied Garland with amphetamines when her work load slowed her down, then “graciously” paid for her rehab when she crashed, hoping they could still get some more mileage out of her.

This sort of hypocrisy is visible in many of the sentimental films made at MGM — like the wildly popular Andy Hardy series, made for peanuts and consistently profitable for almost a decade.  Mayer loved these films, but seen today they reek of calculation and exploitation.  All their sentiment seems not only contrived but downright cynical.  The films do have their moments — the homespun virtues they celebrate are intrinsically attractive — and if you're in the right mood they can get to you.  More often you're keenly aware of being manipulated by shrewd hacks.

Arthur Freed, who produced The Clock, and most of MGM's great musicals, was hardly a saint, and is reported to have had recourse to the casting couch at MGM on occasion, but he was devoted to his family throughout his life, and he imbued everything he worked on with genuine feeling — contrived, certainly, engineered with old-fashioned theatrical calculation, but never cynical, even for a moment.  His films could be corny, way too obvious and even clumsy in their appeal to the heart, but you never get a sense that the artists who made them are trying to put something over on you they don't believe in themselves.

Freed's sincerity is what elevated films like The Clock and Meet Me In St. Louis above the sort of saccharine platitudes found in the Andy Hardy series.  One can say for Mayer that he recognized the real thing when he saw it and backed Freed to the hilt as a producer, even when the other great minds on the lot dismissed Freed's stories as simple-minded.  Freed rewarded Mayer's faith with sublime works of art which also made money — with films which now constitute the core of Mayer's legacy.  Without Freed, that legacy would consist mostly of clever junk like Love Finds Andy Hardy, which plays today like a mediocre, padded-out sitcom.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CINEMATIC IMAGE

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This is the fifth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

Irving
Biederman, a
neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has conducted
experiments in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need
for information.  It would seem that the human brain is to a
certain extent programmed to acquire information, especially about the immediate physical environment — logical enough since
such information, about sources of sustenance and about external
threats, would be crucial to the survival of the species.

Lee Gomes, writing in The Wall Street Journal (linked on Boing Boing), reports this about Biederman's research:

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer
test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of
pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over
others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a
good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or
another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that
somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the
preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than
the unpreferred shots. While researchers don't yet know what exactly
these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased
production of the brain's pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called
opioids.

“A
good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery” strike me as
qualities of all powerful cinematic images — providing we expand the
word landscape to include interior spaces.  “A good vantage”
implies sufficient clues to read the space of the environment
represented, while “an element of mystery” implies an image that is
complex, that doesn't yield up its information too quickly, that
requires investigation.

A cinematic image whose primary function is to deliver narrative
information, as opposed to a spatial illusion, is not going to engage
our imagination in a powerful way.  A cut between two
informational images whose primary function is to establish another
piece of information is likewise not going to be deeply
satisfying.  An example of this would be a cut between a close-up
of a woman looking at something and a close-up of what she's looking
at.  If the two shots in question were not themselves
intrinsically engaging, the relationship between them would be purely
narrative, purely expository.  The shot of the woman looking at
something would not create genuine mystery, only an informational
question — and once the question was answered (by the close-up representing her POV) the interest of the
images would be exhausted.

There might be meta-cinematic qualities to the two images — if the
woman turned out to be looking at a knife, we might wonder what role
the knife will play in the story — but this would not reflect on the
essentially cinematic qualities of the images.

In all this, of course, I am simply recapitulating André Bazin's theory
of the role of montage in cinema, but I think Biederman's research
offers a psychological support to Bazin's thinking.  The
deep-focus shots of Welles and Ford, the long scenes that play out
without directing our attention to specific elements through editing,
give us both “good vantage” and “mystery” — they engage deep levels of
consciousness that seem to be fundamental to human perception. 
And, like Biederman's “preferred images”, they create a pleasure that
may well have a pre-programmed neurological basis.

MONTAGE AND SPACE

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The fourth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .

André
Bazin was exhilarated by the idea of a cinema grounded in photographic
images that conjured up an intense illusion of space.  He saw this
as the center of cinema's power.  Montage, he believed, created
only secondary and less powerful effects, merely intellectual and
therefore not as profound.  Cutting between shots of a single
location could create a mental impression of the space of the location
but not a visceral sense of experiencing that space first-hand. 
“Metaphorical montage”, cutting between images to create a conceptual
relationship between them — as between a shot of a kiss and a shot of
fireworks going off — he saw as equally “intellectual” and thus
equally secondary.  Cutting, he believed, tended to undermine the
power of cinema to imaginatively, as opposed to rationally, engage us.

He was on to a signal truth here, but there are some problems with his
argument.  He consistently identified cinema's spatial illusion
with realism, and saw that realism, the shared ontological identity of
an actual space and its photographic record, as crucial to cinema's
power.  However, as I've argued before, this fails to account for
the cinematic power of hand-drawn or computer-generated images, both of
which can create impressions of spaces which can engage us
imaginatively just as powerfully as photographic images.

Consider also the realm of dreams.  We often in dreams enter
spaces which have no correlative in the waking world — a new wing of
our house, for example, which seems just as real as the house we know
in waking life.  The impression of “reality” here does not depend
on any shared ontological identity between the imaginary wing and our
dream experience of it.  The mechanical authority of the camera
does not figure into the equation, and yet the imaginary wing feels
just as real as the spaces of waking reality.  Our dreaming mind
convinces us of this reality without any forensic corroboration.

It is the impression of space alone which links photographed cinema
with animated cinema.  Photography and animation are merely
techniques for creating illusions of space which we can imaginatively
enter as wholly and as confidently as we enter the spaces of dreams.

Bazin argues that shots need to convey a sufficient impression of
“realism” to counteract the enervating tendency of montage, which
again is a profound insight, but fails to account fully for the dual
nature of some “metaphorical” editing.  When Hitchcock cuts from a
shot of Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint embracing on the train at the
end of North By Northwest to
a shot of the train entering a tunnel, the intellectual aspect of the
visual pun is clear enough — but both shots are interesting and
powerful plastically, both deliver a visceral impact, so that we can
not only comprehend the meaning of the shot of the train rationally
(as a pun) but also feel it as a physical evocation of intercourse.

Finally, Bazin's evaluation of montage does not fully take into account
the musical effects which editing can create.  I would agree with
Bazin that such effects only have true power when the images involved
have an intrinsic plastic power of their own.  We have all seen
those “experimental films” in which indifferent images are cut to the
rhythms of a piece of music — their effect is thin, superficial, the
correspondences between the rhythms of the music and the rhythms of the
editing merely mechanical, an exercise in redundancy.

But consider the musical rhythms of the editing in Orson Welles' Falstaff. 
The images, however fleeting, are always powerful plastically,
viscerally evoking space, but the editing gives them a new musical
quality — much the way the rhythms of poetic meter confer a
meta-meaning above and beyond the literal meaning of the poet's words.

My arguments with Bazin here are narrow but important, I believe. 
If I were speaking with him today, face to face, as I sometimes feel I
actually am, so vivid is his presence in his writing, I would urge him
to cut loose from his attachment to photographic “realism” and
concentrate on the imaginative uses of all illusory space in cinema,
however it's achieved, and to think again about the ways illusory space
can be enlisted in the service of montage, not just as a kind of
compensation for the intellectual reductionism of montage but as a way
of investing montage with an über-cinematic artistic capacity all its
own.

JOHN FARROW

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John
Farrow wasn't by any means a great director but he was a very
interesting man and he made some very interesting movies.  A devoted
Catholic and a serious student of Catholicism — he wrote a book about
the history of the Popes — he was also known as a mean son-of-a-bitch
on the set who liked to bully his actors and crew.  After shooting
wrapped on California (above), star Barbara Stanwyck demanded that he make a public apology to everyone who worked on the production.

On the other hand, she gives a terrific performance in California,
way better than the mediocre script deserves, and the film is filled
with surprising passages, notably a number of extremely long and
complicated scenes played out in single takes with extensive camera
moves.  None of these, however, is framed or choreographed
dynamically, so they don't have the excitement of the long takes found
in the films of Welles or Renoir.

California doesn't have a
coherent tone in any respect.  It has odd, grandiose montages with
opera-like chorales playing under them, and conventional Western
musical interludes in which characters sing improbably.  The
gritty, sexy frontier hustler created by Stanwyck seems to be from
another movie.

Farrow didn't seem to have a good feel for genre or for script.  Plunder Of the Sun (above), filmed entirely, and very evocatively, on location in Mexico has one of the most stylish and promising film noir
openings ever concocted, but the story just dribbles away, turns into a
conventional treasure-quest adventure.  Again, a superb central
performance — this time by Glenn Ford, tense with understated despair
— is wasted.

Still, there's usually something in a John Farrow movie worth paying
close attention to — some flight of inspiration that redeems the
clunkiest programmer.  He had a kind of ambition, a kind of
vision, but it seems to have come to him in fits and starts. 
Maybe the frustration of that was the source of his on-set rages.

ELECTRIC EDWARDIANS

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Jean-Luc
Godard once observed that, with the passing of time, the fantasy films
of Georges Méliès have become actualities, now that man has in fact
made a voyage to the moon, while the actualities of the Lumière
Brothers have become fantasies, since they record lost worlds to which
we can never return, as mythological now as Oz.



I thought of this while watching Electric Edwardians,
the Milestone DVD of Mitchell & Kenyon actualities of Edwardian
Britain.  I must say I was blown away.  It's the most
gorgeous collection of cinematic images outside of Intolerance or Sunrise or Welles's Falstaff, lyrical and deeply moving.






With the
possible exception of a few infants who lived to a great age, all the
people in these films are dead.  As a commentator on the DVD
observes, the young boys in the films were part of a generation that
would be swept into oblivion long before their time by the mass carnage
of the Great War a decade or so later.  The bustling street life
that most attracted Mitchell & Kenyon becomes for us now a memento
mori, incredibly sweet and sad.






I can't imagine
that anyone who loves movies and owns a DVD player wouldn't want to
have this DVD and to watch the films on it over and over again. 
They may constitute a kind of unconscious art, but it's art of a very
high order.

EDWIN S. PORTER

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Check out The Art and Culture Of Movies,
a great blog by filmmaker and writer Matt Barry, for some interesting
thoughts about film pioneer Edwin S. Porter (director of the The Great Train Robbery from 1903.)  The post is illustrated with terrific screen shots from Porter's films.  (The frame above is from It Happened On 23rd Street — shot in 1901 on a block, between 5th and 6th Avenues, which looks almost the same today, architecturally speaking.)

MÉLIÈS

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From
a strictly historical, generic perspective, the work of Georges Méliès
was a kind of magical dead end.  Although his films are commonly
spoken of as the precursors of science fiction and all forms of film
fantasy involving special effects, they are in fact so peculiarly
original in form, so deeply rooted in the traditions of the stage, that
they presaged nothing.

Méliès
was a magician and the operator of a theater dedicated to stage
magic.  He used cinema as an extension of the sort of acts he
performed and presented in his Théatre Robert-Houdin, built as a
showcase for his own art by Robert-Houdin, the great 19th-Century conjurer, the
legendary pioneer of modern theatrical magic (and the man after whom
his masterful successor Houdini named himself.)

Méliès
saw cinema as a way of presenting stage magic and amplifying its
effects by the use of in-camera tricks like stop motion and
super-imposition.  His images evoked the stage precisely, with
strict proscenium framing and frankly theatrical painted flats and
props.  He used many practical tricks from the stage, like flying
people and objects on wires or making them appear and disappear
through traps.  He added his camera tricks on top of these
time-worn effects.

The problem was that camera trickery is not the same as live trickery
in the presence of the trickster — the novelty of camera tricks
dissipates quickly, once you become familiar with them.  Méliès's
films were wildly popular for a while and then, with the rise of the
narrative form in movies, suddenly went out of fashion — to a degree
that live magic shows never have.  In great live magic shows, you
know you're being tricked, but you can't for the life of you figure out
how.  You may not know exactly how a camera trick works, but you
know it has to do with some fundamentally technical resource of the
medium — and so can't
be real magic.  As early as 1905 people began to get wise to the
mechanical tricks of movies, as this postcard, part of a series, shows:

In movies, if the tricks are not done in the service of a story, or at
the very least in the service of creating a convincingly unified
alternate reality, they grow stale.  Méliès
never tried to create a convincingly unified alternate reality — his
reality was always the reality of the stage, without the excitement of
the live presence of the performers.  His magical stop-motion
substitutions were charming as ideas but could never take the breath
away like the “impossible” substitutions of the live magician.

Méliès
could not, in short, enlist the magic of the camera as an extension of
the magic of live stage performance.  He created a vision of a
theater where anything was possible but in the process he lost the core
of the theatrical experience — the tangible presence of its spectacle.

Méliès influenced other filmmakers, like Edwin S. Porter, in the area of narrative.  Méliès's
films occasionally have simple narrative structures, but these are
always just the armature for his tricks.  He called his scenes
tableaux — they were self contained, and he was perfectly happy to
sell individual scenes as stand-alone attractions to the fairgrounds
showmen who constituted the initial market for his films.  Each
scene had a gag, after all, and he saw the gags as the principal element of his
art.

When story films began to dominate the market he lost interest in the
industry, even as his audience lost interest in him.  Storytelling wasn't at the heart of his ambition.



This is all speaking to the formal side of Méliès's work, but of course it had qualities which transcended its formal side.  Méliès
had a sweet, antic, energetic, whimsical imagination which comes across
excitingly in his films, even today.  It reminds one of the
imagination of the great Warner Brothers cartoonists of the 1940s,
silly, flip and surreal.  But cartoon animation was of a piece and
so created an alternate universe that was of a piece, that audiences
could surrender to wholly.  Méliès,
who never could leave the imaginative precincts of his beloved stage,
doesn't allow that kind of identification — we are always reminded
that we are, and are not, in a theater.

Méliès
was, in one sense, a great artist who made ephemeral art, in a form
that had no future.  But his irresistible sensibility often soars
above the contradictions of his formal means.  His films will
always be fun to watch, simply because it's so clear that he was having
an incredible amount of fun making them.  He communicates his joy in stage magic and his
joy in camera magic, even if he never quite finds a way to reconcile
the two practices aesthetically.

In the history of cinema, his only legacy is joy — but there are many more important formal pioneers who left us less.

THE ENCHANTMENT OF DREAMS

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The third in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

In a previous essay in this series I wrote:


As long as a movie constructs a substantial and coherent alternate
reality it has the power to express and manipulate our emotions. 
As long as it delivers the illusion of a world that is convincingly
real while we are inside it
a
film can mimic the process of dreaming.  Cinema is not about, or
not only about, the mummification of reality — it is about the
translation of psychology into the realm of oneiric reality, and the
essential quality of oneiric reality is that it feels absolutely real.



But this doesn't quite tell the whole story.  Even in the grip of
the most convincing oneiric illusion, there is a part of the brain that
recognizes it as an illusion.  This accounts for the exhilaration
we feel when, for example, we find ourselves able to fly in a dream. 
We are conscious on some level that we have been freed from the usual
restrictions of gravity, which means that some part of us remembers the
usual restrictions of gravity — we are enchanted to find ourselves in
an alternate physical universe.

There are also moments in dreams when the waking self intrudes into the
oneiric universe — something so outrageous happens in the dream that we think,
“This must be a dream,” and we think this while dreaming.  (This is usually a prelude to waking up, since the dream
state can not long survive rigorous evaluation by the mind of the
waking state.)

Whatever psychological compensations and satisfactions we get from the
oneiric state, there is always, to one degree or another, a
corresponding sense of wonder at the alternate universe we have entered
— a sense of inhabiting two states at the same time.  The unreal,
and therefore constructed, nature of the dream state invests it with the quality of magic.

The same rule applies to the dreamlike illusion of cinema, though on a
level that is consistently closer to consciousness.  However
seduced we might be by the alternate universe of the cinema, the sides
of the screen are always there in our peripheral vision.  The
visible boundaries of cinema's dream space place a greater burden on
the medium to seduce us into forgetting those boundaries, but also remind
us delightfully of the constructed nature of that dream space, which
induces wonder.

There are other phenomena related to cinema which offer even more
obtrusive reminders of their constructed nature and can actually seem
all the more wonderful for that.  We see precisely how they are
seducing us, and yet we cannot help but be seduced — and we marvel at
the process as a process.  One might point to elaborate miniature
environments, for example, like fantastically detailed and realistic
doll houses, or to the Bunraku puppet tradition.  In the latter,
we can plainly see the puppeteers manipulating the puppets, wearing
black clothing to symbolically distance themselves from the puppet
figures — and yet the movements of the puppet figures are so real, so
like the movements of actual human beings, that we have to remind
ourselves that they are not in fact tiny people.

Realistic automata, toy soldiers, dolls, puppets of all kinds, can
plunge us into this middle world between illusion and the consciousness
of illusion.  The joy they all induce must be complex, difficult
to define precisely, but I think it rests on two bases.  One is
the creation of an alternate reality very like everyday reality in many
crucial respects but entirely within the control of human agents —
including ourselves as spectators, who can surrender to or resist the
illusion at will.  Another is the creation of an alternate reality
in which psychological tensions and desires can be safely engaged — as
they are engaged in dreams.  Thus little children can enact
fantasies of mastery by moving small armies across tabletops, or fantasies
of nurturing by parenting dolls.

All of these things are related to the joys of cinema.  Thus we
can see the fundamental error of André Bazin's “ontology of cinema” —
which he saw as rooted in the shared ontological identity of the
photographic image and its subject, like the ontological identity
between a finger and its fingerprint.  This ontological identity
does exists in photographed cinema, but it is not the source of its
power — it is only a technique for creating the convincing illusion of
a coherent alternate reality. 
As I've observed elsewhere, drawn and computer-generated animation can
also create such an illusion — as can the the techniques of
scale-modeling and puppetry.

CITIZEN KANE

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Citizen Kane
is a hard film to “see”.  It's so alive with invention, so dense
with magical images (and camera tricks) that it's difficult to process
them in detail.  The film also has a relentless narrative drive,
aided by visual, musical and other sound transitions of exceptional
virtuosity which keep one in a perpetual state of anticipation.

The rap on the film has always been that all this razzle-dazzle
distracts one from the fact that Kane is hollow at its center — an
exercise in sensation rather than substance.  This is a complaint
that was often made about Welles' stage productions — that they were
thrilling while you were watching them but evaporated instantly from
the mind afterward.  Pauline Kael saw Kane
as a magic show — and a magic show is another kind of theatrical
experience that lives only in the moment, that has no artistic echo.

I myself disagree with this view of Kane. 
There is a hollowness at the center of the film but it's the hollowness
of Kane himself, of the character — not the actor who plays him or the
film's director (who of course are one and the same man.)  The
sharp dialogue and knowing wit of the film, the insistent technical
bravura of the filmmaking, tend to disguise the fact that Kane is a grandly sentimental work, a work of great compassion and feeling.

I have no doubt that this sentiment and compassion came from Welles
himself, though he may have been steered into it sidewise by his
screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who put a lot of Welles into Kane under
the cover of the roman à clef 
element that related the character to William Randolph Hearst. 
Welles always said that the Rosebud theme was all Mankiewicz's doing,
and that he wasn't terribly fond of it himself.  I would argue
that the Rosebud theme, far from being the artificial MacGuffin it's
often dismissed as, even by Welles, is in fact exactly what it seems to
be — the key
to Charles Foster Kane and to the film.  This may have been
something Welles could not admit because it struck such a deep nerve in
him.

Welles is often treated as a uniquely mysterious character, a mass of
irreconcilable contradictions, but I think this is no more true of
Welles than it is of Kane.  Everything about Welles makes perfect
sense if you remember that he lost his mother, an adoring but demanding
woman, to jaundice when he was 9, and that he lost his father, by a
longer process, to alcoholism, which finally killed him when Welles was
15.

Welles cut himself off from his father six months before his death, in
an effort to get him to face his drinking problem, and never forgave
himself for the betrayal, for allowing his father to die alone and
estranged from him — something he could never make up for.  It's
not dime-store psychology to see these traumas as the forces which
fueled and warped the unfolding of Welles' genius — they are primal
emotional events.  And so with Kane's abandonment by his mother
and father.

The nostalgia for Rosebud, for what it represents, does sum up Kane's
life, and it's not a simplistic analysis.  The loss of a parent in
childhood is a wound that never heals — it can be endured but never
overcome.  A child always sees the loss of a parent as a rejection
— in the case of Kane, his mother's decision to send him away was on one level a literal rejection, however well-motivated.

Simon Callow, Welles's most astute biographer, is dismissive of Welles's performance in Kane,
feeling that it never achieves depth, and he feels this way about most
of the performances in the film — with the notable exception of that
by Agnes Morehead as Kane's mother.  We don't see her for long but
we sense worlds of grief in her as she sends her son out to the wider
world, where she hopes he'll have a better life.

It is a singular performance in
the film, but I think its singularity makes perfect sense.  Kane
has a hole in his heart which robs him of personal substance, makes him
a perpetual performer incapable of real intimacy with anyone.  And the
significant others in his life are content to be his audience —
thrilled or appalled by his “act”, excited and inspired, but with no more real
commitment to him than a theater audience has for the lead actor in a
play after the curtain comes down, or after his celebrity fades.

We share their guilt in this, of course — we the audience are also
thrilled and appalled by Kane's act, excited and inspired, amused by his rise and morbidly delighted by
his fall.  But Welles won't let it go at that.

The story of Kane is a shadowplay, with one real person at its center
— Agnes Morehead's Mary Kane, who has unwittingly, in an act of misguided
sacrifice, turned her son into a shadow.  There are many moments
in the film, especially as Kane ages and begins losing everything, when
Welles lets us (though not the other characters in the film) into his
psychic universe, a place of bewilderment and pain.

Welles is curiously least convincing when he plays Kane at
the age Welles actually was when he made the film — he's like an older
man doing an unconvincing imitation of a younger one.  It's as
though Welles doesn't know how to be young — but that works for the
young Kane, a man born to power and wealth, who has to play at being a
regular lad.  Yet Welles is utterly convincing as the older Kane
— as though he knew in advance what it would be like to hold the world
in your hands and then see it slip from your grasp.  Callow
suggests that the young Welles is preserved in Kane
like a fly in amber but the truth is far stranger — the
older Welles is on display in that film, fully formed (and deformed) by
the vicissitudes of failure and disappointment.

This is uncanny, of course, and in retrospect disturbing — but it
represents a brilliant imaginative leap for the young actor, one he summoned up from the core of his being, and it's very
moving.  Welles asks us,
and allows us, to pity Kane, to forgive him — and he gives us good and
sufficient reason to do both.

Rosebud.

The ambiguity, the unknowable quality of Charles Foster Kane is the real MacGuffin
of the film.  Rosebud is its heart, hiding in plain sight in the
last scene just as the truth of Kane hides in plain sight throughout the
film.

[Thanks to six martinis and the seventh art for the screen grab of the sled in the snow.]

DAISY KENYON

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Fox home video has been releasing a lot of terrific DVDs in their Fox Film Noir
series — great transfers of entertaining films with generally
excellent commentaries and brief featurettes about the movies and their
creators.  They're running out of films from their vaults which
can plausibly be called noir — except that these days, apparently, just about anything can plausibly be called noir.

Daisy Kenyon, the 23rd title in
the series, is an extremely interesting film by Otto Preminger from
1947 which could plausibly be called domestic noir,
though it doesn't involve crime or violence in any significant
way.  It's basically a soap opera centering on a very complicated
love triangle, but it's disturbingly dark, in ways that wouldn't have been
conceivable in Hollywood before WWII.

Joan Crawford plays a career girl in New York who's having an affair
with a married man, played by Dana Andrews, a charming self-centered
lout.  Neither character seems to feel any moral qualms about the
affair, and Preminger presents it with an almost cynical nonchalance
that's strikingly adult and modern.

Crawford meets an equally charming but somewhat unstable returning war
vet, played by Henry Fonda.  Fonda's character feels that the
world and everyone in it has become dead, and isn't sure if this
feeling has to do with the loss of his wife in a car accident or with
his experiences in combat.  The war, and its collateral moral damage, are also referenced in an off-screen subplot in which
the Andrews character defends a Nisei war vet whose farm was stolen
from him while he was off fighting for his country, heroically, in
Italy.  He loses the case.

According to Preminger's biographer Foster Hirsch, these elements
were not prominent in the novel on which the film was based.  It
was Preminger and his
screenwriter who chose to associate the moral confusions and neuroses
of the characters with the broader anxieties of post-war American
society, issues of guilt over the price of victory, over the
psychological wounds suffered by the soldiers who won that
victory.  It's a theme one finds
in many noir and noir-inflected films of the time, sometimes explored explicitly, as it is here, sometimes only by implication.

Perhaps Preminger was too explicit.  Daisy Kenyon
was a box-office disappointment.  Without the cover of the
crime-thriller genre, elements of which figure to one degree or another
in most other domestic noirs, the film's investigation of post-war American angst may have cut too close to the bone for contemporary audiences.

The mood of the film is almost unbearably tense and unsettling,
eventually involving child abuse and a scandalous divorce trial played
out in the tabloid press.  There had always been soap operas like
this in American movies, of course, but there was always a clear sense
of when moral boundaries were being crossed and what the consequences
would be.  Daisy Kenyon plays out in a world in which moral boundaries seem to have been erased.

The Spanish title of the film translates as “between love and sin”
but the tale offers few clues as to where one stops and the other
begins.  The romantic triangle is resolved at the end, more or
less, with everyone doing the “right” thing — but there's hardly a
sense of moral triumph.  We feel that all the characters are going
to remain adrift in a morally ambiguous universe, trying to walk a line
that none of them can see clearly.  This is noir territory, all
right, but strictly domestic, and explored primarily from the point of
view of the female protagonist, which distinguishes it from the classic
noir cycle.

CHARLTON HESTON

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Charlton Heston has died at the age of 84.  In life he never got
the appreciation he deserved — damned with faint praise as an actor of
limited range, damned in more direct terms for his right wing politics
and defense of gun rights.  As an artist, however, he was a
genuine hero.

It was Heston who lobbied Universal to give Orson Welles the job as director of Touch Of Evil
(above), at a time when no one else in Hollywood would give Welles the
time of day, and he single-handedly kept Sam Peckinpah on Major Dundee by offering to kick back his own salary into the production.

In movies, presence is sometimes more important than range — one might
argue that it's always more important than range — and presence
requires more than mere personality.  It requires its own kind of
craft and courage.  There was no other actor of his generation who
could have held his own in El Cid, and his “presence” helped make that film a masterpiece.  It also elevated The Planet Of the Apes from a B-picture to a pop classic.

I am personally grateful to him for Touch Of Evil
— mangled as it was by the studio it's still one of the great American
films, and it wouldn't exist without the artistic heroism of Charlton
Heston.

And for those of you who can't get past his efforts on behalf of the NRA,
remember that he also stood with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March
On Washington — one of the few Hollywood celebrities with the guts to
take a public stand like that in 1963.

MIKE WALLACE AND THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

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Here's link, via Boing Boing, to a collection of Mike Wallace interviews from the 50s, including one with Gloria Swanson:

The Mike Wallace Interview Archive



Wallace's
technique was to get as close to insolence with his guests, especially
his female guests, as possible without crossing the line into
rudeness.  The lack of respect he shows to Swanson is sickening
and she barely keeps her dignity intact.  Swanson observes that
“something has gone dreadfully wrong with the American man,” and
Wallace, puffing away on a cigarette throughout the program, proves her
point.



There's also a
touching interview with Jean Seberg, age 19, just after the disaster of
her performance in Saint Joan, her first film, in which Seberg, too, struggles,
somewhat more successfully, to keep her dignity in the face of
Wallace's insinuating smugness.  “What will happen to your
career,” Wallace asks, “when it comes time for you to get married and
devote most of your time to your family?”  “I hope I'll marry a
man who lets me continue with my career,” says Seberg, looking slightly
bewildered by Wallace's attitude.






The two great
stars, speaking from different ends of their careers, manage to make
Wallace's cigarettes look like accurately-sized phallic symbols. 
What we're seeing in these interviews is the birth of modern
journalism, in which hacks try to elevate themselves by patronizing
their betters, treating their accomplishments as the same sort of
hollow flim-flam the hacks are practicing.



What we're also
seeing is further proof that modern feminism was a response not to an
over-powerful patriarchy, but to a patriarchy in full-on psychic
collapse.  Wallace comes off here as a truly pathetic figure.

THE OTHER SIDE OF KANE

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Yesterday, Showtime screened a rough assembly of Orson Welles' legendary uncompleted film The Other Side Of the Wind,
which Peter Bogdanovich is restoring for the cable channel.  The
select group of critics in attendance were stunned to find that the
film bore no relation whatsoever to the brief excerpts from the film or
to the script pages which have previously seen the light of day.

The film unveiled was in fact a shot-by-shot remake of Citizen Kane using sock-puppets in place of the original actors.  Citizen Kane
is considered Welles' masterpiece, and many have pronounced it the
greatest movie ever made — a stunning debut which Welles never managed
to live up to in the course of his subsequent career.

Bogdanovich explained the “very Wellesian” ruse involved — “He shot
fake footage and wrote a bogus script to keep his real plans a
secret.  'Everybody wants another Kane,' he told me, 'so I'm going to give it to them.  I'm going to shove it up their ass.'”

Bogdanovich believes that the sock-puppet Kane
will eventually be recognized as a greater work than the original —
“though it may take awhile.  Orson was always years ahead of his
time.”

Bogdanovich hopes that the restoration of the Kane
remake will be completed towards the end of this year and screened by
Showtime in 2009.  It will appear under the name Welles chose for
it shortly before his death — Kane You Believe It?