Category Archives: Movies

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

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This
is one of the nuttiest of the Connery Bond films and one of the most
enjoyable. Its narrative is borderline incoherent but that hardly seems
to matter to the filmmakers, who are simply using the plot as an excuse
for the sort of dumb/surreal gags that the series is famous for.
Watching this film you realize that Austin Powers is hardly a parody
at all — just a slight exaggeration of the tongue-in-cheek lunacy of
the early Bond films. This one seems to have been made by people on
some kind of drug that doesn't exist anymore — one part Merry
Pranksters LSD and two parts Rat Pack bourbon. The film is notable
visually for Jill St. John — unspeakably luscious here, performing
increasingly heroic deeds in increasingly fewer clothes . . .

. .
. and for images of Las Vegas in 1971 — from the shocking emptiness of
The Strip (Caesars was the only mega-resort in
existence at the time) to the wondrous dazzling neon of downtown, on
the western end of Fremont Street, before it was turned into a
pedestrian mall.


What's
more, Jay Sarno, creator of Caesars and Circus-Circus, and one of the
true visionaries of modern Las Vegas, plays a bit part as a carnival
barker at Circus-Circus:


You
can see Circus-Circus in this film exactly as it was when Hunter
Thompson first visited it in the early 70s and immortalized its
inspired, deranged essence. “The Circus-Circus,” he said, “is what the
whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won
the war.”

TASHLIN'S APOCALYPSE

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Frank Tashlin's comic critique of American culture was
so anarchic, so all-inclusive — encompassing even the cinema itself,
the medium he worked in — that it's hard to identify a point of view,
a philosophy, behind it.  He just seemed to celebrate the idea of
transgressive thought.

Still, critics have often intuited a dark side in
Tashlin's work, which suggests that it might not have been as
innocently and cheerfully irresponsible as it seems.  Peter Bogdanovich
wrote, “As comic as Tashlin's movies are, they also reflect a deep
unhappiness with the condition of the world.”

But what might have been the source of this
unhappiness, the perspective on the world which determined it?

An interesting clue can be found in a short, 18-minute
stop-motion animation film he made in 1947 called The Way Of Peace. 
My friend Paul Zahl, a distinguished Anglican theologian, recently
tracked down a copy of this obscure film — which is surprising, even
startling.

Tashlin started out in the world of animated cartoons,
and a few years before beginning his career as a live-action feature director
he made The Way Of Peace — which was, as far as I can
tell, his only foray into stop-motion puppet animation.  The
stop-motion work was done by Wah Ming Chang, who later did the
stop-motion effects for The Seven Faces Of Dr. Lao and The Time
Machine.  The film was narrated by the actor Lew Ayres.

But
here's the startling part — the film was made for
the Evangelical Lutheran Church Of America, and it's an unabashedly
religious, Christian work.  Most of it is concerned with the
destruction of the world by nuclear holocaust, presented as an
inevitable consequence of abandoning Christ's “way of peace”.  (A
Lutheran pastor provided the “story conception” for The Way Of Peace, but
Tashlin wrote the script and clearly devoted a lot of care to the
inventive, often beautiful, often terrifying images of the film.)


One might think, given the puppet-cartoon medium it's
made in, that it was a film addressed to children — but the
apocalyptic destruction it portrays is very dark and disturbing.  At
any rate, it's probably not something you'd want to show to very small
children — the natural audience for animation of this sort.

It turns out, however, that Tashlin wrote a number of
picture books for children which are far more explicit in expressing
his fears for human civilization than his Hollywood movies ever tried
to be.  Tashlin's fears were founded on a dread of nuclear war but also
on the spiritual decline of civilization through materialism —
something he satirized mercilessly in his films.


Tashlin being Tashlin, of course, his critique of the
modern world did not preclude a critique of the church — he was no
apologist for organized religion.  A church is shown being obliterated
in the finale of The Way Of Peace, and one of his children's books, The World That Isn't, criticizes churches for their complacency.

I think all of Tashlin's work needs to be re-examined
in light of The Way Of Peace and his children's books.  The Way Of Peace even offers a clue as to Tashlin's oddly affectionate, even
celebratory style of satire.  The short ends with a quote from John's Gospel:


Paul
Zahl points out that there is Tashlinesque irony in the quote, since
we've just witnessed the destruction of the entire planet — but the
theology is sound enough from a Lutheran perspective, and perhaps from
Tashlin's. God hasn't destroyed the world for rejecting Jesus, the
world has destroyed itself by rejecting Jesus's “way of peace”.  There
is no judgment involved, per se — just a kind of spiritual physics that reflects a very grim view of human nature.

Tashlin's mainstream Hollywood work never passes judgment on anyone or anything (The Girl Can't Help
It!) . . . but was it meant to save sinners, instead of just tweak them
for
their follies?

Tashlin, along with his disciple Jerry Lewis, was
probably the most eccentric director of comedy in 50s and 60s
Hollywood.  Was he perhaps even more eccentric than we've imagined —
and more profoundly serious in his deconstruction of American
civilization?  In The Way Of Peace he
portrays a puppet world on the brink of annihilation.  Was that
perhaps what he was trying to do, between the lines, in his live-action features as well?

Another of his children's books offers an intriguing image which might be the best clue to the real Tashlin and his methods — The Possum That Didn't. 
In it, a happy possum hanging upside down has his smile mistaken for a
frown.  A bunch of do-gooders take him to the city, where he's
unhappy, but his upside-down frown there is mistaken for a smile.

To
me this sounds an awful lot like a warning directed at anyone inclined
to take Tashlin's topsy-turvy comic vision at face value.  At the
very least it should make us question whether his smile is ever quite
what it seems.


[The Way Of Peace can now be seen, in a somewhat
fuzzy online version, at the web site of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church Of America, which holds a copy of the film.  It's really a
remarkable and provocative piece of work.  Thanks are owed to that
organization for putting it up, and to Paul Zahl for tracking it down
there.]

OUT OF THE PAST

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As opposed to murder mysteries (for example), which are basically
intellectual puzzles organized around a frisson or two, great suspense
thrillers — which include many different kinds of movies, from
Hitchcock to classic film noir — are rarely about their nominal subjects.  Their plots are
constructions designed to investigate and expose various modes of
existential dread which would be too uncomfortable to face directly but
which are thrilling to experience when disguised as mere
amusement.  The process is very similar to what happens in dreams,
in which we find visual and plastic equivalents to inner tensions which
the conscious mind prefers to avoid confronting head-on.

There’s a smooth continuum between the suspense thriller and the horror
film, the latter category being reached when the subject of death,
bodily decay and destruction is foregrounded and taken right up to the
edge of what the mind is willing to process within a work of
entertainment.  (Convention and the age of audience members play
a large part in determining where that edge begins.)

The film noir tradition, which began during and flourished just after WWII, expanded the limits of dread which American movie audiences would accept — and obviously the
horrors of the global conflict played a determining role in this development.  Film noir
reflected a new cynicism about politics, since politicians had failed
to prevent the war, about civilization, which had been exposed as a
veneer beneath which savagery lurked, and about human nature, because
ordinary people did unspeakable things to each other in the course of
the war.

But most of all, film noir, at its heart, reflected a new insecurity about manhood.

Charles Lindbergh, before the war, wrote of his fear that a truly
global conflict would sap the virility of the civilized world and
create a vacuum in which demons would breed.  He wasn’t just
talking about the young men who would be killed but the young men
whose experience of war would exhaust their spirits — leave them unfit
for the business of domestic life, the hard work of peacetime
civilization.

I think this was a profound insight, and helps explain the crisis of
manhood which afflicted 50s America and which came to fruition in the
epidemic of divorce in the 60s, along with a general retreat from male
responsibility to the institutions of marriage and the family.
The greatest generation had given all it had — its reserves of service
and sacrifice were used up.

This also helps explain the disaffection of youth in the 50s and
60s, the nihilism of the Beats, the rebellion of rock and roll, the search
for newer and more authentic male role models like James Dean and Elvis
Presley — all of which culminated in a radical rejection of older male
paradigms in the 60s, in the de-sexing of the male which began with the
adolescent image of the early Beatles and ended with the long-haired
male flower child.

There was much that was positive in this cultural shift, but its root
causes and possible consequences remained largely unexamined, along
with its dark side — which was an increasing fear and hatred of women,
who could not help but represent an accusation aimed at male
uncertainty and insecurity.

It’s curious, I think, in an age which celebrates feminism and the new
sensitivity of males, that our popular culture degrades and commodifies
women to a far greater degree than earlier, frankly patriarchal
societies.  Camille Paglia provided the key to this paradox when
she observed that the status of women today is determined not by a
patriarchy which has gown too powerful but by a patriarchy which has
collapsed, grown unsure of itself.

Film noir is the place to begin a study of this whole, strange phenomenon.  Look at a film like Out Of the Past, one of the classics of the tradition.  On one level it’s a crime
thriller, an exposé of social corruption, an exercise in cynicism about
everything.  But this level is superficial.  At the heart
of its tension is a vision of things gone horribly wrong between the
sexes — the dream of a lost romantic paradise, the fear that real
partnership and co-operation were no longer options, the nightmare of a
fraudulent and impossible romantic redemption.


At the center of most great filmsin the noir tradition is the femme fatale
— a tough, independent, alluring figure who’s dangerous precisely
because she exploits the impotence of her male counterpoint.  The
collapsed male projects, as he always must, his own inner chaos onto
the female who exposes his weakness, his existential nullity in a
culture that no longer knows what it means to be a man.

Check out the image below, where Robert Mitchum holds on to his
inadequate cigarette-phallus and Jane Greer seems to ask, “Is that it
— is that all you’ve got?”:

Cigarettes are almost always more than cigarettes in film noir.
The tough guys always reach for them when they’re trying to be hard and
cool — and when a woman smokes a cigarette, she’s usually getting
ready to un-man somebody.

The femme fatale of the film noir tradition is the mother of our modern world.  It has no father.

MONUMENTS

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Last summer I made an epic 7,000-mile road trip with my sister Lee and her two kids, Nora (who was 9) and Harry (who was
12 when we started the trip and 13 by the time it was over.) 
We
drove from Las Vegas to the coast of North Carolina then back by way of Upstate New York.



In the course of the journey we made pilgrimages to sites of deep Americana, the first of
which was Monument Valley, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border.
This of course is where John Ford filmed many of his Westerns. The inn
his company stayed at when on location there is still in business, with
a museum and part of the outbuilding that doubled for Colonel Nathan
Brittles' quarters in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon:



[The boulder on top of the roof is a prop.]

You
can see immediately why Ford loved this location. Although its mesas
and rock formations are indeed monumental, they have an almost human
scale — unlike the Grand Canyon, for example.  (If the Grand
Canyon can be ranked among God's masterpieces, Monument Valley was a pièce d'occasion.)   And the formations in Monument Valley are scattered
about in a pattern that yields new vistas, a new sense of space, every
few hundred yards. It might have been built as an epic movie set.


It's
weird to visit a place you feel you know well just from movies, and
moving to visit a place that a great artist has appropriated as part of
his myth about America, a myth that has helped shape what America is,
or at least how it sees itself. The scenic route through the valley is
still just a dirt road, rough even on my high-slung 4-WD vehicle. The
valley is heavily visited, but you still get a sense of being in a
wilderness, or a dream of wilderness . . . the other tourists are like
fellow audience members in a dark movie theater, there but not there.

LOOK!

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Recently I've been in the grip of Hitchcock mania.  He's one of
those artists whose work is so rich that you experience it completely
differently at different stages of your life.  As a teenage film
buff I thought his work was delightfully cinematic but shallow. 
Truffaut's book of interviews with the director got me to take him a
bit more seriously, but not for too long.  I went through an extended
period when I thought of him as primarily a master of style.

Recently, however, I've re-watched almost every movie he ever made, and
the work opened up to me in a new way.  Films I'd considered minor,
like The Birds, began to reveal their subversive depths, and films I'd greatly admired, like Vertigo,
began to take their place for me among the greatest achievements of
film art — indeed, among the greatest achievements of any art.

In the midst of this mania a package arrived from my friend PZ containing the copy of Look magazine pictured above, from 1962, the year PZ and I met, featuring some pre-publicity for The Birds.  An object like this obliterates time — allows you to imagine The Birds
not as a famous classic from the past but as an enterprise in the
working life of a director, enmeshed in the practical contingencies of
filmmaking, which for Hitchcock always included close attention to
publicity.

In the article inside the magazine this image appears — another time
capsule, from an age when smoking was considered elegant and sexy:

Call me degenerate but it still looks elegant and sexy to me.

The art critic Dave Hickey once observed that it was hard to imagine
any culture being both risk-averse and sexy — and it's undeniably true
that American culture has become less sexy (though arguably more
pornographic) since the baby-boomer Yuppies took control of it.

Hitchcock's movies are sexier than movies today because he recognized
the connection between moral jeopardy and the erotic.  In an
amoral society, or one that confines its most passionate moral concerns to areas
of personal health, the erotic simply vanishes.

If your soul isn't on the line in a sexual encounter, in any encounter,
you might as well
be playing ping pong.  Hitchcock believed in souls, and knew that
souls are always in danger, always in jeopardy, always in
suspense.  Leading a healthy lifestyle, practicing safe sex, or
safe ping pong, can't deliver you from this fact — however persuasively our culture argues otherwise.

THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE

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At first it seems as though this film, like a Seinfeld episode, is going
to be about nothing, but in an amusing way — about flirtation not
love, suspicion not jealousy, pique not passion. From the start you
just don’t care, because it’s all done with such delicacy and style.

The performers hardly seem to inhabit the same artistic universe as
Pickford, Keaton, Lloyd — the brash, innocent, plastically
explosive world of mainstream Hollywood movies in the silent era.
There’s a languor, a subtlety, a world-weary wittiness in the playing
that contribute to an overall tone which Lubitsch seems to have
imported wholesale from Europe (by way of Chaplin’s A Woman Of Paris) and cast like a spell over his American actors and crew. No collision of aesthetic strategies here, of the sort we see even in some of the greatest Hollywood silent films — this
artistic vision is of a piece, totally assured, astonishingly mature.

And though this vision derives to some degree from literary sources, from
turn-of-the-century European plays and novels, it has been
fundamentally reimagined in visual terms — intertitles are sparse and
virtually irrelevant. Lubitsch’s visual style is not, however, one of
great plastic power — the felicities of it are on a small scale,
restrained and minutely observed:

A flower falls accidentally from the hands of a woman and lands, in close up, at the feet of a hopeful suitor. There is a pause — we sense the suitor looking down at it in wonder — before he picks it up.

A happily married couple are having breakfast — Lubitsch lingers in close up on the egg he’s breaking, the coffee she’s stirring, until they abandon the tasks and embrace . . . off screen.

A woman at an indiscreet garden rendezvous throws off her scarf
seductively and it blows away — we see it land in close-up at the feet
of her indiscreet partner’s wife, somewhere else in the garden, catch
on the foot of the wife’s importunate companion . . . it’s carried
along by him, still in close up, until the wife steps on it, and they
both realize something is amiss.

A straw hat travels about town during the course of one romantically disastrous night, passed along from one lover and would-be lover to another, forgotten, discovered, brandished, claimed.

Gradually, as the tiny missed connections between people accumulate, as the
minute, half-conscious indiscretions gather momentum, as the
unhappiness of Mizzi, the character at the center of the tale, radiates outward and infects all those around her, the movie becomes profound. Inconsequential acts fill the void at the
center of feckless lives and melancholy, incurable because it’s unexamined, creeps into the farce.

When Mizzi, to distract her husband from some incriminating bit of romantic
evidence, embraces him and says, “I need to be loved,” it’s both a ruse
and a true confession — and the look of bemusement and surprise on the
face of her husband, played with miraculous precision by Adolphe
Menjou, is actually heartbreaking. Just for a moment he believes her —
until that darned straw hat turns up once again and his habitual
cynicism is confirmed.

Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this film, a fact that is admitted and
even celebrated in the finale between the “happy” married couple — who
achieve their reconciliation by a double ruse in which each is deceived
and each the deceiver. Only we, the audience, know the whole story. The
suggestion is that the difference between a good marriage and a bad one
is luck, a healthy dose of ignorance, and just a little extra — almost
imperceptible — application of goodwill.

In the end, The Marriage Circle is not about nothing after all — issues of enormous consequence are caught up in its gossamer threads. It’s very great filmmaking and very great art.

SAUL STEINBERG AND ALFRED HITCHCOCK

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The delightful drawings behind the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film The Trouble With Harry were done (uncredited) by famed New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg, riffing on images from the paintings of Paul Klee.  Hitchcock was a collector of Klee’s work and may well have asked Steinberg to incorporate the homage.

The Steinberg drawings seem to echo a style in 50s design and animation called “cartoon modern”, which I wrote about in an earlier post — though of course the cartoon modern style derives from the whimsical abstractions of artists like Klee and Steinberg, not the other way around.  It’s an example of the way artistic ideas percolate up and down the scale from high to popular art.  In 1955, Klee was high-brow art, Steinberg (at least when he was publishing in The New Yorker) was middle-brow art and Hitchcock was low-brow art.  Today you could hardly rank Hitchcock below either of the other two on any scale of art — which just goes to show how silly and ephemeral such distinctions are, and ought to make us wonder what art today is undervalued because it’s stuck into some temporary and ultimately meaningless hierarchy.

WHY WORRY?

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Harold
Lloyd's Why Worry? (from 1923) is an almost perfect film. Its scale
is relatively small compared to the films that bracket it in the Lloyd
canon, with a more modest action finale. It lacks the breathtaking
spectacle of the climactic sequence of Safety Last and the epic
momentum of the race to the rescue in Girl Shy, but it makes up for
this with a delirious escalating rhythm and a truly romantic lyricism.
The “love interest” is effectively integrated into the plot and
unusually strong for a slapstick comedy.


One
fair criticism one can make about Safety Last concerns the decidedly
unromantic notion that Harold must become financially successful to win
his true love. This leads him into acts of physical courage by the end
of the tale, but we never quite lose the idea that he's risking his
life for cash — the girl comes to seem like a trophy that goes along
with it.


Girl
Shy has a more developed love story but, again, financial success is
the sine qua non of romance, and even when Harold attains it, his final
triumph is still predicated on the fact that his rival for the girl's
affection is already married. The actual, personal love story gets lost
(or perhaps cheerfully abandoned) somewhere along the way.


The
issue of acquiring wealth doesn't arise in Why Worry? because Harold
starts off rich, and that's his problem — he's selfish, spoiled and
self-involved. It's almost a relief to see this critique of the wealthy
set down amidst Harold's more familiar personifications of the
single-minded near-manic American go-getter.


His
character here is a hypochondriac, obsessed with his health. He travels
with his nurse, the ever-vexing Jobyna Ralston, and his butler to a
small tropical country for “recuperation” from his non-existent
maladies. Ralston is secretly in love with him, apparently seeing
something in him that we can't — at least not yet. He'd be in love
with her, too, we sense, if he could ever look beyond the end of his
own sniffling nose.


When
they arrive in paradise, the little country is in the grip of a
revolution. The gag that propels most of the rest of the comedy is that
Harold can't imagine that anything that happens in the world isn't
taking place for his personal convenience. He fails to notice the
mayhem around him. Paradoxically, this makes him behave heroically —
since he doesn't perceive the jeopardy, he overcomes it easily at every
turn.


One
can read this as an image of American arrogance — what's a little
revolution in a third-world backwater to us? One can read it
simultaneously as a sort of ironic vindication of American optimism, of
a naive Yankee ingenuity. What one can't read it as, in the context of
the story, is genuine heroism. Harold isn't actually triumphing over
danger, since he doesn't see anything as really dangerous — not to
him.


But
eventually things become more complicated and interesting. When he gets
thrown into jail by the insurgents, he finally begins to realize that
something is amiss — he thought they were escorting him to his hotel.
He's locked into a cell with a violent and gigantic maniac, whose
violence is currently exacerbated by a howling toothache. Harold's
refusal to take him seriously as a menace seems to perplex the giant,
and soften him. “Let's escape,” says Harold, with blithe practicality.
They do, and Harold manages to extract the aching tooth — making the
giant his pal for life, and very soon his accomplice in putting down
the revolution and restoring order.


This
is the first stage in Harold's moral rehabilitation — his democratic
solidarity with the outcast giant and his act of simple, practical
kindness towards him get for Harold in return the giant's awesome
strength, which, combined with Harold's wit, makes for an unstoppable
force.





Meanwhile,
Ralston has gotten lost and is hiding out from the insurgents dressed
as a man, a caballero. Somehow this makes Ralston even more vexing,
both to us and to Harold. When their paths cross again Harold is able
to see her, out of the usual nurse's uniform, as a distinct person —
not just as a provider for his needs. All his defenses crumble. “Why
didn't you tell me I was in love with you?” he demands petulantly.
That's the residue of a character he has already started to shed.
Seeing Ralston in danger makes this whole revolution personal for
Harold — his half-conscious or merely practical heroism now becomes
deliberate and important. He is prepared to enter the world fully,
engaged not just as a restorer of order but as a committed lover. He
has grown up.


He and
Ralston and the giant, equal partners now, quickly defeat the insurgent
army and sail off happily for America, where the giant gets a job as a
traffic cop and Harold and Ralston get married. The film ends, sweetly,
with Harold collecting the cop to come and celebrate the birth of his
child.


The
lyricism and romantic conviction of the tale unfold in an unbroken
chain of evolving slapstick incidents which tumble into each other like
the incidents of a dream — perfectly logical until you think about
them for a second. The gags, always ingenious and funny, become
beautiful, too, as they do, for example, in the train sequences of The
General. The girl becomes more than a sidekick or a goal — she
becomes, in fact, the whole motor and point of the story.

At the
beginning of the film, there's a beautiful blue-tinted scene set on the
deck of the steamer taking the party south — a dance lit by strings of
lanterns, with a calm sea rolling along behind them. It's there that we
realize that Ralston is in love with Harold and there that we decide he
ought to be in love with her. It prepares us for a romance — and that
is what we get in the end, in the unlikeliest and loveliest of ways.

101 DALMATIANS

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Above is some beautiful concept art from one of my favorite Disney animated features, 101 Dalmatians.

Compared to the classic fairytale epics, this film is almost a chamber piece, with a quiet, cozy, gentle humor — interrupted, of course by the delirious Grand Guignol of Cruella DeVille.  Its modernistic (for 1961) line-drawing style reminds me of the work of the great N. M. Bodecker, who did the wonderful illustrations for the Edward Eager magic-themed children’s books.



Despite its reaching for a newer, more linear style, and the fact that it used Xeroxing to help in the transfer of the artists’ drawings to the cels, 101 Dalmatians has a fully animated look and makes exciting use of composition and animation in depth. It’s the perfect film for a winter’s night by the fire, with some cookies and a cup of hot chocolate.

CINEMA AS A PLASTIC ART: A PREAMBLE

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Moving picture images are magical not because they move, not because they can efficiently convey factual or narrative information, and not because they can be composed to produce pleasing graphic effects — although, of course, they can do all of these things.  Moving picture images are magical because they can create the illusion of a space on the other side of the screen into which we look and into which we project ourselves experientially.

The fascination and appeal of this illusion can be simple, even crude — witness the famous story of the first public projection of the Lumière brothers’ Train Arriving In A Station, in which a train, moving on an angle almost directly towards the camera, caused spectators to duck and scream, as though they thought the train might might leave the illusory space of the projected image and penetrate the real space of the auditorium.


Of course it’s doubtful that people actually felt themselves in danger from the projected image — the reaction was physiological.  When you see something that looks big and solid and seems to be hurtling towards you, you duck first and think later — very much the way a Cinerama traveling shot filmed from the front of a roller-coaster car can cause slight nausea.  The eye tricks the body into a physical response.

Our eyes, conditioned by long experience watching moving pictures, are not as innocent as the eyes of the people who ducked and screamed at the Lumières’ train, but we still react viscerally to the imaginary space on the other side of the movie screen.  Shots which emphasize the illusion of space on the other side of the screen still draw us imaginatively into that space, cause or allow us to participate more fully in the action that seems to be going
on there.

When lighting or framing or camera movement or choreography of action within the frame intensifies the spatial illusion, our attention becomes more focussed, our ability to project ourselves into the action of the film more pronounced.  This is something all great directors have known, consciously or intuitively — as they have known how to manipulate the phenomenon for specific emotional effects.

It would seem that most of the truly great directors understood the phenomenon intuitively.  Griffith’s first film, made in 1908, works hard to create the illusion of spatial depth and to exploit it in every shot — something that was far from routine in films, especially narrative films, of the time.


Hitchcock, a child at around this same time in the development of movies, said the first films that captured his imagination were part of a non-narrative series called Phantom Train Rides, in which a camera was mounted on the front of train and simply filmed the unfolding journey, penetrating space and thus emphasizing the spatial illusion of the film image.  (One such film, From Leadville To Aspen, with a brief interpolated narrative plot, can be seen on the More Treasures From American Film Archives DVD box set — and the opening of Strangers On A Train has an exceptionally beautiful shot, used also in the trailer for the film, below, from the front of a moving train that echoes the technique of the Phantom Train Rides.)


Hitchcock also said that when he was a teenager what impressed him most about American movies was their use of backlighting to separate foreground figures from backgrounds, to give the impression of “relief” — spatial depth.

The techniques listed above for intensifying spatial illusion in movies all tend to exploit the basic three-dimensional quality of the photographic image, its optical coherence with regard to perspective, to give the impression of a space which is malleable, filled with potential for movement within it.  They reveal the illusion of cinematic space as something akin to real space, which can be redefined and re-analyzed by movement, molded — as something, in short, which is plastic.

Film images are routinely analyzed for their graphic qualities and for their factual or narrative content, but they are very rarely analyzed for their plastic qualities, even though these qualities are precisely the ones which constitute their power and seductiveness, the ones on which our responses to a film are primarily based.

There needs to be a whole new criticism of film centered on its identity as a plastic art.

A DIRECTOR'S LIFE

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Alfred Hitchcock: A Life In Darkness and Light
may be the best biography of a film director ever written.  Long
and detailed, filled with fascinating information about all aspects of
Hitchcock's life and films, it's also a great read, almost as
entertaining as a Hitchcock film.




There have been two previous full-scale biographies of the director.  Hitch,
by John Russell Taylor, was published in Hitchcock's lifetime and with
his cooperation — it sets forth the basic facts without delving too
deeply into problematic areas.  Donald Spoto's well-known The Dark Side Of Genius,
published a couple of years after the director's death, was more
detailed and uninhibited but, as its title suggests, had a somewhat
slanted point of view.  It marshaled evidence and highlighted it
in such a way as to expose primarily the neurotic and malicious side of
the man.




Patrick McGilligan, as his title suggests, tries for a more balanced
view, and specifically challenges many of Spoto's interpretations of
events and sources, while treading fearlessly into territory that
Taylor avoided.




None of the books solves the mystery of Hitchcock's genius and art,
because genius and art are mysteries without solutions, but in
McGilligan one finds a plausible Hitchcock, one that contains all the
complexity and contradiction of the films themselves, the darkness and
the light.




It's a terrific achievement.


[Apologies for the web log's disappearance for a couple of days — it
exceeded its allotted bandwidth     . . . too many visitors!  I think
the problem has been solved, and thanks for the interest!]

ISLE OF THE DEAD

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Above is an amazing image by the 19th-Century Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin — Self Portrait With Death.  I stumbled across it while looking for another Böcklin painting, The Isle Of the Dead, which Hitchcock reportedly used as a visual frame of reference for Vertigo.

The Isle Of the Dead (below) is almost as spooky as the self-portrait, and while it’s not referenced directly in Vertigo, its mood and basic visual strategy obviously informed a lot of the film’s compositions involving Madeleine, the ghostly, morbidly-obsessed heroine, who often appears as a distant, deathly-still figure set against backgrounds of dark trees and the sea.

HEADIN' HOME

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Unless you're one yourself it's probably hard to
imagine how wondrous and magical it is for a baseball fan to watch Headin' Home — one of the films on Kino's new silent-era baseball
set.

The film features Babe Ruth looking unbelievably young
and unusually lanky.  The year was 1920 and the Bambino had just been
traded to the Yankees — a year later he would have the most incredible
season any baseball player has ever had and probably ever will have. 
(He hit 59 home runs that year — a recent book estimates that under
modern rules and field dimensions the total would have probably been
101, all with the old “dead ball”.)

Ruth looks remarkably composed in front of the camera,
even in the scenes that call for acting — his minimalist style has
aged very well.  But what's really stunning is just watching him move
— you see a physical grace and ease, an elegant self-possession, that
doesn't always come across in documentary footage of his on-the-field
play.

Roger Angell has suggested that a core appeal of
baseball in the urban America of the early 20th-Century was its aura of
the pastoral — its wide greensward, like a big enclosed meadow, and
its easy rhythms reminding transplanted urban dwellers of their rural
roots.  Headin' Home confirms this insight in a way.  It's conceit is
to construct a fictional biography of Ruth as the product of a small
town and small-town values.  This was a far cry from the Babe's actual
childhood on some of the meaner streets of Baltimore and in an
orphanage, but it represents how America wanted to view its baseball
heroes.

It must have been strange for Ruth to enact the
fantasy youth conjured up for him by the filmmakers — choppin' down
trees, carvin' his own bats, eatin' mom's apple pie and goin' to the
church social — but he looks utterly nonplused by the whole exercise. 
(Ruth
had a delightful and quintessentially American matter-of-fact attitude
to everything.  When asked how he felt about making more money than
Herbert Hoover, the President of the United States, Ruth said, “I had a
better year than Hoover.”)

The film appears to have been shot somewhere in
Upstate New York, and it offers delightful images of small-town America
in 1920, including a wonderful recreation of a local ballgame between
rival small towns. 

The film also incorporates footage of Ruth in action
in an actual big-league game — part of a framing device in which an
old fellow attending the game reminisces about the Babe's youth “back
home” with genial if uninspired cracker-barrel wit.

But it's the physical presence of Ruth himself that
enchants, whatever he happens to be doing — it's like seeing
documentary footage of Achilles engaged in some amateur theatricals or
demonstrating his prowess with a spear . . . documentary footage of a
mythological being.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION — PART TWO: A RACISM INDEX

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The picture of Reconstruction presented in the second half of The Birth Of A Nation is entirely bogus, but since it represents the views
of respected historians of the time we need to see it as expressing the
environmental racism of 1915.  That it did express racism, however, is
beyond doubt.  Radical Reconstruction sought to fully enfranchise
Southern blacks and bring them into full political and social equality
with whites.  Its ideals were decent, and ones that almost everyone
today would heartily endorse, but it was undoubtedly unrealistic in the
context of Southern society just after the end of the Civil War.  And
it wasn't only Southerners who were horrified at the notion of treating
blacks as free and equal citizens.  To many, the idea was both
ludicrous and repugnant.




Unwilling to oppose the idea of liberty and equality for all people,
opponents of Radical Reconstruction created a myth about it — that it
was a cynical ploy by unscrupulous Northern whites to maneuver
ignorant blacks into political power and then use that power themselves
to control and plunder the South.  Historians, out of a similar
prejudice against blacks, confirmed the myth as fact.




The myth, and the bogus historiography that seemed to confirm it, tried
to disguise an opposition to equality for blacks, but the disguise
comes apart in The Birth Of A Nation, where attempts by blacks to
interact on terms of social equality with whites are presented as
outrages almost on a level with political and judicial corruption. 
Henry Walthall's Little Colonel grows steely-eyed when black soldiers
assert their right to walk on the sidewalk in front of his house, when
Silas Lynch offers to shake his hand — his look in those moments is
not so different from the chilling one he gives in reaction to the
death of his sister at the hands of a crazed black would-be rapist. 
Earlier, that same sister had reacted with a look of repugnance when
Stoneman's daughter publicly conversed, on perfectly innocent and civil
terms, with the mulatto Lynch.




In such attitudes we see the ugliest side of casual environmental
racism — the nastiness it could provoke when its assumptions were
challenged by “uppity” blacks . . . that is, blacks who presumed to be
entitled to the common respect and dignity accorded to whites.




Indeed, the pathological racism of The Birth Of A Nation can be seen
as a kind of justification for this nastiness, by showing where such
presumption by blacks will inevitably lead — to sexual assaults by
black males on white females, to miscegenation.




This connection is established in the very first scenes of the second
half of the film.  In the wake of Lincoln's death and Stoneman's rise
to greater power, Stoneman's maid has now become his social equal,
dressing like a lady and insisting on being treated as one by
Stoneman's associates, though she remains an infantile schemer. 
Stoneman states his intention of elevating his protege, the mulatto
Lynch, to full equality with whites — but we are shown what the
consequences of this will be, which Stoneman can't see yet.  Lynch
stares lustfully at Stoneman's daughter, foreshadowing his future
pursuit and attempted rape of her.  That's what “equality” means to him.








The association of political and social equality for blacks with sexual
designs by black males on white women is carried through the scenes in
South Carolina which follow.  We see blacks displaying signs which read
“Equal Rights/Equal Politics/Equal Marriage.”  The
drumbeats are clear — the progression apparently inevitable.  In the
black-dominated state legislature, the
ignorant, buffoonish black members react with indifference to the
government business being conducted, until a bill allowing
miscegenation is passed, whereupon they direct sexual leers at the
white women in the galleries and then break out in riotous celebration.




A title informs us that this picture of a black legislature was based
on historical photographs, but David Shepard, in his excellent short
documentary on the making of the film, included in the Kino DVD
edition, reveals that it was not — it was based on political cartoons
of the time.  Once again, when Griffith wants to inject an element of
psycho-sexual paranoia into his film he adopts a different standard of
historical accuracy than he applies elsewhere.




Black political power is shown as having no legitimate ambitions.  It
exists only to enrich or enable the white and/or mulatto manipulators
of the black vote, and to sanction sexual relations between the races. 
Even “marriage” is a euphemism here, since blacks are shown as having
no conception of the institution — it just represents a license to
copulate, with or without the woman's consent.







The rise and mobilization of the Klan is presented as a response to the
political and judicial corruption of Southern society by the wicked
carpetbaggers and their ignorant black minions, but its primary
dramatic function is to avenge Gus's attempted rape of the Little
Sister
— by murdering him extralegally — and to save the other white female
principals from attempted rape.  Everything, in the end, boils down to
protecting white females from sexual outrages by black males.







In the finale, as former Union and Confederate soldiers and
their women huddle in a remote cabin assaulted by crazed blacks, we
are told that they have united, not in defense of shared American
values, shared ideals of justice and freedom, but “in defense of their
common Aryan birthright”, granted by the “purity” of their Aryan blood,
which is really what is threatened here.  The women face the
possibility of rape by the animalistic blacks and the men prepare to
kill them rather than allow that possibility to come to pass.  The
“nation” whose birth this film celebrates has almost nothing to do with
the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution — everything to do
with Aryan purity and superiority.  It's racist to the core.




The white sheets of the Klansmen in The Birth Of A Nation do not
cover idealists riding to right political and judicial wrongs, despite
a blizzard of intertitles which tell us otherwise.  They cover the
beleaguered psyches of 20th-Century males riding to restore their own
insecure manhood.