Category Archives: Movies

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

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The environmental, or broad cultural racism in the first half of The
Birth Of A Nation finds expression in two ways.  The first is the
general depiction of blacks under slavery as well-treated and happy. 
It can be argued that some blacks under slavery were well-treated,
insofar as anyone held in involuntary servitude can be said to be
well-treated, and that some blacks under slavery were happy, insofar
as anyone held in involuntary servitude can be said to be happy.  But
presenting such blacks as the only representatives of slavery in a film
with the epic scope of The
Birth Of A Nation cannot be seen as merely
an act of dramatic selection.  All the characters in the film are
emblematic of broader social realities, and the view of slavery
presented here, as part of the “gracious” Southern social order that
will be swept away by the Civil War, has an ideological dimension —
and
the ideology is based on a lie.  Whether or not slavery was a
“necessary evil” or a crime against humanity or on balance a benign
institution, it did not even remotely resemble the portrait of it
offered up in The
Birth Of A Nation.




The second expression of environmental racism is more complex.  It lies
in Griffith's decision to have all blacks who are presented as
individuals in the film played by whites in blackface.  In this he was
following
conventional theatrical practice.  We know, from his testimony in a
censorship hearing for the film, that he considered the issue before
deciding on the blackface solution, but he probably wouldn't have been
terribly self-conscious about it, so common was the practice.  But its
very commonness raises interesting issues.




On one level, the blackface caricature of an African-American by a
white actor carries its own critique within it.  There is no theatrical
deception involved — the glaringly obvious make-up reveals that the
convention is a convention, and one of the things expressed in the
convention is that whites have appropriated the image of the black,
that whites will control the image of the black.  The image must be,
therefore, on the blackened face of it, constructed.  The convention
announces that whites feel empowered to construct, to control, the
image of the black, but also admits that the image is inauthentic.  It
leaves open the possibility that blacks might construct other images of
themselves, if they had the power to do so — and that they might not
participate willingly in these particular constructions of their
images.  There are more questioned raised than answered by the
convention of blackface, at least on an unconscious level.




The pathological, psycho-sexual racism of The
Birth Of A Nation
doesn't emerge until about 16 minutes into the film, with the first
appearance of Austin Stoneman's sluttish maid.  Previously, Stoneman
has been
established as a grotesque figure, with a club foot and an ill-fitting
wig.  Suspicions about him have been aroused by revealing that he
spends a lot of time in his library, where his family never visits. 
He's never shown in his own home — his sons even march off to war from
that home when he is not present.  This is Victorian code for the fact
that Stoneman is a creep — at the very least a deeply problematic
figure.  Devotion to the
home was an essential element of male rectitude in Victorian fiction.




With the appearance of Stoneman's maid we learn the dark secret he is
hiding — an illicit sexual relationship with his maid, a mulatto
woman.  Stoneman is a thinly-veiled stand-in for the great anti-slavery
statesman Thaddeus Stevens.  Stevens' radical views on Reconstruction
can be, and have been, criticized as over-zealous and impractical, but
Griffith is suggesting that his polity was the direct result of sexual
perversion, the impulse towards unbridled sexual lust in general and
miscegenation in particular.  The mere fact that his slovenly maid is a
mulatto, the product of miscegenation, sets up the association of black
enfranchisement, even black aspirations towards dignity, with an
undiscriminating, animalistic sexuality.  The maid is offended when a
visitor to Stevens'
library treats her dismissively, as a mere servant — after he leaves
she flings herself to the floor and writhes in anguish, her shoulders
immodestly bared, her hands playing over her breasts.  Her behavior is
not just indecorous — it's positively bestial.




There is no evidence that Thaddeus Stevens ever had an affair with a
mulatto maid, or that he engaged in sexual misconduct of any kind. 
What we
have here is pure, and very bizarre, fantasy, which can only be
explained by the pathological association of black enfranchisement and
equality with the destructive unleashing of the libido.  A title card
announces that we have witnessed in the scenes described above “the
weakness” — Stoneman's lust for
a black woman — “that blighted a nation”.  The entire Civil War and
the complex moral and economic forces that led to it, the entire
abolitionist cause, is reduced to sexual “perversion” in the form of
miscegenation.




Meanwhile, down South, the Civil War has broken out and almost
immediately the Cameron home is threatened by Negroes gone wild. 
“Renegade” black soldiers, in Union uniforms, attack the town where the
Camerons live, and the Cameron home itself.  Griffith concentrates
dramatically on the threat to the two Cameron sisters, hiding out in
their basement.  Any viewer of the time would have recognized the
sexual component of the threat.  The girls are clearly in danger of
being raped by the maniacs assaulting their home.


There were, in fact, no bands of renegade black soldiers running wild
in
the South.  A title tells us, misleadingly, that the first black troops
were enlisted in South Carolina, which is true — but none of them
ever behaved the way these blacks troops do, which is what the title
implies.  A title also tells us that the blacks have been incited to
their behavior by an irresponsible white commander.  Griffith often
uses this device in the film to show he's not blaming blacks for their
behavior — only the white trash who spur them on.  But this muddles
what's really being said between the lines.  The bad whites in these
cases have failed to
exercise proper patrician supervision of and control over their black
charges, they have misdirected and unleashed the animalistic tendencies
of the blacks.  The important point being driven home — and it's
driven home throughout the film — is that this potential for
animalistic behavior by blacks is always there and always needs to be
controlled.  This is the white man's burden — his first duty in
protecting the home and its women.




A detachment of white Confederate soldiers rescues the Cameron girls
and their home — white actors in blackface help put out the fire in
the house and embrace these soldiers in gratitude.  But in the course
of the film, the white deliverers
won't always get there on time . . . indeed, their failure to do so
on one crucial occasion will lead directly to the dramatic climax of
the film.




The first half of The
Birth Of A Nation ends with the assassination
of Lincoln, dramatically and quite accurately recreated onscreen.  This
assassination has become a tragic, iconic component of America's
national myth, and in the film it is greeted by sorrow on both sides of
the Mason-Dixon line — with one exception.  Stoneman's mistress exults
as she strokes Stoneman's arm lasciviously and tells him he's now the
most powerful man in the country.  Her villainy and inhumanity could
not be
asserted more forcefully — a more direct connection could not be drawn
between the “history” we're about to watch unfold and the sexual
“perversion” of miscegenation.  To this woman, and perhaps to Stoneman,
Lincoln's death only removes the greatest obstacle to the sexual union
of the black and white races.




It's really impossible to fully appreciate Griffith's artistry in this
film without recognizing how skillfully he inflects his national epic
with psycho-sexual themes, appealing to patriotism, nostalgia for a
more gracious age, reverence for the home, in order to set all these
things against the perceived horror of the pollution of the Aryan race
by admixture with inferior blood.




The environmental racism of The
Birth Of A Nation is not egregious by
the standards of its day.  It wouldn't even have been egregious by the
standards of 1939, the year of Gone With the Wind, which simply used
cleverer and more sophisticated means to distract us from thinking too
seriously about the horrors and the enduring moral stain of slavery. 
And in the first half of The
Birth Of A Nation, the more disturbing
and
pathological racist element is almost overwhelmed by the lyric beauty
of the film in its celebration of family and home and gallantry and
innocent courtly love.


But we will see that the pathological element has been carefully
interwoven into the fabric of the film's first half precisely in order
to set up its emotional ascendancy in the second half — and there is
no question that this strategy was deliberate.  The
Birth Of A Nation
prides itself on historical accuracy — with some justification.  The
film is historically responsible and convincing in visual terms, and in
many of its recreations of actual events.  The only times it departs
conspicuously from historical accuracy, the only times it unashamedly
distorts and
falsifies the historical record, are in those passages where it seeks
to promote its psycho-sexual racist agenda.  That agenda will come to
dominate the second half of the film, but it was painstakingly and
strikingly foreshadowed in the first half.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION: A RACISM INDEX — INTRODUCTION

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There are two kinds, or degrees, of racism in The Birth Of A Nation.  The first might be described as environmental racism, reflecting the conventional racism of the dominant culture of early 20th-Century America.  This centered on the idea that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, unfitted for social or political equality, and best treated with a kind of benign paternalism.

In 1915 one might hold such views almost unconsciously, so imbedded were they in the thinking of the time, and one might find “scientific” explanations for the inferiority of blacks even in the pages of authoritative reference works like the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Other viewpoints were available, however — other public voices which insisted that blacks were fully the equals of whites and deserved to participate fully in American democracy and American society.  The attitude of the dominant culture did not go unchallenged, and so involved a measure of choice, of moral responsibility.  Moreover, the dominant culture benefited psychologically and financially from maintaining blacks as a permanent underclass and source of cheap labor, so its view of their inherent inferiority incorporated an element of self-serving denial.

In short, there was very little about environmental racism which could be considered morally neutral or benign, even though it could be entertained by people who were in other respects decent and good-hearted.

The second kind of racism in The Birth Of A Nation has a darker undertone.  While it derives from the assumptions of environmental racism it moves into a frankly pathological realm.  It held that blacks were not just intellectually inferior but animalistic, distinctly subhuman, and would, if ungoverned by strict regimentation on the part of whites,
revert to bestial behavior, especially with regard to sexuality, and particularly with regard to sexual aggression by black males against white females.

The social history of race relations in America provided almost no evidence to support this view — quite the contrary.  Historically speaking, sexual aggression and sexual abuse between the races resided almost exclusively in the sexual predation of white males directed against black females within the Southern plantation system.  This was the unspoken scandal of ante-bellum society in the South, as Mary Chestnut confessed ruefully in the original unexpurgated version of her famous diary.

The fictive threat to white womanhood from black males had origins within the psyches of white males — under threat in 1915 from social causes inherent in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing America.  Males increasingly worked for and at the pleasure of other men far more powerful than themselves, and women had access to incomes from office and factory work independent of male domestic partners.

The male insecurity that resulted was augmented by cultural insecurity as waves of immigrants began to change the face of America, importing “foreign” mores, customs, values and even languages that competed with those of the dominant culture.

In this atmosphere, the casual environmental racism of the dominant white culture took a more intense and programmatic form — it mutated into a defiant celebration of the “Aryan race”, an aggressive insistence on its superiority, and an essentially pathological fear of its dilution, or even overthrow, by lesser races, especially the animalistic “Negro” race.

The great success of Thomas Dixon’s potboiler fiction, which openly promoted this new, more self-conscious and aggressive racism, testifies to its wide cultural appeal at the beginning of the 20th Century.  In his skewed and irresponsibly manipulated version of the historical facts of Reconstruction, Dixon was presenting a prophecy of what might happen to white culture if “lesser” races ever again got the upper hand.  He was quite clear about this.  His introduction to The Clansman, the novel on which The Birth Of A Nation was partly based and under which title it was originally released, described Reconstruction as one of the most important episodes, not in the history of America, but in the history of the Aryan race.

Thinking of the history of America as the history of the triumph of the Aryan race was appealing to many in early 20th-Century America — it bolstered the manhood of white males threatened by new female power and new cultural influences.  It was psychologically seductive.

One of the men it seduced was D. W. Griffith.  It was an ironic tragedy, since Griffith was himself, by all accounts, a benign sort of racist in his dealings with individual blacks, and also a man deeply sympathetic, in his way and within his limitations, to the emerging
position of the “modern woman”.  One can only conclude that the seduction took place on some level beneath the conscious — as it must have, surely, to some degree, for American society as a whole.

I’m not sure the process can ever be wholly understood, but from a distance it can at least be described, and I think there’s some value in that.  In future posts I’ll offer some examples of how the two kinds of racism described above play out in The Birth Of A Nation.

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER

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When Ernst Lubitsch, in his American movies, looked
back on the Europe he left
behind to pursue a career in Hollywood, he looked back at its glamor
and
sophistication, inflected it with a wry nostalgia, turned it into a
dreamscape.  But he kept his emotional distance from it, precisely
because it was a dream, and he knew it — a world he was never really a
part of, though as a man of the theater and the cabaret stage and
cinema, he got close enough to observe it.

And then came The Shop Around the Corner,
towards
the end of his career, when he dropped his mask of sophisticated
reserve and looked back at the Europe he actually came from as the son
of a Berlin shopkeeper.  The deep humanity and emotion of the film
revealed that his dreamy evocations of high-class European culture were
simply a displaced nostalgia for his youth, and when he engaged that
nostalgia directly, a sort of miracle occurred.  Lubitsch opened his
heart for perhaps the first time ever in his work.

Lubitsch had always been amused by the flim-flam at
the
center of aristocratic charm, and was attracted to characters who
penetrated the
aristocrat's world by imitating the aristocrat's special form of social
theater — much as he had used the theater itself in real life to gain
status and wealth, and with them access to privileged circles.  That
was why he retained a shrewd if affectionate cynicism towards the
people in his movies, a sense that everything they did was part of a
game.  But in The
Shop Around the Corner his cynicism mutated into a kind of love —
still clear-eyed about human foibles but with a new sense that affairs
of the heart amounted to something more than delirious and delicious
role-playing.


There has never been a more heartfelt celebration of
petit-bourgeois life than The Shop Around the Corner, not least
because it's so nuanced.  The financial terror involved in losing or
looking for a job, the deceptions of merchandising, the humiliations of
employment, are all engaged squarely — but so are the satisfactions of
running a business, the creativity and sensitivity of salesmanship, the
comradeship of workers engaged in a collective enterprise.

If you've ever known a family-run shop first hand,
or even just worked as a temporary hire during the holidays at a
department store, you will recognize in this movie the magical sense in
which any retail business is a theatrical presentation, with its own
version of the enchantment of being
backstage and then stepping out in front of the audience, its own
version of the
excitement involved in seeing the whole production come together (or
not) in
times of stress.


For Lubitsch in this film, the tension between
theatrical presentation and reality is still a central concern — with
the shop and with the romance that develops between Jimmy Stewart and
Margaret Sullavan.  But stage and backstage, appearance and reality,
come together here as they
don't in any of Lubitsch's earlier films.  The workers in the luggage
shop become a real family, not just an amusing parody of one.  The
lovers' pretenses are exposed, and instead of just laughing them off
with a sublime, wistful nonchalance,
as he always had before, Lubitsch discovers a depth of connection beneath
the ruses and fantasies
— a love
that can survive the exposure.

It's all so much more moving than the explicit
sentimentality of It's A Wonderful Life,
that other great
Christmas
movie starring Jimmy Stewart — because it involves sentiment without
illusion, or rather, sentiment that appreciates illusion but sees an
enduring beauty revealed in it, something that transcends
improvisation, something internalized.  There's no Old Man Potter
in this film
to
threaten the happiness of the young couple and no guardian angel to
restore it — the threat comes from within themselves . . . as does the
leap of faith that saves them.


Ernst Lubitsch's long journey as an artist began above
his father's clothing store in Berlin and reached its pinnacle in a
fake luggage shop built on an MGM sound stage in Culver City,
California.  Even that surreal paradox doesn't convey just what a
complex and profound journey it was — but all of it is summed up and
brought to a magnificent fulfillment in The Shop Around the Corner.


DRACULA (1931)

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I saw the 1931 version of Dracula so many times as a kid, and listened so
often to a tape of its soundtrack I made off the TV, that at a certain
point I couldn’t see or hear it anymore. Even watching it today I
sometimes find myself speaking the lines before they’re delivered, with
the exact (and always eccentric) vocal inflections of the actors.

I stopped watching it in my late teens, a bit embarrassed by its
clunkiness and lack of sophistication — so it was something of a
revelation to see it again recently in the restored version now out on
DVD and find myself wondrously entertained.

It is a truly demented film, in a way none of the other classic Universal horror films are — and the dementia must be credited largely to Tod Browning, because it echoes the perversity of so many of his silents.

Everyone in the film looks drugged — moves like a sleepwalker or someone in a
woozy erotic reverie. The slow pace can perhaps be attributed in part
to the recent transition to sound — to the need for actors to avoid
stepping on each other’s lines and to the silent-era habit of lingering
on movement for character or narrative exposition that could now be
supplied by the dialogue. But a bigger part I think is a stylistic
choice by Browning — his way of creating an otherworldy and yet
insistently sensual mood.

It’s not quite campy, as James Whale’s style can be — there’s no real wit
to it, no winking at the audience to let them in on the joke. We simply
seem to be watching a film in some unfamiliar Kabuki-like performance
tradition, which demands from its performers a greater degree of
deliberation and a slower pace than we’re used to. The effect is
unsettling but adds to the uncanny atmosphere.

The restored version gives one a chance to appreciate how beautifully the
film is shot — with exquisite lighting and infrequent camera moves
that are nevertheless always effective, either in enlivening an
otherwise static interior scene or in giving the spectator a sense of
being drawn in to a forbidden precinct. The film is so much more
stylish visually than most of Browning’s work that I guess one must
credit the speculation that cameraman Karl Freund was a kind of
co-director on the film — or at least that Browning gave him total
license in creating the look of it.

It has many lapses of continuity, a few of which are really jarring — evidence,
as has been suggested, that someone took the shears to Browning’s
original cut. But when the film slows down in the second half, with its
maddening repetition of expository material in the dialogue, you find
yourself wishing for the shears yourself. The script is simply very
clumsy, and I’m convinced the cutting was done to eliminate unnecessary
dialogue rather than to address any directorial lapses by Browning, who
after all was charged with shooting the script approved by the studio.

The film is never scary, exactly — but it’s creepy, spooky, strange, in
its own unique way. It has a dreamlike quality that allows its
subversive themes to gain sway over the spectator’s unconscious
experience of the film.

VICTORIAN ART AND THE CINEMA

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In the mythology of modern art history the realist painters of the
Victorian era fought a losing battle with the photograph and eventually
capitulated to the dominant aesthetic of 20th-Century art, with its
irresistible (and progressive) trend towards a greater and greater
abstraction, abandoning both pictorial realism and almost all narrative
ambitions.

In fact, however, realist painters of the Victoria era conducted an
exciting and productive dialogue with the photograph, incorporating its
apparent authority but also, at the same time, extending its range of
representation beyond the technical limits of the 19th-Century camera.



Academic art surrendered not to the abstractions of the 20th-Century
painter but to the great artists of the early cinema, who assumed the
narrative and representational ambitions of academic art in a medium
which had, at least as far a popular taste went, better resources for
realizing those ambitions.  You could almost say that the academic art
of the 19th-Century was born again, gloriously, in a new medium, which
it deeply influenced.



Academic art taught movies how to orchestrate photo-realistic elements
into theatrical forms, using lighting, framing and the placement of
figures in space to create a hyper-realistic illusion that had the
coherence of actual visual experience even when departing from it in
fabulous ways.  Because film could capture motion, and thus emphasize
the plasticity of space far more expressively than the easel-painter,
it rendered the academic easel-painter’s art passé.  It was motion and
the greater illusion of spatial depth it allowed which lost academic
art its popular following.



But much more than that was lost, especially in the realm of color.  Up
until very recent times, color film stocks couldn’t begin to reproduce
the range of lighting conditions which the Victorian realist painters
gloried in.  By marrying, through draftsmanship, an almost photographic
realism with an über-photographic sensitivity to color and light, the
Victorian painters anticipated cinematic effects which remain difficult
to achieve even today.

The attempt to devalue the work of Victorian painters, seeing them as
obstinate blocks to the steady progress of art, was a strategic ploy on
the part of 20th-Century modernist painters and their apologists in the
academy and the marketplace.  Engaged in a project which would divorce
art from popular taste and arrive at an aesthetic dead end before the
end of the 20th century, they posited a straw man in the person of the
reactionary academic practitioner which lent their own schools an
undeserved glamor and prestige — even as the academic practitioner was
informing and inspiring the great new popular art form of the movies.

But the intellectual disgrace of the Victorian painters also helped
impoverish cinema, because, after the first glorious blossoming of the
art in the silent era, filmmakers forgot academic painting.  To get
back in touch with its lessons, they had to get back in touch with the
masters of the silent era, like Griffith, Vidor, Murnau and Ford, for
whom Victorian academic painting was a living form and a direct
inspiration of their techniques.  The filmmakers who followed them had
to engage Victorian academic art at one remove, and thus lost touch
with the very forms which had inspired and instructed the original
pioneers of cinema.



The propaganda of the modernist painters, understandable from their
point of view, resulted in a great loss to the visual culture of the
20th-Century.  It couldn’t obliterate the glories of Victorian academic
painting, which survived, transformed, in movies and in popular
illustration (through the work of artists like N. C. Wyeth and Norman
Rockwell.)  But it distorted the intellectual appreciation of a visual
tradition which might have been of great use to artists, film artists
especially, if they hadn’t been shamed into despising it on principle.



I would argue that a new appreciation of Victorian realist painting has
the power to recharge the art of cinema in our time — quite apart from
the pleasures to be gained by directly encountering a vital and
ravishing visual tradition.


IMAGES

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One of the most delightful sites on the Web is Dr. Macro's High-Quality Movie Scans. 
Wandering through its galleries of movie stills, star portraits and
promotional graphics is a ravishing experience.  Check it out.


[Above is the lovely and always vexing Jobyna Ralston, who co-starred
with Harold Lloyd in many of his best silent films.  Below, a seminal
image from The Black Cat.]




THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT

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Frank Tashlin was the nut-case genius who unleashed
the nut-case genius of Jerry Lewis as a filmmaker.  Before Lewis became
a director, Tashlin directed him in some important movies that helped
set the tone and strategy for Lewis' later work.

Tashlin basically showed Lewis that if in a film you
deconstructed the process of making movies and let the audience in on
the deconstruction in a lighthearted, complicitous way, you could
vastly expand the range of comic eccentricity possible in a mainstream
film.  As long as the audience knew you were violating convention
deliberately and “just for laffs” it would then allow you to do and say
almost anything.


Tashlin started out in animation, so he had a good
idea of how much surrealism and aesthetic self-reflexiveness a
mainstream audience would accept.  It was his genius to show how this
receptivity could be appealed to in live-action comedy.

The Girl Can't Help It, Tashlin's masterpiece,
starts out in black and white and in Academy ratio.  Tom Ewell, the
male star of the film, steps forward towards the camera and announces
directly to the audience that the film they're about to see is in
Cinemascope.  He waves his hands and the sides of the image expand to a
Cinemascope ratio.  He also announces that the film will be in color —
more prestidigitation and the image becomes saturated with color. 
“Sometimes,” he confides to the audience, “you wonder who's minding the
shop.”

Instantly Tashlin establishes a bond with the audience
based on the suggestion that the powers that be in Hollywood would give their customers
less than they wanted if they could get away with it — but Ewell, acting
on the audience's behalf, won't let the industry get away with it.  The
implications of this are profound.  Hollywood is the establishment,
part of the cultural compact of the nation.  Once you're seduced into
suspecting Hollywood, you're ready to suspect everything.

But Tashlin doesn't leave it at that.  As Ewell
chatters on, telling us that this movie is going to be about rock and
roll, Tashlin tracks in on a jukebox playing the title song, sung by
the highly suspect cultural icon Little Richard, and the song drowns
out the end of Ewell's monologue.  Don't even trust the star, Tashlin
seems to be saying — don't even trust me.

I think it's probably a mistake to parse this film, and
Tashlin's work in general, looking for a programmatic critique of
movies or of American culture.  Tashlin, like Nietzsche, is offering a
perspective from which a critique is possible, but he leaves the
conclusions to the viewer.  Tashlin was interested in creating a
transgressive frame of mind, a frame of mind in which anything and
everything could be questioned — he wasn't interested in formulating
answers to the questions themselves.  He liked, I think, the giddiness
of abandoning, of shattering received forms, the license it gave him to
free-associate — and that's what he does in this film.


The center of The Girl Can't Help It is the
iconic, cartoon-like image of Jayne Mansfield.  Somehow Tashlin sensed
that the psychic chaos that could be induced by her sheer carnality was
somehow connected to the energy of rock and roll — that there was a
cultural matrix that generated both.  There are times in the film when
he seems to be mocking this matrix, times when he seems to be
celebrating it.  In fact he was just observing it in wonder — and
asking the audience to wonder about it, too.

There's a famous scene in which Mansfield bursts into
Ewell's apartment carrying two bottles of milk she's picked up from his
doorstep on her way in.  She holds them up to her breasts like
extensions of those already preposterous attributes.  On one level it's
a dirty joke.  On another level it's a symbol of Mansfield's
innocence.  On a deeper level it can be read as an acute analysis of
the male breast-fixation in post-WWII America — not a sexual thing at
all, at bottom, but an infantile regression, a lust for the alma
mater.


There are any number of such suggestive images in The Girl Can't Help It. 
The complex ways African-Americans are presented in the film deserve an
essay of their own.  One image can serve as an example — the
gorgeous African-American singer Abby Lincoln, dressed in a spectacular
sparkling evening gown, sexy and elegant, is shown on a cabaret stage lit in lurid colors . . .
singing a Gospel song.  This is beyond satire, beyond surrealism
— it's an image as strange as American culture itself.

The lines of thought are never clear in Tashlin's best
work — and that's its value.  In the
social currents he observed colliding and redirecting each other, echoed in the wildly clashing colors of his cinematography, Tashlin uncovered
perplexing contradictions in America culture and threw them in our
faces like so many custard pies.  All we can do in response is wipe the
custard out of our eyes and wait for the next one.

His work in the Fifties was excellent spiritual
preparation for the Sixties — a cultural slapstick routine that still
challenges complacency in any form.

THE DREAMERS

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Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the great masters of cinema, but he has rarely found film stories and/or scripts equal to his genius. There are passages in almost all of his films as extraordinary as any in the history of movies, but he has made more bad movies than almost any other important director. The Dreamers is one the most misguided of his misses — a stilted, inauthentic evocation of the Sixties stifled by the nostalgia of old men for their youth (the movie is based on a novel by a guy who, like Bertolucci, was a young man in the Sixties.)  Indeed, nostalgia is too strong a word for it, since nostalgia implies
at least a trace of yearning, of passion — and this movie is basically a smug intellectual appreciation of the Sixties, and of youth, disguised as a drama.

There’s lots of sex and nudity — almost no real sensuality or erotic joy. And kids in the Sixties never talked the way the kids talk in this movie — not even the ones who were intellectual film buffs. The Sixties rock songs on the soundtrack and the intercut clips from films of the French New Wave, especially those by Godard, still seem fresh and alive — almost mocking the tired vision of the screenwriter and director. There are great visual passages in the film, and Bertolucci’s director’s commentary is brilliant — indeed, the film
is best seen as a pale and unconvincing illustration of that commentary.

SPIDER-MAN 2

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With Spider-Man 3 just around the corner, I find myself remembering with pleasure Spider-Man 2.  It was an astonishment — a Hollywood blockbuster that was decent, humane and morally complex . . . all the while delivering stupendous action sequences and state-of-the-art special effects.

Peter Parker’s superpowers didn’t solve his generation-next existential dilemmas involving being fatherless and then (in this second film of the series) even father-figureless. They didn’t even really help him on his voyage to manhood, since his very potency as a hero threatened the safety of those he loved and complicated his puzzlement about the love of his life. But Peter grew up in this film . . . not by accepting his destiny as a crime fighter but by accepting the autonomy of Mary Jane — letting her decide what kind of jeopardy she was willing to risk for true love. In the process they both became real superheroes — in the emotional and moral realm inhabited by all of us every day and which asks of us a kind of courage far beyond that required to swing recklessly through the vertiginous canyons of Spider-Man’s New York.

Tobey Maguire gave a wonderful, quirky, nuanced performance as the troubled Spidey, as did Alfred Molina as the equally troubled villain Doc Oc . . . and Kirsten Dunst was simply riveting, enchanting beyond words, with an honest, down-to-earth intelligence and sexiness that went way beyond the typical ingenue glamor of this degraded age.

Spider-Man 2 is a film that will be remembered and watched for generations and is a genuine paradox of our time — a mega-budget work of art.

JEAN-LEON GEROME: A VICTORIAN PAINTER YOU SHOULD KNOW

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The spooky, wonderful image above, Duel After A Masked Ball, was painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the great masters of Victorian academic art.  To me, his work aspires to the condition of cinema and can be studied in that regard with great profit.  I think one finds in it, both formally and in terms of subject matter, the reflection of many concerns that would help shape the emerging art of movies.

Gérôme used a photo-authoritative style to make his visions of Oriental scenes and his recreations of historical periods alive and true to viewers who were beginning to process the visual world more and more through the medium of photography.  He was concerned with narrative images and used the illusion of depth to draw the viewer into those images — the drama of space obsessed him.  He was so concerned with stereometric forms that he also worked regularly
as a sculptor.


Though he died in 1904, before movies came into their own as a plastic and narrative medium, he would have thrilled, I think, at their capacity to carry his aesthetic methods into new realms and elaborate them fantastically.

Gérôme‘s Technicolor über-photographs can seem like frame-grabs from imaginary movies.  You can see the compositional style of Lawrence Of Arabia (and John Ford) in his desert scenes . . .


. . . foreshadowings of Intolerance in his 18th-Century tableaux . . .


. . . the epic visions of De Mille in his Biblical scenes . . .


Griffith, De Mille and Ford would have been familiar with Gérôme directly — his work was wildly popular and widely reproduced in the time of their youth.  Lean may have echoed Gérôme simply by sharing his formal concerns, though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Lean knew and admired his paintings.  In any case, the profound connection between Victorian academic art and the cinema is nowhere more evident than in the work of this great painter.

To me, the image below of Pygmalion’s sculpture Galatea coming to life can serve as a metaphor for the advent of movies, when the aesthetic aspirations of the Victorian academic painter came into fuller life through motion itself.

SEARCHERS

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Perhaps
it's not surprising that the rapidly urbanizing culture of China has
produced filmmakers making deep and profound work about urban
loneliness.  Urban and suburban loneliness in America has been
treated by pop sociologists like Robert D. Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone . . . and in TV sit-coms we see models of coping strategies in shows like Friends and Sex In the City,
where sex and gossip about sex among a circle of acquaintances try to
fill up the void that's clearly felt both by the characters and by the
vast numbers of people attracted to these series.



But Chinese
filmmakers like Wong Kar-Wai and Tsai Ming-Liang are intent on looking
at the phenomenon head-on, as something existential and not susceptible
to easy or trivial consolations.  The criss-crossing lives in Wong
Kar-Wai's films, that touch each other without ever making meaningful
contact, exist in a landscape of exciting visual stimulation, which
adds to the irony.  Tsai Ming-Liang has a different strategy.



In What Time Is It There?
he holds his camera steady on urban spaces until they yield up the full
measure of their sterility — he gives us time to enter them and feel
their emptiness, and this creates a strong sense of identification with
the stranded, cut-off souls who inhabit them.  Tsai Ming-Liang
doesn't tell us much about these characters, they don't voice their
hopelessness, but we can see it in everything they do, lovingly and
devastatingly observed.





What Time Is It There? is set in motion by the briefest of encounters on a public sidewalk, between a
street vendor of cheap watches and a woman who buys a watch for her
upcoming solo visit to Paris.  Before she goes, she gives the
vendor a small cake, to thank him for selling her a special watch she
wants, his own.  This tiny, infinitesimal exchange of regard fills
up the rest of the film.  It leads nowhere in purely narrative
terms but we feel how it haunts the two people involved, sharpening
their sense of distance from other human beings.



As I say, none
of this is ever voiced.  We are allowed the time and space to
enter into the existential estrangement of the characters, and
ultimately to experience it as our own — in much the same way that
John Ford gives us the time and space to enter into the existential
estrangement of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, something that is never explained, never put into words, but can still be deeply felt.



We are so far
in these films from the thought-balloon dialogue of modern American
films, where the characters tell us exactly what they feel, exactly why
they're doing what they're doing, and so give us a chance to categorize
and dismiss it.



John Ford's The Searchers, Wong Kar-Wai's masterpiece In the Mood For Love, and Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There?,
a small masterpiece in its own right, all offer in their endings images
of an almost mystical redemption — but they don't offer resolutions,
or solutions.  They set off chain reactions in our hearts — they send us on journeys . . . they make us searchers.



[The frame-grab above is from a wonderful site called DVD Beaver,
which offers in-depth reviews, with lots of technical information,
about
international DVD releases.  Check it out and make a donation if
you can to support its valuable work.  Sadly, the DVD version of What Time Is It There? available in the U. S. is not enhanced
for 16:9 sets — it's a good transfer but this film, with it many long-held
master shots, cries out for as much screen space as possible.]

WAR OF THE WORLDS

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Hollywood
has now managed to absorb on a conscious level that the failure of
fatherhood is a central issue of our culture, and that people are
desperate for stories which address this issue and offer images of
fatherhood redeemed.


It's a
subject that has always attracted Spielberg, at least on an intuitive
level. He's always said that E. T. was about divorce — about the
ways a child scarred by divorce and an absent father can use fantasy to
survive. The knowledge came from his own personal experience with the
phenomenon as a youth.


In War Of the Worlds he takes on the subject from the father's, not the
child's perspective — and that may reflect his own maturity and
experience as a father. It also takes us closer to the crux of the
crisis.


Phenomenally
successful films like The Lion King and The Sixth Sense dealt with
the effect of fatherlessness on sons and, like E. T., offered coping
mechanisms, images of transcendence. War Of the Worlds deals with the
source of the pathology — the emotionally self-indulgent and
incompetent father himself.


As I
say, Hollywood knows the appeal of the subject — one finds it
“layered” into otherwise conventional spectacles like The Day After
Tomorrow, where it has the feel of a perfunctory marketing ploy.
Spielberg, as usual, goes deeper.


Taking
as his model the 50s-era sci-fi film, which exploited our fears of
nuclear holocaust and alien (i. e. Communist) invasion, Spielberg taps
the post-9/11 malaise for the subliminal terror of his tale. Alien
sleeper-cell creatures erupt from within to devastate our civilization,
and in the crisis our assumptions about everything are tested.


For
Spielberg's protagonist, Ray Ferrier, a self-centered lifestyle, in
which he has neglected the children of a failed marriage, who now live
with their mother and her new husband, is shattered when he's forced by
unimaginable disasters to step up to the plate and protect them. And to
protect them, he needs to know them — something he's failed so far to
do.


It's a brilliant scheme, which places Ray's failure as a father center stage, and makes it far more unnerving and devastating
than the lethal space invaders and their horrifying acts.



The
greatness of the film is that it doesn't posit absolute redemption for
Ray — he has lost more through his failure as a father, and his
children have lost more, than his last-minute heroics can ever restore.
But he has come face to face with his failure, and has grown up in the
process — and that is more affecting, more real, than any contrived
feel-good catharsis could ever be.


Ray
remains a tragic figure, a reminder that the true lost souls of
post-WWII America are not the children betrayed by feckless fathers,
but the fathers themselves, who surrendered the deepest meaning of
their lives for a transitory, an illusory freedom.


GABRIEL FIGUEROA

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There are some cinematographers, like Greg Toland and Vitorio Storaro, who are
auteurs in their own right — it’s worth watching anything they shoot,
whether the film is good, bad or indifferent, for the superior art and
craft they bring to each assignment.

Gabriel Figueroa, the great Mexican cinematographer, is in their
class.  He studied with Toland and his style is reminiscent of
Toland’s — with a concentration on stereometric lighting and deep
focus that gives his images a sculptural quality.  (I’m speaking
here entirely about his black-and-white work — I’ve never seen a
Figueroa film shot in color.)

Figueroa worked for the top directors in Mexico’s fabled golden age of cinema, in the 1940s and 1950s.  He shot Macario for Roberto Gavaldón, in 1959, which was the first Mexican movie ever nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar.  Macario is a fascinating fable based on a novella by B. Traven (who wrote The Treasure Of the Sierra Madre.)  Set in colonial Mexico, the film is sort of an existential morality play about a poor man who meets a supernatural figure in the forest
(the Devil . . . Death?) who gives him a jug of healing water.  The consequences of the gift are not quite what the poor man, or we the audience, quite foresees.  The film is filled with ravishing images of daily life in old Mexico, including some great footage of a Day Of the Dead celebration.  A
lot of the footage is reminiscent of Tisse’s photography on Eisenstein’s aborted epic ¡Que Viva Mexico!



Figueroa shot most of the important films directed by Emilio Fernandez,
the celebrated master of the Mexican golden age — one of the most notable
being Victims Of Sin, a noirish vision in a peculiar Mexican genre, the cabaret dancer
film.  These films concentrated on the heroic efforts of lower-class women to rise above the exploitation and misery of street life, mainly by working in cabarets run by sleazy underworld
thugs.  There is almost nothing like these films in American cinema, though some of their themes are echoed in the films noirs starring Joan Crawford in the 40s.  They have a frankness about sexuality and a brutality that still startle.



Even more startling, perhaps, is the fact that many of the greatest Latin singers
and musicians of the time make appearances in the cabarets around which
the stories of these films revolve — creating an almost surreal
contrast with the sleazy ambiance.  The films are strange but
wildly entertaining.

Figueroa sometimes worked for American directors making films in Mexico — John Ford on The Fugitive and John Huston on The Night Of the Iguana (below) for example.



It’s hard to find films from the Mexican golden age on DVD in this country, harder still to find ones that are subtitled — but they’re well worth tracking down.  (The two mentioned above, Macario and Victims Of Sin [Victimas del Pecado] are available here in subtitled versions.)  Any one of them shot by Gabriel Figueroa repays the closest attention.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

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One
of the best movies ever made about sexual love, about the intoxication
of falling in love and the toxicity of a break-up. It's beautifully
observed, beautifully written, beautifully played — it features Jim
Carey's best performance ever on film, brilliant and pitch-perfect —
and it's directed with magical, lyrical, demented invention by Michel
Gondry. It's funny and romantic but it's not a romantic comedy — it's
far too real and too devastating to enchant us the way that genre can.
In deconstructing one particular romance, Charlie Kauffman is also
deconstructing the kind of movies that feed our delusions about love —
and he's offering something to take their place, a profoundly felt
sympathy that is honest, humane and inspiring. The movie is a miracle,
plain and simple.