Womb Notes

When you make a movie about a personality-less woman whose entire life is driven by her memories of a guy she barely knows and whose only hope for fulfillment (emphasis on the fill) is a sense of physical or at least emotional intimacy with said guy, and you fill that movie with lots of empty spaces (deserted beaches, isolated cottages, vast bare swaths of 'scope, protracted shots of non-action), and then you call the whole thing Womb—well, what you end up with is high-minded misogynist claptrap.

At least Benedek Fliegauf can't be accused of being duplicitous or inconsistent. Everything in Womb, Fliegauf's first English-language film, evokes, mirrors, reiterates the idea of desolation—though the movie isn't ascetic by any means. In fact, Womb revels in barrenness: the bare-bones plot, the almost exclusively static camera, the negative space-heavy compositions, the soundtrack (a steady drone of seaside wind wooshes occasionally prettied up with a plinky Max Richter score), the larghissimo pace, the vague setting and even vaguer time-frame (though Womb is presumably set over several decades, Eva Green never ages), the pared-down characters (each is given one emotion and, at most, one identifying characteristic)—it goes on and on. Womb is what you'd call accomplished; how receptive you are to what it accomplishes depends on how receptive you are to its central image—the womb as a barren place—and to the idea that women are empty vessels waiting to be filled with a masculine presence—two notions that are, admittedly, older than art itself.

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In Womb, Eva Green plays a sort of lobotomized blank slate who travels to her late grandfather's seaside cottage looking for a childhood crush named Tommy. He still lives in town, and they enjoy a brief romance before he gets killed in a freak car accident. Having lost the one thing—the idea of being with Tommy—that brightened up an existence that seems to otherwise consist entirely of despondent staring, Green literally puts the memory of Tommy into her hollow center—her womb—by getting impregnated with the dead man's clone (Womb is set in a sketchy future where human cloning is common but frowned upon) and raising the clone as her child. Once the clone Tommy grows into an adult that looks and talks exactly like the original, Green develops an intense incestuous longing for her "son."

Both iterations of Tommy are played by Matt Smith, an affable, eccentric actor best known for playing the lead in the BBC's long-running / self-contradicting narrative hodge-podge Doctor Who. Smith's screen persona—he sways while idle, slowly forms half-smiles before speaking, stares off mid-conversation, and over-expresses with his eyes, eyebrows, and forehead even while underplaying a line—suggest a cross between an overgrown five-year-old and a slightly sedated Crispin Glover. Like Glover (to whom he bears a passing resemblance), Smith works chiefly in terms of mannerisms; his twitchy likeability makes him the liveliest character in the film—and that's more or less the point. He's the presence Green needs to fill the absence that's central to her character (and, Fliegauf implies, her gender; all of the other female characters in the film are defined by their relationships with men—men who are, more often than not, some version of Tommy or another).

Scott's Metaphysical Romances, Pt. 2A

In Spy Game, Redford and Pitt play CIA agents; Redford, once Pitt's mentor, arrives for his last day of work to discover that his former protege has been captured in China and that their mutual boss has decided that it's not worth it to rescue him. Throughout that 24 or so hour deadline before Pitt's execution, when Redford must tell the agency about his often difficult relationship with his old friend while also slyly engineering his rescue (partly, it becomes obvious, out of a sense of guilt and a newfound acceptance of his friend's life apart from him), Pitt is unconscious on the other side of the globe. In the lengthy flashbacks, they're as likely to be separated as together, occupying different spheres even when sitting across from each other at a table.

The framing cuts them apart and then the editing glues them back together until it becomes clear that their camaraderie isn't a question of professionalism and day-to-day interaction (the seeds of many of Hawks'—and Johnnie To's—most complex relationships) and is in fact an emotional bond existing on some kind of "more subtle level." Sure, ok, this is the usual male weepie hokum, but it's in movies more than anywhere else that hokum finds its greatest opportunity to be profound. At the speed at which the shots change, almost spinning, this idea is unable to be carried as a clearly-discernable metaphor; it simply becomes the accepted reality of the style. It's a bond that's already extant at the start of the film, and which we become privy to through rhythms; after a while, it's simply assumed that any shot of Redford will soon be followed by a shot of Pitt, regardless of where or when the two them are. Scott's intuitive approach—which eschews most conventions of setting up a scene (sometimes one will start only to briefly cut back to another one) and construction (unrelated shots from other scenes will be edited in)—lulls one into intuitions.

Scott's directorial technique uses a very large number of cameras and very few takes (at least for a modern Hollywood movie). It requires a finessed and detailed acting; as in certain kinds of theatre, a performance must function when viewed from any angle. It also gives performances an off-the-cuff quality, because these same actors who must act in all directions are also unable to grind a scene down to its bones over the course of a dozen takes. There's a lot of improvisatory fat, especially in Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which—as a movie about two flawed men talking to each other over a radio—is nearly an epic of just-guys-shooting-the-shit hard-boiled one-liners, set-up & punchline games and epigrammatic nonsense.

Even the characters who start out as Michael Bay-like caricatures of authority (James Gandolfini's unpopular mayor, John Turturro's negotiator) grow into likeable people through a profusion of jokes and asides, more or less the same way as strangers stuck in the same place might come to be on friendly terms (it helps that both characters do not devolve, as their equivalents in Bay movies do, into punching bags for third act violence, but instead are shown to be helpful and worthwhile people). There's something genuine and uncomfortably intimate to this union of foul-mouthed voices who occupy the same screen but whose bodies are never in the frame together; when Travolta says to Denzel Washington, upon finally meeting him near the end of the film, "You're taller than I thought ... and good-looking, too," you know he means it.

I'm Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010)

Ben Sachs was totally right on when he wrote that this is an American von Trier film. The moral is essentially conservative (though, like in von Trier, presented through "radical" "content"): the meaninglessness of "personal art" (Joaquin Phoenix's shitty rapping, which comes straight from his character's heart) compared to the meaningfulness of the pettiest piece of popular entertainment (the art he's escaping). This is not a satire of Hollywood -- the film is firmly in the Hollywood camp, and it's certainly the work of two people who believe ardently in "acting" and popular entertainment; in fact, it's an attack on those people (represented by the character Phoenix plays) who think that saying somebody else's words for a living is bullshit and who put faith in the myth of artists as loners. The huckster Diddy plays isn't banking in on Phoenix's celebrity (he couldn't give two shits); he's just willing to take the money of any fool who thinks what he has to say is worthwhile.

68 Sentences

Carax remains one of the few genuine mysteries in cinema because he puts everything out in the open. The Heartbreak Kid is a comedy of repeated phrases or words ("50 years," "teddy bear," "Minnesota," "wonderful," "don't like," "Jockey Club," "ni-i-i-ce," "pecan pie") that become mantras or magic spells that imprison the characters; for Charles Grodin's character, every utterance turns the key a little further in the lock. Tennis and soccer depend on an evenness of light, on illumination, to provide drama (through clarity), while the drama of boxing lies in shadows. In his 1960s and 1970s films, Zanussi delivers well-reasoned, well-argued reports on the narrative complete with facts (throwaway moments captured in images, like the old friends checking their hairlines in the mirror in Structure of Crystal) and figures (the cause-and-effect of the plot); the films are well-reasoned experiments devised in order to demonstrate certain theories about human activity and experience (human evidence). Moral vs. ethical filmmaking: the moral is that which reaches for the impossible and the ethical is that which chooses, out of a list of possibilities, the one that most closely resembles a shadow of morality. Fassbinder used post-synced sound extensively; it's the most brutal aspect of his films (as it was with Antonioni), even more than the fatalistic movements and framings he gives the camera, because, while the camera may turn away, the microphone remains poised in the same position in front of the actor's mouth. Few movies are ever saved in the editing, but plenty have been ruined in it. All films nominally about girls are really about the boys who watch them. In regard to classical Hollywood filmmaking, the editing is usually the most overlooked aspect; part of this might be the length of the takes, but it might also be a bit of auteurist bias. King Vidor's best characters are unindividualistic individuals. My Wife is a Gangster: a good laugh, sometimes resembling a pre-Code American comedy, but that’s it, since the movie's not directed much better than a joke is usually told. Van Damme directed poorly is still Van Damme. Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls: Metropolis' Hal + Shelley Duvall. Hartley was the best of the directors to emerge from the American independent filmmaking boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s: more sensitive than Van Sant, better at combining his interests and his education than Haynes, more concerned with form than Soderbergh. Verite (Clouzot): in the courtroom, to show her seriousness, Bardot wears her hair in a bun, looking like Tippi Hedren. Viewed as a Flash Gordon serial or a space opera (with Clive Owen as the dashing starfighter pilot), Elizabeth: The Golden Age ain't that bad. We had Westerns in Italy and Spain; we can handle a Romanian film from Chile (Tony Manero), though one wishes it was better. With Oliver Twist, Polanski's isn't trying to be Dickens -- he's trying to be Cruikshank, reducing Dickens' characters to their essences (looks, faces, features). When Claude Jade puts on the "Japanese" make-up in Bed and Board, Truffaut is making a reference to Tashlin's The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (Tashlin, of course, plays his scene for comedy, and sides with the wife). Directors are the ones who must learn to express themselves fully without having their voices heard or their words read. The least sophisticated forms of montage often have the most complex results. The landscape is the oldest image. The simplest ideas are the hardest to grasp / master (no one could play a scale like Coltrane). The bras women wear in 1950s and 1960s French films make their breasts look like knees. When someone says they don't care about artists, what they mean is they don't care about art, because art isn't some nebulous force that comes out of the ether: it is human expression and human work. Jesse Eisenberg: a second-rate Michael Cera but a first-rate actor. Everyone's been obsessed with the mundane, "the quiet;" too many films deny the excitement of everyday life. Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill is set in Baltimore, but it could just as easily be St. Petersburg, Florida (like Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass), or a less urban part of the same state (like Trans, Julian Goldberger’s first movie), or in Jem Cohen’s Georgia or even somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (like, to a certain extent, Dance Party, USA, Aaron Katz’ debut), or Detroit or Cleveland or Northern Indiana or Toledo or Akron or any of the hundreds other American cities and towns where these sorts of movies haven’t yet been made but probably will be in the next few years, because for all their regional specificity, Putty Hill and the films I’ve mentioned share enough stylistic qualities and stances that it would be possible for them to swap locations; they constitute a shadow movement. What movies often forget: war is not corpses, it's the reality of having to walk past the corpses to get to the market every day. Jarmusch had discovered something that seemed obvious: a sort of rigid and physical non-time, the concreteness life takes on when you don't wear a watch. The Fountain: every image is carefully lit, designed and manipulated, and not one of them is worthwhile (see also: It's All About Love). In the early days of the cinema, no one thought to point a camera at the sky. There's no need for poetic realism, because realism is poetry enough. Up in the Air: a mixture of "Yes We Can" populism and passable melodrama that suspiciously resembles an American Airlines ad; hypocritical while also lulling its audience in hypocrisy. Serge Daney once pointed out that cinema could be like the rear view mirror in a car, moving forward while it keeps looking back at a dissolving past. I think there's been enough chance and accident in film methods; time to get back to a cinema of decision-making. The way Peter Lorre puts on his shabby coat in Crime and Punishment: pure Chaplin. Love with the Proper Stranger: film about uncompromising people than ends in compromise. The problem with modern Westerns is that so few are made nowadays than whenever someone gets around to making one, they feel like it should be the Western to End All Westerns. The dialogue and the camera eliminate every tangible "naturalistic" emotion, leaving only the basic urges Blier is interested in. Only forgeries need to be realistic. It's a well-known fact that Bela Tarr is a fan of Night at the Crossroads, and it's become something of an "accepted idea" of sorts that The Man from London is largely indebted to Renoir's intoxicating, enigmatic movie ("BT does JR") -- but actually, the movie The Man from London resembles (and I don't mean just a passing resemblance, but a total physical resemblance) is Henri Calef's Les Violents. It's important to make serious inquiries into unserious subjects. In A Gentle Woman, Bresson reduces a complex domestic drama to several shots, intercut, of two people eating soup. Shin Eun-kyung has the sort of face that gets ruined by showy make-up and the sort of slim figure that looks good in a men’s suit; she's better with her hair short, and her slouch is more attractive than her saunter. Wenders' goal: to mix literary "great themes" with observations of the minutiae of life. A note to directors: even children don't like being treated like children. Though Amreeka's script seems to have been collaged out of panels from Sally Forth, For Better of Worse and Cathy, it contains the only convincing high school principal in the history of American cinema. Montage is, at the most basic level, "the presentation of images," so Russian Ark is, in fact, a masterpiece of montage. Walter Hill belongs to the best sort of hardworking men, a sort that's always damned when they become successful: he works well with sparse resources and no expectations, but give him too much money (Another 48 Hrs.) and he doesn't know what to do with it. There has never been as much variety in cinema as there is now. What I like about I Can Do Bad All By Myself, besides the fact that Tyler Perry writes consistently funny, snappy dialogue and the fact that he knows the rhythms of his actors and the fact that Madea's verbal / vocal shenanigans make me laugh the same way Julius Kelp's and Eugene Fullstack's do and the fact that every actor can sing pretty well and might at any moment break into song, is the sense of purpose in its every element. Gerard Depardieu is slowly turning into a perfect sphere. We think of the movie camera as something beyond writing because a writer is only capable of writing down his or her thoughts, while the moment you start filming, you begin recording all sorts of things you aren’t even aware of, maybe even things you won’t discover until decades after the fact. Scripts are expected to be written slowly, and films are expected to be made quickly. Tilda Swinton in Julia is every graceful attribute taken to the breaking point, with a leg emerging from a car becoming unsteadiness and the lighting of a cigarette a disaster. Radzilowicz, Depardieu, Gabin: the most trustworthy faces in cinema belong to wide-nosed men. There's no image in cinema that brings a person closer to being a monument or a statue than a figure against the sky. The definition of Woody Allen's style is a struggle with the self to prove that the subject matter he's chosen was worth choosing; form, therefore, becomes that which justifies the content. Chahine was cinema's great slave: to the culture he was born into, to the history taking place during his lifetime and, of course, to the movies, to whose many shapes he was passionately devoted. Jean Rabier is the most underrated of the major Nouvelle Vague cinematographers (and maybe that fate seems inevitable for the man who was for decades the regular DP of Chabrol, the most underrated of the major Nouvelle Vague directors; but then again, Rabier shot Cleo from 5 to 7, Bay of Angels, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Le Bonheur and lent his precision as camera operator to Leon Morin, Priest -- but we're back where we started, because that's the most underrated Melville). What is admirable about Dirty Work is that, though not everything about the movie is funny, every element of the film constitutes a joke. There is great cinema that goes unnoticed because no one regards it as cinema. Abraham Polonsky understood words chiefly because he understood feelings; he could see the emotional punches in the gestures and actions that made up everyday life. Eisenstein may have made his films based on theories, but he developed those theories out of curiosity, not out of the assumption that cinema always functioned based on principles. Ethics constitute the lowest form of morality; the moral is often unethical. People who contend that everything is bad are the ones who'll most readily settle for mediocrity. Good ideas are not good enough.

Playing Nosferatu

Il Divo's not much of a movie -- a good lazy afternoon watch if you catch it on TV, though it'll probably never play on TV in this country. Politics, as Guy Ritchie would describe them to you. It's worth it, though, for Toni Servillo, who plays Giulio Andreotti as a cross between Max Schreck's Nosferatu and one of Richard Barthelmess' Chinamen. Hunchbacked and heartbroken, but also eternally calm like one of Barthelmess' cyphers, who were too Expressionist to be ethnic caricatures -- to be accused of that, they'd have to seem like human beings first. Servillo neither humanizes nor villifies Andreotti -- instead, he finds, within the likeness of a public figure, a strange creature, someone who casually walked in from some netherworld into ours and simply hasn't found the time to leave.

Young Bachchan

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To watch Amitabh Bachchan is to see someone embody both worldly masculinity and goofiness, un-self-conscious empathy and hurt distance, always at the same time. A few comparisons: Cary Grant, Chow Yun-Fat and, to a lesser extent, George Clooney, Harrison Ford and Simon Yam. He has the unusual quality of being both feline (tiger or tomcat, take your pick) and wolf-like. He's Jean Gabin and Jerry Lewis rolled into one, dead serious and giddy. There's nothing like seeing his harsh face smile. He sees the troubles of the world, and then he laughs, and then he's troubled again. Of all the big movie stars working right now (40 years in, he still makes a half-dozen films a year), he presents the greatest emotional range with the greatest ease. He doesn't force feelings; he's human, as human as Chaplin.

It's there even in his first big film, Zanjeer, where he plays, as he often does, a wronged man (no one seems so in their element portraying a character out of their element). But it isn't there right away; you have to wait for it. The first time you see him, when he sits up into the frame, waking up from the nightmare of the credits, it's not quite Bachchan, just a young man that looks a lot like him. There are small glimpses -- his facial expression during the job interview, the glint of ordinary sadism in his eye when he comes to confront the red-bearded villain at the market, the way his police uniform doesn't quite fit -- but not enough. But then he's in the hospital hallway, interrogating Jaya Bhaduri, playing a knife sharpener witness to a crime. It's their first movie together. He's a good foot taller, and there's no attempt made to hide the height difference. He sits down, twirling his baton, saying every sentence as if it ended in an inaudible sigh. He grabs her arm. "You're lying," the subtitles read. He drags her into the morgue. He's yelling. He lifts the sheets, showing her (but not us) the faces of the dead. Angrily, he hurls her out of the frame, and the camera bounds forward. For half a second, he's out of focus, and then the camera is staring him right in the face, and there are those great sad eyes, weary and resigned. And that's Bachchan.

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Re: Justin Rice

Justin Rice is a pretty funny guy, a damn good comic actor. Ok, how do you make a Justin Rice movie? After all, there are a lot of them around now, some better than others. Harmony and Me, for instance, is a trifle. It’s not refined or crass, simple or complex – it's all in-between. The jokes last only until the next cut; after that, we’ve forgotten them even more than the film has. A bit like watching a good, but not terribly interesting, stand-up. You’ll laugh, but the best you’ll be able to say is “it was funny.” And it is often funny, and usually it's funny because of Rice.

The best that can be said about Bob Byington’s direction is that he understands how Rice works. The key principle: Rice is funniest when he doesn't look people in the face. Yes, he's an interrupter, but the interruption has the best effect when he's cutting himself off mid-sentence instead of another actor, and yes, he can get his tongue twisted in a bit of social acrobatics, but it’s best if the only one trying to wriggle their way out of a situation is him. He's got a comic inattentiveness combined with a completely misplaced focus. Part of it might be the way he sometimes seems to open his eyes wider than anyone ever should, and that he doesn't blink enough. His is a talky comedy – even his body movements are funny only in how they relate to the movements of his lips, tongue and vocal chords. But, at the same time, the voice needs the body, those slow movements of the arms and legs. Maybe that's why his narration in Harmony and Me isn't funny at all, but almost grating: without Rice, his voice is nothing. He is comic as a whole. As just a picture, or just that ramble (secure with his sense of things, insecure of his place in the world), he just wafts by. But put the two together, and he’s something very concrete, a type you didn’t realize existed until the screen pointed him out to you.

Ferrara's Caruso

You can say that there aren't any bad actors -- just poorly directed ones. And half of good acting is good directing. For instance, there's something about Abel Ferrara's direction that brings out the violence in David Caruso.

The same's true of Matthew Modine; even Kubrick got just a passive violence out the guy, but with Ferrara Modine seems like he's screaming even when he whispers. But Caruso -- he's not a terribly interesting actor elsewhere, usually just floating by on a few good tricks even if he's in the lead, but when Ferrara casts him, even if it's in just a supporting role (and in fact, that's the only way he's ever cast him: in China Girl, King of New York and the Crime Story pilot), he's a monster. With that red hair, he stands out in a crowd, but even without it, that viper look would still overpower anyone else in the frame. He can be in the background, out of focus, and still, every second, you're aware of how he's reacting, what's he doing, how he's fidgeting with his hands or turning his head to the side. A real punk.

Listening to The Touch

When we think of Max von Sydow, we tend to think of his mountainous face, especially the way it looks in shadows, the way those crags and canyons shift as he talks. But there are many faces with the same qualities, but no voice quite like his. The face seems to belong to some landscape; the voice is completely organic. Von Sydow, more than any other actor, acts not with his words, but with his mouth, throat and nose. That is, when we hear von Sydow talk, it isn't dialogue that we're hearing, but a man breathing in and out, with words occasionally making their way out of his mouth alongside the carbon dioxide. The voice is made equal with a wide variety of sighs, coughs, quick inhalations, barely audible hums and whistles. To watch his face is also to watch his neck, and the way his Adam's apple bobs down when he swallows at the end of a sentence.

So who does Bibi Andersson leave good old Max for in The Touch? Elliott Gould. Elliott Gould, whose voice (always more feline that it seems like it should be), big head and lanky body are reminiscent of a recorder: the mouth as a labium, the brain as a fipple, the nose as a windway. Not a human flute, like Jean-Pierre Leaud (whose voice seems to be produced by the wind blowing against that embouchure hole of a mouth) -- no, certainly a recorder, and one that's being played by an amateur, maybe just a student, someone who knows the fingerings but can't get their embouchure right, the notes sometimes coming out as squeaks, sometimes wonderfully sweet, sometimes too quiet. He sounds as if his lungs were made of wood. And maybe that's the tragedy: she chooses an instrument over someone that can only be human.

Six Great American Films, 1978 - 1988

...All the Marbles (1981)
This was Robert Aldrich's last movie, and I like to believe that Aldrich died happy, knowing he'd made it. Along with Abel Ferrara's Cat Chaser, made, at the tail end of the decade, this is one of the last true examples of film noir. It's simultaneously shadowy and colorful, in every sense. But what do you expect from Joseph Biroc, who gave the world the image-monuments of Forty Guns and the careful delirium of Confessions of an Opium Eater? And you end up wondering the kind of movies Peter Falk would've been in if he was born 20 years earlier--him and Harry Dean Stanton. How many bits of 80-minute grit could they have cranked out in the post-war years?

Big Wednesday (1978)
History, tugging like a hand on your sleeping shoulder. John Milius's best film, and one of the few epic films. The mise-en-scene is Vincente Minelli and John Ford arguing about a decade; you're never sure if the 1960s were a tragic romance or some great folly. Waves crash, punches are thrown, mistakes are made and lived through. Grandly sincere, or sincerely grand, this is Milius's attempt to make The Great American Movie. The attempt is a failure, but the result is a success regardless. That's the funny thing about movies: though the intentions behind them play a role, intentions aren't the final result. Yes, a film is a gesture, but it is more importantly a film. The writer only writes what he or she thinks up, while the moment you start running film through a camera, you let the world in. What language can't communicate, cinema wholeheartedly accepts, sometimes without us even noticing.

The Driver (1978)
The vague and the painstaking. The soundtrack is a terse musique concrete composition for voices, squealing tires and slamming doors. The driver of title is played by Ryan O'Neal, an actor without temperature, neither cool nor warm. Maybe that's why Stanley Kubrick managed to put him to such good use: Kubrick's cinema is climate-controlled, which leads many people to wrongly assume that it's cold. Walter Hill is an abstractor (this film, 48 Hrs.) and a parabalist (Streets of Fire, Crossroads, Johnny Handsome), which is more or less the same thing. To take something complicated (a history, a morality) and turn it into a parable is not very different from taking a real thing and, through its image, making something direct: a color is easier to understand at first glance than a street, the cold light of a headlamp is simpler than an oncoming car. But, of course, no two things are completely alike: the parable has only a limited meaning, while the image is bottomless.

Modern Romance (1981)
The present hasn't been too kind to Albert Brooks, but history will be kinder: we'll someday say "Brooksian" with the same ambiguous clarity as "Hawksian." Fed by a distinctly American sense of compromise, that sour taste that accompanies every sweetness, Brooks' cinema is not one of contradictions: the world is complicated, but it isn't fractured. Every happy thing is sad, and every sad thing is a little funny; there is no clear separation in our experience of things. It's through focusing on certain elements, through the sieves of our memories (or the editing of a film), that we are able to look back and distinctly say that an event was tragic or that it was good. It's the basic premise of Brooks' later Defending Your Life, in which the newly dead must argue that scenes from their lives display their strengths, even though it can just as easily be said that they show them at their worst. Absolute happiness is an illusion: it's just something you claim to win an argument. Modern Romance is a rejection of traditional dramatics, a serious approach to comedy. And always unflinchingly intelligent.

The Moderns (1988)
An incomparably passionate film by the most brilliant American director of the 1980s. The Jazz Age is to Alan Rudolph what the Belle Epoque was to Jean Renoir: an era of creativity that inspires more creativity through reflection. A film about the ideas of an era more than its specifics. Or, to rephrase, a film that takes inspiration from the ideas of an era to create something new. Keith Carradine is Keith Carradine is a painter, Wallace Shawn is Wallace Shawn is a gossip columnist, John Lone is John Lone is a businessman and Kevin J. O'Connor is some dream image of Ernest Hemingway. Here the elements that are used haphazardly or lazily by other directors become rigorous and expressive. Rudolph stands with Fassbinder--and now Hong Sang-soo--as one of the few poets of the zoom lens: what is done with a jerky hand-operated zoom in a brief sequence in The Moderns is more beautiful than most directors' camera movements. The use of black-and-white historical footage is genuine quotation instead of a lazy attempt to set a mood.

Paradise Alley (1978)
I refuse to believe that any movie directed by Sylvester Stallone isn't at the very least interesting. Sometimes, as in the curious case of Paradise Alley, the movie's much more than that: it's great. Case in the sense that Paradise Alley is isolated from its contemporaries and seemingly the rest of film history; curious in the sense that every film is the result of a set of choices, and the choices here are, as if often the situation with a great movie, infuriating--certainly more infuriating than Big Wednesday, and possibly more infuriating than The Moderns. A movie that seems to belong to no time and no mindset. Lit with the kind of neons that bathe a body but designed in the earth tones that make every character feel like a part of the room they're in, it's set in 1940s New York--more of a location than a period, just one of those places any story can be set as long as it's costumed accordingly (like "Morocco").

As a director, Stallone is always acting. Every one of his movies isn't directed by Sylvester Stallone, but by Stallone playing some directing archetype; he's clearly playing a different character behind the camera of every film. So maybe Paradise Alley is his best movie because Sylvester Stallone, Director of Paradise Alley is his most original character, the ordinary visionary he'd re-use for the first half of Staying Alive.

Thoughts on Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand and foot prints at Grauman's Chinese Theater
(from Wikipedia)

We're far removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger now. He's changed addresses, moved from the lobby poster to the political ad, from the movie theater to television news. Sure, a part of the old Schwarzenegger--the 1980s Schwarzenegger--remains on DVDs and the occasional midnight revival, but he's married to his politics now, and we can't separate the two (let alone divorce them) in our memories.

The last twenty years have infected the image of Schwarzenegger in the same way they've infected the songs of Michael Jackson. Schwarzenegger and Jackson stood out on the cultural landscape of the 1980s, so effortlessly alien. No one moved or talked quite like them. There had never been pop stars or film stars so devoid of pathos or motivation. Schwarzenegger would turn as though there were hydraulics hidden beneath his muscles; when you saw a photograph of him or Jackson, it seemed as though their bodies had been custom-built for the frame.

Schwarzenegger was not dispassionate; he simply made passion irrelevant. He approached every line of dialogue--the sarcastic quips provided by the screenwriters--with an astounding indifference. He was never human, never a feeling--he was always a sound and an image, and we never wondered what secret feelings might motivate him, but instead imagined ourselves as machines. Why have love when we could have love scenes? Why have hate when we could have a punch, a pistol shot, a well-worded put down? He made dispassion into a force, transforming inertness into inertia. He replaced acting with actions. Van Damme had an ace's cockiness, Stallone had Jerry Lewis's earnestness, Bronson had weathered distance, but Schwarzenegger would emit vaudeville puns like radio signals, as though he had a transmitter in place of vocal chords. His mouth was a slit in his face. He showed you that there was nothing human about the human body. You take the context away from a hand, a pair of shoulders, a head and it's no different from a chair, a window, a wall.

Watching his films forces me to question myself. History has a funny way of turning our interests against us. The 2003 California gubernatorial recall is an ugly but inseparable footnote to Commando and Red Heat. "Am I playing into the hands of Schwarzenegger the politician?" I think. The "man of action," the "thing that needs to be done" that exists outside of context or emotions, is the fallacy that serves as the basis of reactionary politics. The dream of the action film lead to the reality of a conservative America.

Did the dream fail? Or was it always waiting to betray us? I have a doubt, like a cough in the back of my throat: is fascination a surrender? Is interest an approval?

Cinema as a Revue

The Gene Siskel just concluded the first half of Jacqueline Stewart's excellent African American Auteurs series, which focuses on two race film directors (Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams) and two middle-aged, contemporary black directors (Spike Lee and Charles Burnett).
I wrote this down in my notebook after the screening of Spencer Williams' Juke Joint (shown as a double feature with the Dirty Gertie From Harlem, which is probably the best way to see Williams' films):

Juke Joint don't seem to come from a cinematic source--rather, it seems like an attempt to film "performance" and put it on the screen.
You've got to think of all the wide shots as performances--every edit within a set-up, every close-up, is not as much a cut as a digression. The cutaways feel awkward because they are canned inserts into what is essentially documentary (the documentary of how these actors and musicians perform fiction). Scenes with several characters seem jarring because every character is performing their "routine," their vaudeville act, without seemingly any cooperation. The film feels most natural when an "audience" is present--such as the extras in the juke joint scene, who react and laugh at the dialogue.

The film's juke joint sequence, which inspired these notes, is standard race film fare--a few dance teams, a band--the kind of number you find in any Micheaux or Williams film. At the start of the scene, a pair of dancers--Mack and Ace--perform several a lengthy routine. The female dancer has thighs out of an R. Crumb comic. At one point, she does a handstand while the male dancer pretends to mimes the bass part of the backing band on her leg, transforming her body into an upright bass. Suddenly, you can hear some snickering, and realize that there is a live audience behind the camera (Williams' films use one-track sound, so the soundtrack is always either direct, or completely post-synced; more on that later).
After another, less impressive duo performs (with a much shorter routine), the film's featured band, Red Calhoun's Orchestra, begins to play. Extras wander into the shot and dance naturally--the feeling is of total documentary, perhaps even a tad voyeuristic. The microphones have been placed near the band, so we can't hear the dancers talking, but we can see their lips move as they flirt and joke around.
Occasionally, cutaways of the band (possibly the only angled shots in a film full of room-encompassing wide shots and above-the-waist medium framings) are inserted, but they feel like interruptions--not only because they are clearly shot at a different time, but because they seem to break the flow of the "performance." Which is what Juke Joint essentially is--a revue, a set of performances, broad comic acts and beauty pageants. In Juke Joint (and in Dirty Gertie), Williams builds films out of neither the tradition of sound nor image nor narrative nor even acting, but out of the simple idea of watching people "perform"--the idea of a stage rather than a theater, if you will.
The film's strongest scenes therefore all occur towards the end, in the titular juke joint, where the actors, with their clashing talents and acting styles, have a real audience to perform to. Extras turn and laugh to each other in the foreground as Inez Newell attacks Leonard Duncan, playing the part of her philandering, lazy husband. At one point, Katherine Moore, playing the black sheep daughter who wants to run away with the juke joint owner to Chicago, almost swears, but the take is kept (no doubt due to budget constraints). It's almost like everyone is waiting for their number: tap dancer Howard Galloway, who plays the aforementioned juke joint owner, stumbles over dialogue, but in a scene where he has to introduce the band and attract the (real) audience's attention, he shines as only a showman would.

In the more visually dynamic Dirtie Gertie from Harlem, which features many of the same actors (including Spencer Williams himself in drag), it the sound and not the cutaway that creates digressions from the performance. The film's island setting requires effects to be added to the soundtrack (such as the sound of steam ship announcing its arrival), and these drown out all dialogue. The acting in the film is also more traditional, more caricaturish than archetypal. The film also features a dance number, featuring Howard Galloway as one of the lead tap dancers--his routine is fantastic, but the sound has been replaced by a crisper recording of the band, therefore leaving us with the eerie result of a tap number with no clicking-and-clacking sounds.
Dirty Gertie does feature the most astounding single "performance," though: a non-actor, a servant playing a servant, whose single line, "Yes, ma'am," is said in a way that more instinctual and automatic than any actor could ever manage. It takes more than a lifetime to perfect it: it takes generations.