2007 in Review: Two Subtle Leaps

Everyone has already written about their favorites. I've been lazy. I've spent January cleaning the salt off of my shoes; my fingers stink of vinegar. "What was your top ten for the year?" was a December question. It was asked on slow buses and in movie theater lobbies. Everyone agreed it'd been a "good year." Everyone wanted to know your favorites.
There's a difference between speaking and writing about movies. The problem with writing is that movies age differently from essays. Written words always feel like they're a million years old, already so far behind, but at the same time they don't get old quickly like films, which are so much like people--they get wrinkles, gray hair, they start to forget. What once seemed right becomes questionable. Movies are hard to judge, at least with traditional language. They shift in your memory and they tailor themselves to your experiences. What was a bad movie six months ago becomes a good one. The last year's masterpiece crumbles.

Bill Morrison (left) and Ralph Tyler (right) in a still from Peoples House (2007)

I watched Andrew Bujalski's short Peoples House on the little TV set in my living room, sitting with the remote in my hand. Peoples House is only 8 minutes long. It lives in the extras of the DVD of Mutual Appreciation, Bujalski's second feature, just above the commentary and the trailer. It's Bujaski's first work in video, and his first in widescreen.
Aesthetically, Andrew Bujalski is Maurice Pialat's cousin. He is also Pialat's opposite. We see the same techniques in their films, but used for completely different reasons. Pialat's elliptical edits nonchalantly jump across time; he treats a few seconds or a few months the same way. The things that happened in between, the events we didn't see, have been omitted because they didn't matter. Certain events that we experienced seemed important at the time, but they aren't worth a damn in the long run. It can be heartbreaking.
Bujalski's ellipses instead give us an expansiveness. We cut from scene to scene because those are the moments we're focusing on for now, but the film acknowledges that a lot happened in between, or might have happened at the same time as the actions we're watching.
Peoples House is Bujalski's most elliptical film and his most quickly paced. We see moments from a lazy afternoon: Jerry Peoples (Ralph Tyler) shows Walter (filmmaker Bill Morrison) around his house. They talk about a grand piano, Walter takes a piss, Jerry shows him a sculpture in his back yard where hornets nest. It's set in the outside world Mutual Appreciation's gaps suggest: the subjects are supporting characters from that film. They are not the twentysomethings Bujalski's famous for: they're well-off middle-aged men; they talk about retirement, their children, work. Removed from the aesthetics , settings and subjects of Bujalski's other films, the film shows the expansiveness of his vision. It is a leap forward, and, appropriately enough, a subtle one.

Lars von Trier during the production of The Boss of It All (2006; released in the States in 2007)

Lars von Trier is a liar. He's a traveling magician and a trickster. He distracts you this his left hand so you don't notice what his right hand is doing. He tells a cock-and-bull story while he's sliding your silverware into his jacket.
"The Boss of It All is a light movie," he says, and everyone nods along. We believe because it seems to make sense, like he's done all the detective work for us and, after all, he made it, so he must be right. It's a clever ruse: we don't notice that he's made the greatest leap of his career. He's the emperor who's fooled everyone into thinking he's got no clothes. The truth is that The Boss of It All is the first of von Trier's films to be moral instead of moralistic. Automavision is a fraud, but it's a fraud that's greater than the truth of Dogme.

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.