June Editorial

“Without displeasing the demagogues who refuse the idea of choice, excluding all hierarchy in the name of pseudo-egalitarianism, life in each instant proves to the contrary, and, in the domain of aesthetics, criticism in particular is confronted by this problem.” – Michel Ciment

Hall Pass and How do you Know are two of the most satisfying recent American comedies and deserve to be viewed alongside the most exciting contemporary cinema. This has to do with Peter and Bobby and Jim; directors whose films reflect a humanist and humorous sensibility. The two films have different tones and emphasis but some adjectives to describe them would include funny and dramatic, romantic and sleazy, sweet and rude, intelligent and trashy, relevant and true to life. They are about the simple things: being bored at work, hanging out with friends at sports bars, being awkward on the dance floor and hanging out with the girlfriend. The settings are relatable: the home, cafés, the gym, restaurants, laundry mats and out at parks. Brooks and the Farrelly brothers are engaging with contemporary experiences through making these everyday man comedies; hybrids of all of life’s complex situations and feelings. They successfully borrow from unlikely sources like slapstick, theater, stand-up, road movies, action films and musicals to create these original forms. The films are statements by their creators on what is art; bold and original films that transgress the cookie-cutter comedy mold. The acting is brilliant as Jason Sudeikis, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd and Reese Witherspoon could not be better. They really bring depth to these characters. Hall Pass and How do you Know are films that stay with you. See them if you get a chance.

Ozon’s Potiche and Honoré’s Man at Bath are two examples of the wealth of French cinema today. Potiche as a modern day Jacques Demy colorful musical-melodrama and the latter for the rawness of the deconstruction of the sculpturesque François Sagat mythology. I look forward to their future projects (Honoré just had a new film at Cannes). On a side-note I still cannot wait to see Kechiche’s Black Venus.

The director Andrei Ujica in The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu compiles the official archive footage (9000 h) of the former Romanian dictator into a three-hour flashback. In retrospect, the footage is the undressing of an emperor (to use an Andersen analogy) as the footage captures the people not as they are but their masks in face of the leader and his television crew. The more the charades goes on, the more desperate and false the whole show seems to appear. The state-sponsored filming technique seems to be in-depth to both Eisenstein and Riefenstahl. The revolution which is at the heart of Autobiography… seems pertinent today with what is going on in the Arab world.
*****June Film Listings: At the Lightbox there will be The Tree of Life (which Robert Koehler hated), Tavernier’s new film and a Thom Andersen and João Pedro Rodrigues retrospective. The Fellini double-bills look cool. Jaap Pieters will be visiting from Amsterdam to introduce his film They Eye of Amsterdam at the Early Monthly Segment. And for the some popcorn summer fare there is Super 8 and a new Transformers.

Film Writing: Olivier Père has some thoughts on Cannes 2011. In the new Film Comment, Gavin Smith’s writes about the Warner Brothers’ Video On Demand service, Kent Jones’ on Midnight in Paris and David Bordwell has a piece on the clash between journalistic and academia cinephilia. Over at the French Cinematheque blog, Toubiana writes about Tomboy (“Le film a voir”), the new Cavalier and the Iranians that were not at Cannes. The May issue of Cahiers is great - don’t worry Delorme – were listening to every word; it's a great issue. The new issue of 24 Images is on the newsstands. In the 180 ° (Summer 2011), Brad Deane has a piece on John Cassavetes and James Quandt's article An A-Z of Montgomery Clift is a lot of fun. Rosenbaum has a review of The Forgotten Space. Fabien Baumann’s Dernieres tendances de l’idolatrie godardienne in Positif is a terrific essay, a good example of first-tier film criticism which is a lot better then a Emilie Bickerton who also wrote about the de Baecque book for the New Left Review.

Events: Abbas Kiarostami’s photograph series The Wall was at Pari Nadimi Gallery. The MDFF films at The Royal went off superbly and afterwards there was an insightful Q&A with Kaz and Dan. Some of the actors were in attendance. And the local coverage of the event was welcoming, especially Adam’s piece for Scope.

DVD Special Features: An intimate look at the Egoyan universe in The Mysterious Egoyan as part of the features on the Blu-ray DVD of Chloe. Extra Innings is a look at Brooks’ process in creating How do you Know. Stuck on You has a making-of feature Stuck Together. James Quandt has a few video essays on the Criterion Collection box set The Three films by Hiroshi Yeshigahara. A bonus on the Blu-ray of Breathless is the Godard made in USA which has interviews with the renowned filmmakers De Palma, Gray, Friedkin, Penn and Schatzberg.

*****There are so many good books that come out which I would like to read and discuss but I only have so much time. Some of these book though include Jean-Michel Frodon’s Le Cinema d’Edward Yang, Vincent Amiel's Joseph L. Mankiewicz et son double and Fredric Jameson’s Fictions Geo-Politiques published by Capprici France. And also Jonathan Lethem's splendidly written book about John Carpenter's They Live as part of the Deep Focus series.

To get ready for writing a review of Stéphane Delorme’s book on Francis Ford Coppola, I wrote a review of Ondaatje’s book with Walter Murch (Coppola’s sound designer and editor) and to make my comments of how well Delorme is running Cahiers more clear, I wrote a piece on the film magazine editor who is most messing up his publication, which is Nick James at Sight & Sound.
*****On Essential Killing, David Price contacted me,

“It is an odd film to categorize and I can see the odd dynamic that has happened around marketing it (at least in the UK and Poland) as there is the temptation to try to sell it as a straight-up action film in order to get as many people into the theater as possible and this can be a kind of double-negative (at least as I see it personally - not speaking in any kind of official capacity) in that people coming with that expectation are likely to be disappointed and that kind of marketing likely works to keep away those that might most appreciate it.

I don't know if you've seen the film or not but I played the American officer who interrogates Gallo - and, yes, very interesting experience all the way around - those two personalities and very unusual methods - I can really see how Jerzy can almost magically get really elemental stuff out of actors that may go beyond what they knew they were capable of. I've also been in very regular contact with Jerzy and, especially, Ewa (his wife and the co-writer and co-producer) through the post-production and then the entire roller-coaster ride since.”

And on the recent Ferrara retrospective at Anthology in New York, Marcus Pinn from Pinnland Empire wrote to me,

“i actually met abel ferrara the opening night of his mini-retrospective at anthology film archives (which has now become my new 2nd home over the ifc center these days). it was pretty funny, because i went to take a picture with him between 2 of his movies that were showing that night (go go tales and mary), and he was just all over the place. he kept checking his pockets franticly for something, and kept starting conversations with me, and then cutting them off. lol, it was so wierd haha. but then before the 2nd movie started, he came in to the theater to introduce the movie, and not that many people were there, so i guess i stood out, and he points at me and goes; "oh man, this guy, ok, everybody is here now." and this lady sitting behind me thought we knew each other haha.”

Have a good month,
David Davidson*****The Princess of Montpensier (Bertrand Tavernier, 2010)
** (Worth Seeing)

*****Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)
*** (A Must-See)

*****Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010)
** (Worth Seeing)

*****Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)
** (Worth Seeing)

Murch and Ondaatje on Art and Editing

Title: The Conservations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Knopf (1999)
Pages: 339
Price: $29.95
*****“Bach at the organ, admired by a pupil, answered: “It’s a matter of striking the notes at exactly the right moment.”” - Robert Bresson

The Conservations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje has a candid introduction and then progresses through five interviews with Mr. Murch, which took place between 2000 and 2001. In the first conversation Murch talks about working with Francis Ford Coppola and in particular the DVD re-edits of Apocalypse Now. In the second conversation the focus is on sound design and some of the films Murch worked on over the years, the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte comes up. In the third conversation the focus is on The Conversation and Murch’s re-editing of Welles’ Touch of Evil. In the fourth conversation Murch theorizes (something on the Negative Twenty Questions game) and they talk about Fred Zinnemann and astrology. In the fifth, and last, conversation the subject ranges from I Ching and Rilke to Murch’s own writing and his directorial work on Return to Oz, which was inspired by Wisconsin Death Trip. One is fortunate as Ondaatje is interesting, which isn't the case for all interviewers, and there is an enthusiasm in the responses, each participant wants to share their craft and working methods, they also bring up their perspective on each other’s work.

Ondaatje met Murch during the filming of The English Patient* (1996), when Murch was editing the film. They became friends. Ondaatje would appear on Muriel Murch’s radio show on KPFA in Berkeley, California as part of a three-way conversation, which sparked Ondaatje's interest to explore Murch and film-editing as a preoccupation. After Ondaatje finished Anil’s Ghost (2000), which took seven years, and the book tour ended, he wanted to sit down with Murch to start this series of interviews. It is interesting to note, as the interviews progress, it seems like Ondaatje is absorbing the importance of sound, he starts including more descriptions of it in his own writing.

Ondaatje mentions that Murch likes to quote Robert Bresson on how a film is born three times, here it is, from Notes on the Cinematographer, “On two deaths and three births. My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and the real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.” It’s a nice thought, and I think Bresson is also relevant to the discussion of Murch by what he has to say about music, “The noises must become music.” And, “Be sure of having used to the full capacity all that is communicated by immobility and silence.” It seems like Murch also arrived to this conclusion as in his sound-designs he builds numerous layers of tracks, all with different sounds, to give off the feeling of being trapped within a cave-like room. Murch even provides sounds taking place outside the room, while he also leaves the soundscape room for silence. Here is Murch on the subject, “Music functions as an emulsifier that allows you to dissolve a certain emotion and take it in a certain direction. When there’s no music, the filmmakers are standing back saying, simply, Look at this. Without appearing to comment.” One of Murch’s tricks is the insertion of a metaphorical sound, an intimidate noise that will anticipate an important event. In The English Patient there is a distant bell before the patient eats a plumb, “It was to hint at a memory opening up.” Or in The Godfather, before Michael Corleone performs his first murder, there is the subway train screech from outside the Bronx restaurant.

In describing his childhood, Murch brings up a certain cartoon character that went by the nickname Gerald McBoing-Boing “who spoke in sound effects instead of words.” Murch would adopt 'McBoing-Boing' as a nickanme. Some terms that are relevant to the trade of a sound designer are: acoustic envelope, worldizing sound, atmosphere sound, musique concrete, the aphasic, the Avid, and Dolby Stereo. While some important composers include David Shire, John Cage, Miles Davis and Glenn Gould. And some renowned sound designers and effects guys include Randy Thom, Les Hodgson, Alan Splet and Leslie Shatz. And on the exaggeration of sound in film, it seems like it were the cartoons by the Fleischer brothers and Walt Disney during the advent of the Talkies that had the biggest impact on its early metaphorical uses, with an influence on people as diverse as René Clair, Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein.

One thing the book tries to highlight are the marginalized editors of film history, some of the famous editors that are brought up, and others, include Dede Allen, who worked on Robert Rossen’s The Hustler and some Arthur Penn films; Anne Coates, whose career spanned Lawrence of Arabia to Erin Brockovich; Cécile Decugis, who did a lot of the French New Wave stuff; Richard Chew, who did Star Wars; Gerry Hambling who mostly worked for Alan Parker; Thelma Schoomaker who works with Scorsese.; Ralph Rosenblum’s who did Woody Allen’s early stuff, and gave the films their shape; and others like Richie Marks, Barry Malkin, William Chang, Margaret Booth, and Steve Rotter. And on the subject of film-editors it is worth bringing up editors-turned-directors like Donald Siegel and Robert Wise, Larry Fessenden and Monte Hellman. David Lean also started out as an editor and continued to work on the editing of the films he directed, though he never took credit.

On editing Murch writes,

“You see them [actors] forwards, backwards, at twenty-four frames per second, at forty-eight frames a second, over and over and over again. You are studying them the way a sculptor studies a piece of marble before deciding to chisel it – here. So I have to know all the hidden veins and strengths and weaknesses of the rock that I’m working with, in order to know where best to put the chisel.”

“What you do as an editor is search for patterns, at both the superficial and ever deeper levels – as deep as you can go.”

“The editor works at both the macroscopic and the microscopic level: ranging from deciding how long precisely each shot is held, to restructuring and repositioning scenes, and sometimes to eliminating entire subplots.”

This goes to demonstrate to what extent the editor’s job is an intimate relationship with the source material and how they can play an important role in molding the final product. The two major approaches to reducing the length of a film, which are discussed, is the spaghetti-sauce method, gradually eliminate bits, and the Procrustes method, which involves larges chops. A comic aside, Albert Brooks in the terrific Modern Romance plays an editor and he demonstrates how editors are at the whim of directors, illustrates the repetitiveness of their tasks and shows their odd resourcefulness which goes into creating perculiar foley sounds - all of this for a goofy sci-fi film!

On the early influences on the Cinema, Murch posits “The three fathers of film: Edison, Beethoven, Flaubert!”, which he further expands upon: Edison for the technical stuff, Flaubert for the idea of realism, and Beethoven for the dynamism he brought to music and the composition. This classicism in approach will seep into Murch’s own European filmmaking influences, which includes Godard, Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, and Pontercorvo. Murch is linked into film history, primarily due to his collaboration with the Movie Brats, but he runs deeper, much deeper. Murch was given the assignment of reconstructing a seventeen-second Kinetoscope recording that Edison made in 1894, apparently the first known recording of the moving-pictures with accompanied sound. Murch also collaborated with Rick Schmidlin on implementing Orson Welles notes towards the new ‘Director’s cut’ of Touch of Evil, one of the other great sound-recording films with Blow Out and The Conversation. And Murch worked with Fred Zinnemann on Julia, and he would make a short film, As I See It, on Zinnemann after he died. On Zinnemann, Murch writes, “He was a member of cinema’s second generation. First were the Griffiths and the Chaplins, the people who started making film just after the turn of the century. They were the ones who got him [Zinnemann] intrigued by cinema when he was in his teens. He started making with Billy Wilder in 1925, as a teenager, in Berlin. Then there was third generation – Welles, Kubrick, Stanley Donen, Arthur Penn – and I guess my generation was the fourth.” My only problem with this general and respectable approach to film-history is that it leaves out such eccentricities like Fernando Di Leo, Sean Cunningham, and the late Irvin Kershner (who pops up late in the book as The Conversation, which first appeared as an article in Life magazine, was brought by him to Coppola’s attention).While some of Murch’s contemporaries that are discussed include Michael Mann, Robert Parrish, Wong Kar-Wai, and Robert Duvall.

Finally, The Conversations offers much to savor. There are guest contributions by George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola (that bearded filmmaking entrepreneur), Rick Schmidlin, and Anthony Minghella. Between Ondaatje and Murch they discuss their work with collaborators and peers and the differing working processes out there, which makes part of the book read like Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. The two offer different perspective on a work of art – the difference between the interpreter and the creator where one is more interested in analysis and the other on the technical aspect. Their influences and knowledge derive from each other’s resumes and background. Murch has also worked on all of The Godfather’s, The Talented Mr. Ripley, American Graffiti, K-19: The Widowmaker, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the late Coppola films, and also has another book on editing, The Blink of an Eye. – David Davidson

* Michael Ondaatje will be introducing The English Patient at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Monday, May 9th at 7PM as part of the Books on Film club series.

Vapor Trail (Clark)

In the last month, the film that had the strongest impact on me, which engaged me the most, made me reflect, showed me something about the world that I was unfamiliar with, and did so in an innovative and intelligent way is John Gianvito’s four-and-a-half hour documentary Vapor Trail (Clark). It is a work of awe-inspiring social activism and historical revisionism as with the collaboration of Myrla Baldonado and Teofilo Juatco from the Alliance for U.S. Bases Clean-up, Philippines (ABC) the film explores the ABC’s campaigning for the US government to take responsibility for its toxic dumping in and around its former military bases in the Philippines, particularly that of Clark and Subic in the Pampanga province. Gianvito is finishing the accompanying Vapor Trail (Subic). Presently in the settlements around the Clark base, which was abandoned in 1991 due to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the groundwater is contaminated and is causing illnesses and death. There aren’t enough resources to accommodate the victims and Myrla, who was present at the screening, had a cast on her left leg and you can tell that she was overworked though hopeful, fighting though getting disillusioned. The present day injustices are historically contextualized against the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), which was part of Philippine’s early struggle for independence, and it is also the first engagement between the United States and the islands. For an example of one of the wars atrocities: there are the American troops under General Leonard Wood who trapped 600 half-naked Moro natives, and shot them all dead while they were in a crater. The soldiers were later to be congratulated by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Emerson College professor Gianvito, who edited Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, shares a similar filming technique with the Russian master as his observatory camera with long and fixed takes contribute to a contemplative stillness. This state of meditation is especially strong when the visuals include a series of infant tombstones, a landscape that shows sign of industrial-military-commercial transformation, and the local residents that are being interviewed or conversing.

Vapor Trail (Clark) was brought to Toronto as part of the Images Festival 2011, which included an artist talk with Gianvito. It was more of a reading group as a couple of sheets were distributed with texts related to Vapor Trail for everyone to read and discuss. These texts were Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, a blurb from Howard Zinn, Susan Sontag’s answer to “What should artists do now?”, and an except from Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s Towards a Third Cinema. Gianvito spoke about why he makes films, his answer was “to remind people of real life.” Everyone's efforts were truly commendable, and if one feels charitable, money can be donated at http://fdnbayanihan.org/.