Editorial: The Margins at the Center (Cahiers du Cinéma, May 2013)

The French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma in the issues around the month of May become more intensified: last year there was the editorial Programmer and this year there is the polemic La marge au centre (which is translated below). In this new editorial, the current chief-editor since 2009, Stéphane Delorme argues for a new youthfulness in French cinema and interrogates the financing and programming institutions so that they will better understand and be more receptive to the plight of these independent filmmakers: what there is to gain is an emergence of more youthful, lively and creative forms.

The May 2013 issue of Cahiers includes an Événement on Cannes 2013, which includes the articles l'âge du festival on the average age of the programmed (older) filmmakers, and articles on Arnaud des Pallières' Michael Kohlhaas, Mathamat-Saleh Haroun's Grigris, Ari Folman's The Congress, and Léa Seydoux (La vie d'Adèle, Grand Central). There is also a Billets Cannes which includes the articles Où sont les femmes? (suite), Paolo Sorrentino: un invité envahissant, James Gray: l'obstiné, D'une Asie à l'autre, and Premiers Films Français sans convention.

There is an Événement on the Convention collective, which is a government and industry sanction to impose stricter regulation on the filmmaking industry that would greatly disrupt smaller independent productions. The article that opens the dossier, Jean-Philippe Tessé's Convention collective: le cinéma français au pied du mud, brings up many of its key points.

The rest of the magazine is full of good articles. The Cahier critique section has only three films (Shokuzai, La Fille du 14 juillet, L'Écume des jours) and the rest are in the Notes sur d'autres films section (where the stand-out is The Lebanese Rocket Society). The Le Journal is dense with articles on, for example, the actor Jean-Luc Vincent (Camille Claudel 1915), Albert Serra, Jess Franco, and Vincente Minnelli. And finally there is a good dossier on South by Southwest by Nicholas Elliot and Clémentine Gallot with interviews with the key Austin filmmakers Richard Linklater, Jeff Nichols, David Gordon Green, Andrew Bujalski, and Chris Eska. - D.D.

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This year's Cannes Film Festival is under the menacing shadow of the extension of the collective agreement which aims against those films that have the most fragile budgets. Since we are particularly attentive to the young French filmmakers (see the April issue titled: "Jeunes cinéastes français on n'est pas mort!"), we had to continue the investigation, this time not on the side of creation but on the funding side. This deconstruction will continue in the next months in the pages of the magazine to promote the emergence of free and daring filmmakers. It is not enough to criticize the films that arrive, the mission of the Cahiers is to formulate what is missing, propose solutions, and see where it gets stuck. The meeting with the Minister of Labour Michel Sapin and Minister of Culture Aurélie Filippetti as well as the deciders of France 2 Cinéma is to discuss this concern. What is the government and the public service doing to promote boldness and creativity? What can the government do and what is the goal of the public service? Power and service. The primary objective is not to denounce, but to seek and to generate new ideas through confrontation.

There are ideas that weigh on the subject like that of "diversity." Their draw which we are reassured is that they are cheap to make: the "small" films also has a role to play, a "small" part, as it should. The cinema of auteur is still in this "diversity clause," in the exception, in the annex, in the margin, in the insulting category of "difficult" films. It is as if a film made by a filmmaker who has something to say could not reach the greatest numbers. What makes an auteur film difficult? How can a movie be generous, enthusiastic, sensitive, that talks about our lives, even if they are first films or small films: why couldn't they work for everyone? Why are these films are not on prime-time television and why aren't they in the competition at Cannes?

Because ultimately the same thing is at stake: that of jobs. Each one in his place. A small pool for the young and broke, and a large pool for the experienced and well-off. There is a second class and a premium class. But how can one not see in this a lack of imagination? It is a movie like J’ai tué ma mère by Xavier Dolan that should be in the premium class for the Palme d'Or (why not?) and on TV with a 8:30PM Sunday night slot so that everyone will be speaking about it the next day. If people are falling asleep in front of their TV it is because we do not give them anything to watch. The public wants films that affect them, that divides them, and that exist. Cinema is made to make people speak. We are told that we need a "family" movie to play between 20 h 30, but the films that will be discussed within the families are precisely J’ai tué ma mère and My Little Princess, because, there, there are things to say. But the same thing happens at Cannes. La Bataille de Solférino by Justine Triet is found in the smallest section, ACID. It was predictable: a first film with a small budget. Yet the "potential audience" is real, with its father and mother who tear each other apart as they are trying to look out for their children. This is Kramer vs. Kramer on Solferino street. But as they say, since this good film pushes the limits, then we will have to defend it here.

This issue ends on the other side of the world, with some American filmmakers who live and work in Austin, where a community gradually emerged, in opposition to the forms of both Hollywood and the independent cinema. In between the lines, regarding this trip to Texas, we can read another way to make films and work together, which emphasizes dynamism, support and enthusiasm. The American system is certainly no better, and it's getting worse, but we wanted to see what had prompted many filmmakers to leave Los Angeles and New York to provide the means to find their freedom and to ensure that the margins becomes the center.

Stéphane Delorme

Howard Hawks: Cahiers du Cinéma 1956 Interview

In the current world of film criticism where, with some exceptions, there is a a narrow representation of contemporary film tastes on the internet and a lack of space dedicated to film history in print, it's important to return to its history to read, or re-read, its major texts to have a better perspective on where it's today.

The following is one of the first major interviews with Howard Hawks from Cahiers du Cinéma from 1956. Scott Breivold in Howard Hawks: Interviews writes about it,

"The "discovery" of Howard Hawks began in the 1950s (ironically not in America but in France) with the publication of Jacques Rivette's 1953 essay, The Genius of Howard Hawks in the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. [...] In 1956, some of the French critics conducted what is regarded as the first important interview with Howard Hawks. [...] The 1956 Cahiers interview is a good foundation for discovery of Hawks, exploring his choice of subjects, genres, techniques, and early influences."

In the interview Hawks discusses his films The Land of the Pharaohs, Scarface, Viva Villa and Paid For Love as well as he emphasizes the humor in his films. Saul Austerlitz in his book on film comedy, Another Fine Mess, would highlight the Hawksian "farcical good humor" of the performances and especially the ones by Cary Grant. This interview is also frequently cited (cf. Bill Krohn's The Making of Land of Pharaohs). - D.D.

*****

Interview by Jacques Becker, Jacques Rivette, and Francois Truffaut (Cahiers du Cinéma, N.56, Feb. 1956). English translation from Interviews With Film Directors by Andrew Sarris.

“The evidence on the screen is the proof of Hawks’s genius,” we had recently written. It would have been an exaggeration to pretend that this evidence was accessible to everyone; and critical unanimity is happily far from being settled on the genius of one of the great American cineastes: it is clear enough that our own evaluation has not changed.

            It was not a question of interrogating Hawks on his “genius”; no metaphysical speculations; nothing that could distress the champions of clarity or common sense; at least, let us hope that each will find here his own account, and that includes the “Hitchcocko-Hawksians” of pure obedience.

            When we arrived for our interview, we found Hawks conversing with whom? Jacques Becker, one of our old friends. The auteur of Casque d’Or courteously took his leave of the auteur of Sergeant York when we protested his departure: since Jacque Becker was a friend of Howard Hawks, the interview could only gain in interest. Furthermore, Becker’s fluency in the language of Griffith made him more than an interpreter, a valuable collaborator.

            Since our interview transpired a few days before the release of The Land of the Pharaohs, our first questions quite naturally dealt with that film.

Howard Hawks: I made this film for one simple reason: Cinemascope. At the time I was approached to direct a film in this new screen size, I was considering as a project the story of an astonishing feat of construction in China during the war. The American Army wanted an airfield which the engineers estimated would take eight months to construct. The Chinese supplied twenty thousand men and women, who carried stone in little baskets on their heads, and this huge airfield was completed in three weeks. I was about to abandon this project because the political situation made cooperation with Red China impossible; the producers then considered shooting the film in Thailand. It then occurred to me that the building of the pyramids was the same kind of story – it too demonstrated what man is able to create with his bare hands from sand to stone. This kind of story appeals to me tremendously. We thus wrote our script on this one theme: the construction of a pyramid.

Cahiers: What part did William Faulkner play in the development of the scenario?

Hawks: He collaborated with Harry Kurnitz in the writing of both story and screenplay. As always, he contributed enormously. He’s a great writer; we are very old friends and work easily together. We understand each other very well, and any time I need any sort of help, I call on Faulkner. He has done three or four scenarios for me, but he has also helped me on many others. The story of The Land of the Pharaohs because his imagination was challenged by these men, their conversations, the reasons for their belief in a second life, how they happened to achieve these tasks for beliefs we would find it difficult to understand today, such as the slight importance attached to the present life in comparison with the future life, the rest that was to be assured to the Pharaoh in a place where his body would be secure…

Cahiers: For ages, or even…

Hawks: For eternity, for eternity. For all these reasons, Faulkner was the man for the assignment: he has an affinity for these ideas. They are what he is made for.

Cahiers: We would like to know how you transported your imagination back to an age so remote as the ancient Egyptian.

Hawks: We were assisted by several historians in Egypt’s Department of Antiquities, and above all by a Frenchman who has lived and written numerous books on Egyptian history in a little house in the shadow of the great Pyramid – the exact spot on which we shot the picture. He and the other authorities instructed us in the ways and customs of the Egyptians. I’m afraid we paid attention only to hat best suited our picture. It is possible to reconstruct the furniture and dress, and even some of the ritual, of the Pharaohs from the hieroglyphics and drawings on the tombs. We know what the soldiers’ uniforms looked like, what musical instruments were played, and what utensils were used. As for the architecture, Trauner did a great piece of work. He is, without doubt, one of the greatest scene designers in the world. We tried to reproduce Trauner’s visual conceptions exactly.

Cahiers: Did that French Egyptologist see what you shot each day?

Hawks: He saw some of the rushes, I think. He was very interested in some of the schemes we concocted for moving and transporting the blocks of stone. According to him, it was quite possible the Egyptians had thought of the same stratagems. For example, we were in agreement about the use of a ramp to get the stones to the summit, and the subsequent dismantling of the ramp once it was no longer need. The method by which stones are raised from the ground and lowered onto the boat in the film is our invention. So is the way the pyramid is sealed after its construction. The scholars were quite intrigued. We employed a hydraulic process which is quite modern, but instead of water or oil, we used sand. Thus, we had a huge stone rest upon enormous wooden pilings. Each pile was sunk in a hole, and each hole was filled with sand. For each block of rock to fall into place it was necessary merely to open a small hole which allowed the sand to run out. As the sand did so, the huge block settled down slowly into its final position. This is probably the method the Egyptians used. We don’t know for sure.

Cahiers: Then you have tried to make a realistic film?

Hawks: As realistic as possible, but that didn’t stop us from using camels, even though very few camels were in Egypt at the time of our story. Our justification, shaky on purely historical grounds, was that camels did seem integral to our image of Egypt. There were many other things we could only guess about. That’s why we had the workers be free at the start of the pyramid and slaves at the end. We reasoned that the employment of 10,000 men on a pyramid for 30 years would drain the country economically and that after the first few years of exaltation, discontent would smolder into collective rage and the workers would have to be enslaved to make them continue. This thesis is an integral part of our film.

Cahiers: You ordinarily avoid stories with a long time span, and the notion of continuity plays a great role in almost all your films. Were you bothered by the fact that this story extended over thirty years?

Hawks: Bothered, no, but handicapped. It was difficult to devise a story that lasted thirty years while maintaining an acceptable continuity.

Cahiers: What have you concluded from your experience with Cinemascope?

Hawks: We have spent a lifetime learning how to compel the public to concentrate on one single thing. Now we have something that works in exactly the opposite way, and I don’t like it very much. I like Cinemascope for a picture such as The Land of the Pharaohs, where it can show things impossible otherwise, but I don’t like it at all for the average story. Contrary to what some think, it is easier to shoot in Cinemascope – you don’t have to bother about what you should show – everything’s on the screen. I find that a bit clumsy. Above all, in a motion picture, is the story. You cannot shoot a scene as quickly in Cinemascope, because if you develop a situation quickly, the characters jump all over the wide screen – which in a way makes them invisible. Thus you lose speed as a means of exciting or augmenting a scene’s dramatic tension. You have to proceed differently. What you lose on the dramatic plane, however, you gain on the visual plane. The result can be very pleasing to the eye. You have to decide what seems best. Have you seen a film entitled The Tall Men with Gable?

Cahiers: No, not yet.

Hawks: My brother produced it. It’s Red River, but in color and in Cinemascope, and it’s a very pleasant film to watch. It’s not a great film, but a good film. It made me regret not having Cinemascope when I made Red River. John Ford and I made some anamorphic attempts around 1926, but we didn’t care for the results. I always think that the artist who paints a scene in a certain manner must, in changing his manner, change his scene.

Cahiers: And Africa?

Hawks: For this film we must use portable cameras. For certain scenes even hand-held cameras; the Cinemascope gear would be too difficult.

Cahiers: Will this be your next film?

Hawks: I don’t really know. We can start shooting, the scenario is finished, but I must make another film before; we won’t go down into Africa before next September.

Cahiers: Could you tell us a little about this other film?

Hawks: It’s difficult, we are only beginning to work on it. I can’t tell you very much, because we haven’t even decided on the main plot line. I don’t know what form it is going to take. I don’t even know what genre of film it will be. Its point of departure is a true incident that I’ve heard about, but it might never become a film. It depends.

Cahiers: All your films are based on events which tend to show a man in action, his effort and struggle. Even considering the wide variety of your projects, these themes keep recurring in almost all your films. Do you think this is so?

Hawks: That may be true, but I am not really aware of it. I make movies on subjects that interest me: That could be automobile racing, airplanes, a western or a comedy, but the best drama for me is the one which shows a man in danger. There is no action where there is no danger. It follows that if you achieve real action, there must be danger. To live or to die! What drama is greater? Therefore I have probably chosen this direction because I have gradually come to believe that it matters more than anything else. It’s very easy to make a movie knowing that everyone will love it, but that doesn’t count for much. What one should do, what one must do, is try to anticipate what the public is going to like. I don’t think that these people are producers; they make a picture because somebody makes a picture that is successful, so they make one like it, you know?

Cahiers: Yes, too many films exist only as imitations of others.

Hawks: That’s true. We made Scarface because the violence of this particular era was interesting. Scarface is still being copied – and hence still lives. There were fifteen murders in Scarface, and people said I was crazy to have so many. But I knew that was the story: violence made the story. Also, in practice, all the gangster movies that have followed Scarface only reiterated the same material. Similarly, when I made Red River, I thought an adult western could be made for mature audiences, and now everyone is making “intelligent” westerns. And a film like Twentieth Century… have you seen Twentieth Century?

Cahiers: Helas non!

Hawks: It was the first time the dramatic leads, instead of secondary comics, played for laughs. I mean we got the fun out of John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. It was two or three years ahead of its time.

Cahiers: We think that a film like Monkey Business has renewed American comedy, and is undoubtedly more ambitious than it seems…

Hawks: Oh, probably, yes. Because of its general theme: the laughs are born out of the inhibitions that restrict each of us and are here abruptly removed by rejuvenation. It was a good story. Perhaps we pushed the point a bit too far for the public. From this point of view, it is less amusing than Male War Bride or Bringing Up Baby. Monkey Business went too far, became too fanciful and not funny enough: this is my opinion.

Cahiers: And Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?

Hawks: Oh, that was just … fun! In other movies, you have two men who go out looking for pretty girls to have fun with. We pulled a switch by taking two girls who went out looking for men to amuse them: a perfectly modern story. It delighted me. It was funny. The two girls, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, were so good together that any time I had trouble figuring out any business, I simple had them walk back and fort, and the audiences adored it. I had a staircase built so that they could go up and down, and since they are well built… This type of movie lets you sleep at night without a care in the world; five or six weeks were all we needed to shoot the musical numbers, the dances and the rest.

Cahiers: What period of work do you prefer? Script, shooting, editing?

Hawks: I hate the editing.

Cahiers: But you do the editing of your films?

Hawks: Oh, yes! Simultaneously with the shooting, if possible. When I started out in this profession, the producers were all afraid that  made a film too short because I didn’t give them enough film for editing. And I said: “I don’t want you to make the movie in the cutting room, I want to make it myself on the set, and if that doesn’t suit you, too bad.” That’s not to say that editing isn’t a chore, particularly when you haven’t done a good job wit the shooting. Editing is a horror for me because I look at my work for a second time and say that’s pretty bad, and that, and also that – The difficult work is the preparation: finding the story, deciding how to tell it, what to show and what not to show. Once you begin shooting you see everything in the best light, develop certain details, and improve the whole. I never follow a script literally and I don’t hesitate to change a script completely if I see a chance to do something interesting. I like to work on the scenarios. Some of my best movies were written in very little time. Scarface took only eleven days, story and scenario.

Cahiers: Does that include the dialogues?

Hawks: Everything. The whole thing took eleven days. I know because I paid the writers who worked for me by the day.

Cahiers: Who gave you the material, the basic facts?

Hawks: The facts came from several reporters in Chicago, many books, and magazine articles. The outline was done by Ben Hecht. He didn’t have to do any research. All he had to do was ask me about this or that detail, and I would rattle off the information because I had read a lot on the subject. For example, I don’t know if you recall George Raft flipping a “nickel” in his hand? There are actually been a large number of murders in Chicago, where, as a mark of disrespect, the killer stuck a nickel into the hand of the corpse. Raft’s character being that of a killer, he always had a coin in his hand. We also exploited another little known fact: The papers that published the photos of a murder indicated “X marks the spot where the body was found.” So we designed fifteen or twenty scenes around the X, finding all sorts of ways to use the X when a murder occurred.

Cahiers: Each time someone was killed, there was an X?

Hawks: Yes. X.

Cahiers: Did that have something to do with the scar on Muni’s face?

Hawks: Yes. Once you start off on that path, why not go all the way? Do you remember the scene in which Boris Karloff is bowling? As he lets the ball go, he’s hit; the pins all go down. An X for a strike is marked on the scorecard.

Cahiers: And the cloud in Red River, was it intentional or accidental?

Hawks: We saw it coming just as Wayne began reading the prayer over the grave. We told him to hurry reading so that we could catch it at the right moment. This was a case of seizing an opportunity as it presented itself. I don’t think we would have held up the scene to wait for a cloud.

Cahiers: You were the producer of The Thing without getting credit as a director, but you undoubtedly supervised the production very closely.

Hawks: Oh, yes. The direction was handled by my editor, but I was on the set for all the important scenes. It was a very pleasant assignment. We wrote the script in four and a half days. I had read the story in Germany, in Heidelberg, where we shout Male War Bride. We only used four pages from it. I bought the rights and hired tow good screenwriters. The story interested me because I thought it was an adult treatment of an often infantile subject.

Cahiers: Many critics have complained about the big differences that existed between the Hemingway story To Have and Have Not and the film you shot from it. Why did you change so much?

Hawks: Hemingway and I are good friends, but whenever I tried to persuade Hemingway to write for the movies, Hemingway insisted that he could be a good writer of books, but he didn’t know whether he could be a good writer of movies. Once when Hemingway and I were hunting together, I told him that I could take his worst story and make a movie out of it. Hemingway asked me what was his worst story. “To Have and Have Not,” I said. Hemingway explained that he had written the story in one sitting when he needed money, and that I couldn’t make a movie out of it. I said I’d try, and while we hunted, we discussed it. We decided that the best way to tell the story was not to show the hero growing old, but to show how he had met the girl, and, in short, show everything that had happened before the beginning of the novel. After four or five days of discussion I left. Faulkner and Jules Furthman then wrote a script incorporating the ideas Hemingway and I had evolved on our hunting trip. In fact, there was enough material left over for another movie (Michael Curtiz’ The Breaking Point) which was pretty good.

Cahiers: Your career has been divided equally between adventure films and comedies. The adventure films seemed optimistic and the comedies pessimistic, but there always seemed a lesson to be drawn from the humor in both genres. Are you more interested in the mixture of genres within your subject or in the clash of genres?

Hawks: Perhaps I can best answer in the following manner. Life is very simple for most people. It becomes so routine that everybody wants to escape his environment. Adventure stories reveal how people behave in the face of death – what they do, say, feel, and even think. I have always liked the scene in Only Angels Have Wings in which a man says “I feel funny,” and his best friend says “your neck is broken,” and the injured man then says “I have always wondered how I would die if I knew I was going to die. I would rather you didn’t watch me.” And the friend goes out and stands n the rain. I have personally encountered this experience, and the public found it very convincing.

             But a comedy is virtually the same as an adventure story. The difference is in the situation – dangerous in an adventure story, embarrassing in a comedy. But in both we observe our fellow beings in unusual situations. You merely emphasize the dramatic or the comical aspects of the hero’s reactions. Sometimes you can mix them up a bit. My serious pictures usually have their comic sides. You’ve seen The Big Sky? You remember the scene where they amputate Kirk Douglas’ finger; it was really funny. I had already wanted to do that scene in Red River, but John Wayne had said that I was crazy to want such a scene played for comedy. I said okay, I would do it in my next picture instead. When Wayne saw it, he phoned me and said he’d do whatever I wanted to in our next picture together.

            It’s possible to do comedy scenes even at very tragic moments. I once told a Spaniard I was thinking of doing Don Quixote with Cary Grant and Cantinflas, and the Spaniard said it was impossible to make a comedy out of a tragedy. I asked the Spaniard to tell me the story of Don Quixote, and after the Spaniard had done so, I said, “You’ve just told me the story of three of Chaplin’s best pictures.” He looked at me and said, “You’re right. Let’s go make a comedy.” And that’s pretty much the way I see it. The only difference between comedy and tragedy is the point of view. That’s the only way I know how to answer your questions.

Cahiers: The question has been answered.

Hawks: You know the story of The African Queen? I turned down an invitation to direct it because I couldn’t see any humor in the situation. It pleased me to see how they made it a comedy. There were some silly things it, but it went. Whenever I hear a story my first thought is how to make it into a comedy, and I think of how to make it into a drama only as a last resort. Do you remember the story about the man who wanted to commit suicide and stayed on a window ledge – Fourteen Hours? They wanted me to do it, and I said no. “Why not?” they asked me. “It’s a great story.” I told them I didn’t like suicides, and I told my friend Henry Hathaway that I didn’t like the film he had directed. The public didn’t like it either, and Zanuck told me I had been right. I told Zanuck: “I might have done it if it had been Cary Grant getting from the bedroom of a woman whose husband had come back unexpectedly and after he was found on the ledge he pretended he was contemplating suicide.” Zanuck asked me if I wanted to start on that one the next day.

Cahiers: You’re not interested in abnormal characters?

Hawks: Sometimes I get interested in the encounter of a normal person and an abnormal person. Almost all my caprices, my manias (like the way I am playing with key chain while I talk to you), I like to think that these are abnormal things. To see the difference in the way of thinking makes good scenes, but to tell a long story about a nut isn’t easy. Besides, I don’t like theoretical situations. I like stories like Viva Villa! which I wrote and half of which I directed. The Villa in that film, like the Villa in real life, was a quite bizarre man. So was Scarface. Ben Hecht wanted to make the Capone-like character a Caesar Borgia and Capone’s sister like Lucretia Borgia. This analogy permeates that script, and every intelligent person sense something unusual, something that can’t be brought out into the open, but affects all the scenes.

            Pancho Villa had a very complex personality – that’s what made him interesting – but these subjects are rare. Fox wanted me to do Zapata, but the script was all wrong about the character. Zapata was the worst murdered Mexico had ever seen. Had Fox been willing to tell the true story of Zapata, I would have been interested. But they made a sort of Santa Claus of him and had him riding around the country giving presents to poor peons.

Cahiers: In short, you’re guided in your work by an intentional reaction to what is going on around you.

Hawks: Exactly. I’ve already said that it’s easy, when one sees crowds rushing off to see a movie, to make another movie almost exactly like it. What is more fun is trying something new, and hoping it will work. That’s how I hit upon the tempo of my movies. I made a film called His Girl Friday in which the characters spoke so fat that the characters kept stepping on each other’s lines. The public liked it. Moreover, the tempo in Scarface was faster than usual in that period. I generally work with a faster tempo than that of most of my colleagues. It seems more natural to me, less force. I personally speak slowly, but people generally talk, talk, talk without even waiting for other people to finish. Also, if a scene is a bit weak, the more rapidly you shoot it, the better it will be on the screen. Moreover, if the tempo is fast you can emphasize a point by slowing the rhythm. Similarly, when you have a scene with two characters, don’t always use a close-up. When you use close-ups sparingly, the public realizes that they are important. I hate movies which, without any reason, are composed completely of close-ups. I don’t like them. I don’t want to say that they’re necessarily bad movies, but I don’t like that particular style of film-making.

Cahiers: Have any particular directors influenced you?

Hawks: In the beginning, I was very much impressed by Murnau’s Sunrise, particularly for its camera movements. I once made a film in this style – Paid to Love – with a great many camera effects, but I have never used such trickery since that time. I try to tell a story as simply as possible with the camera at eye level. Since I had directed Paid to Love at a time when the public was easy to impress, the result was well-received. But I don’t believe the future is in that direction. The other directors who have most impressed me are John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, and Leo McCarey; these are the men who, in my opinion, have been the best.

Cahiers: What do you think of the young directors: Nicholas Ray, for example.

Hawks: I’ve seen several of Ray’s films, and find them very promising. He is one of those directors of whom it is said: “I will go see everything he does because he is a good story-teller.” But the actual situation in Hollywood is hard for young directors. They don’t get the freedom we older directors enjoy. Young directors are told what to direct, where to shoot it, on what day to be finished. It’s hard. However, the more successful a young director’s movies, the more freedom he will be give.

Cahiers: What would be your ideal film, that which you would make for yourself alone?

Hawks: I have no desire to make a picture for myself. There has never been a picture so good the public didn’t care to see it. I like to make comedies because I like to go into a theater and hear people laughing – the more laughter the better I feel. I have no desire to make a picture for my own pleasure. Fortunately, I have found that what I like, most people also like, so I only have to let myself go and do what interests me.

            I am actually thinking about a subject for a movie. For four-fifths of the picture there is only one person on the screen. A girl, cut off from all contact with humanity by avalanches and melting ice, bears a child and cares for it for three moths before she is found.

Cahiers: Do you always work on your scripts?

Hawks: From the beginning and for all my films.

Cahiers: If you had to choose three or four of your films to be saved, which ones would they be?

Hawks: For sentimental reasons, my first talking film, Dawn Patrol, then Scarface and probably Twentieth Century; but … there are many others I would like to save. Dawn Patrol was very interesting because it was my firs experience with sound. I had not worked since the coming of sound because the producers didn’t know if I could work with dialogue. I had never had any theatrical experience. I myself wrote almost the entire scenario, and during the shooting, everyone kept telling me: “It’s not good dialogue, it’s not dramatic. Everything is flat. Everything you’re doing is going to be flat.” No one liked the film because none of the characters cried or screamed. When the editing was finished, the studio had so little confidence in the movie, they dispensed with the premiere. They preferred to release it discreetly, and then it turned out to be the best film of the year, and then they got into the habit of screening it for other directors and saying: “That’s what good dialogue is like.”

Orson Welles' CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965)

John Ford: Multiple Perspectives (Costa, Comolli, Gallagher, Straub)

In discussing John Ford with David Jenkins at Mubi, Pedro Costa praises Ford for his film's documentary and poetic quality, "It makes me dream and it makes me come back. I felt so right when I saw a film by John Ford and I'm in front of those people. It was a dream thing. It was a real thing." It's hard to isolate what exactly makes Ford's film so special and why his influence is so vast. Throughout the history of cinema there has been a plethora of of diverse directors that have praised Ford's cinema: Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Jean-Marie Straub, Maurice Pialat, and the Ross Brothers (River). To just name a few. And, of course, Ford is equally as polarizing, and other directors, like Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino, have reacted against him.

In an interview with by Daniel Fairfax with Jean-Louis Comolli, "Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am...", Comolli brings up Ford in the his recounting of the conflicts between Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinéthique in the late 60's,

"They distinguished themselves by radically rejecting practically the entire cinema. Personally, I have always been concerned with saving the cinema, including the most ideological films. The idea behind "Young Mr. Lincoln" was to save Hollywood. [...] "We proceeded from the idea that, if forms have a meaning, it could be – and this is the case with the great Hollywood directors – that this meaning is not that of the characters, or the story the film tells. It could be that this meaning comes from the mise en scène, and there, all of a sudden, forms take on a meaning at odds with the énoncés of the film’s logic. In the end, Young Mister Lincoln is particularly striking because it is a film which, if you read it rapidly, tells us of the Lincoln myth, of bourgeois, mercantile America. Everything is there, justice, absolutely everything. But as soon as you dismantle it, as soon as you deconstruct it, you perceive that it is infinitely more perverse than that, and that the filmmaker manages, on the basis of his work, or his own genius, to endanger, and even squarely overturn, the énoncés which are in the film. This can lead to a much more subtle reading, which in the end shows the film as fiercely critical of Lincoln’s position. This is what is interesting: Lincoln is there, like a statue, and at the same time he is something much more problematic, none of his weaknesses are concealed."

In an interview by Toni D'Angela with Tag Gallagher for La Furia Umana, Gallagher speaks about Ford in regards to the structure of his films,

"He made “experimental films” (at least according to Straub and me). Sometimes he experimented more in one direction, sometimes in another. [...] Ford is virtually the only filmmaker in Hollywood between the wars who exposes and denounces racism and the nature of the military, […] more Brecht than Brecht, as Jean-Marie Straub says."

Gallagher might be one of Ford's staunchest defender and in his writing he ocasionally brings up Jean-Marie Straub admiration for Ford’s cinema. 

In Gallagher’s incredible John Ford: The Man and His Films (University of California Press) he further elaborates on Straub's describtion of Ford as "Brectian" in Footnote #703 (pg.566-567). 

Here it is: 

***

Any effort persisted in becomes corrupt. The sense of duty that sustains

Ford’s individuals (and also their sense of faith) commonly leads them astray

into aberrations or death. Duty-bound, they invade others’ privacy, and

arrogate knowledge of higher good, right and judgment: judges, ministers,

soldiers, outlaws, priests. Thus racism, war or any form of intolerance

becomes a function of society. In tracing Ford’s pictures (particularly Judge

Priest, How Green Was My Valley, This Is Korea!, The Man Who Shot Liberty

Valance) we have seen how people (and governments) act from feeling, not

from logic. People are made of dreams as much as reality. And we have

seen how Ford, in awakening around 1927 to cinema’s ability to be art

through total stylization, awakened simultaneously to his art’s high task: to

help us free ourselves from determining ideologies. Art, after all, has the

capability of making us understand things through emotion that we would be

absolutely incapable of understanding through the intellect. Within a determining 

milieu, particularly when that milieu is challenged, free will,

human nature, life’s worth, a benign divinity’s existence, all must necessarily

be posed in question. And so Ford pictures ideally construct in minute detail

a social set of apparent homogeneity (thus often military-like) in order to

analyze that society within its historic moment, and in order to demonstrate

how the garments of society, together with history itself, operate on the

individual. It is for these reasons that Jean-Marie Straub has called Ford the

most ”Brechtian” of all filmmakers.703

703. When Straub made this remark to the author in 1975 (after seeing Pilgrimage

and Donovan’s Reef) he was referring not so much to Ford’s acting style —in that

sense no films are truly Brechtian — as to Ford’s manner of stripping naked social

ideologies that are elsewhere unacknowledged. To Joseph McBride, Straub said Ford

is the most Brechtian of filmmakers, “because he shows things that make people

think...by [making] the audience collaborate on the film” (McBride and Wilmington,

John Ford, p. 108). McBride analyzes Fort Apache in this light, pointing out how

Captain York donning Colonel Thursday’s hat at the end is a Brechtian device [like

the cardinal donning the Pope’s robes in Brecht’s Galileo], and that we see clearly

that an insane system needs the dedication of noble men to perpetuate itself.) Less

simply, one might call Ford Brechtian because every element in his cinema is

engaged dialectically with every other element (whether one speaks of elements of

— or between — style, content, myth, ideology, or whatever), with the result that

Ford’s movies are self-reflexive and transparent in their workings.

This notion — essentially the thesis of this book — flies violently in the face of a

recent [1980] critical tendency to regard the “classical” cinema of Hollywood as a

monolithic system that sought to mask its “codes” (e.g., its montage) in order to

create an apparently unmediated representation of the real world; it sought to

entertain passively and left unacknowledged its own governing ideology. (Cf.,

Stagecoach: my argument with Browne (“Spectator-in-the-Text”); also Burch,

Distant Observer; Robert Phillip Volker, The Altering Eye [New York: Oxford, 1983];

Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres [New York: Random House, 1981]). “Modernist”

(i.e., some post-1960) cinema, on the other hand, subverts our absorption in

emotion, story, or character, and exposes its “codes” (e. g., by showing the camera,

discordant editing, having an actor speak directly to us), in order to force us to relate

intellectually rather than through emotional identification.

In these circles, Straub is admired as epitomizing “modernist” cinema, while Ford

is often derided (although not by most of the above-named critics) as a sentimental

reactionary. Thus Straub’s comparison of Brecht and Ford caused considerable

head-shaking. It is, of course, generally agreed that many movies cater exclusively

to an audience’s desire for passive spectacle (e.g.. Star Wars, some of Hitchcock);

and all research shows that audiences generally watch movies in order not to think.

Nonetheless, the fallacies of “modernist” critics are multitudinous (even including

their arrogation of the label “modern”). Firstly, their premise of a monolithic

classical system is a pure fantasy that reveals little sensibility for the complexity of

pre-1960 cinema and almost no acquaintance with the actual films themselves.

Secondly, they naively assume that audiences can be forced to think, whereas

“modernist” techniques soon lose their initial shock and audiences happily reimmerse

themselves into the fictional worlds of even the most determinedly

antipathetic movies. Thirdly, because their basis is exclusively materialist, they, like

Grierson and Aristarco before them, distrust emotions and aestheticism and would

destroy the art of cinema in favor of a cinema of political propaganda.

An examination of Brecht’s 1930 table, in which he gave cursory comparison

between the (bad) “dramatic” and the (good, Brechtian) “epic” theaters, will, in the

light of Straub and this book, show Ford very much on the “epic” side — the

“modernist”:

Dramatic Theater                                           Epic Theater

plot                                                                  narrative

implicates spectator into drama                         makes spectator an observer

wears down his capacity for                             action arouses his capacity for action

provides him with sensations                            forces him to make decisions

provides experience                                         provides a picture of the world

involves the spectator                                       confronts the spectator

suggestion                                                         argument

feelings are preserved                                        feelings are propelled into perceptions

man is assumed known                                      man is the object of inquiry

man unalterable                                                 man alterable and altering

suspense about the outcome                              suspense about the progress

each scene exists for another                             each scene for itself

linear development                                            in curves

evolutionary determinism                                   evolutionary leaps

the world, as it is                                               the world, as it becomes

what man ought to do                                       what man is forced to do

man as a fixed point                                          man as a process

his instincts                                                       his motivations

thought determines being                                   social being determines thought

(Brecht did not intend, obviously, that epic theater be absolutely one way and not at

all the other way; it is a question of tendency.)

Tag Gallagher

Two Rode Together (John Ford, 1961)

  "Puisque nous avons la chance d'avoir affaire à un des rares cinéates qui méritent vraiment le beau nom de classique, les meilleures raisons d'aimer Ford seront encore les simples; et le fait est qu'elles ne sont pas sensiblement différentes de celles qui faisaient Delluc s'embraser pour Rio Jim, il y a quelque quarante-cinq ans. Ce sont donc des raisons vieilles comme le cinéma lui-même. Mais, dans Les Deux Cavaliers, non seulement il n'y a nulle contrainte, mais Ford nous offre son film le plus débridé, le plus désinvolte, en un mot, le plus libre. Le classicisme y appraît comme ce qu'il est vraiment: la souveraine maîtrise d'un art, le libre épanouissement qui autorise l'abandon des contraintes jadis utiles, et dont il est la suprême conquête. N'ayant plus rien à apprendre, le créateur se livre tout à la joie de sa création, et donne, sur le tard, ses oeuvres les plus surprenantes: les dernière pièces de Corneille, le Second Faust. Ainsi Les Deux Cavaliers sont-ils à La Chevauchée fantastique ce que Suréna est à Polyeucte." - Philip d'Hugues (Cahiers du Cinéma, N.127)

Love 'Em or Hate 'Em: Controversial Directors in Nayman's Terms

The film class Love 'Em or Hate 'Em: Controversial Directors in Nayman's Terms is going on through the month of May to early June, each Mondays (except for the 20th) at 7PM at the Miles Nadal JCC. The class on Paul Verhoeven on May 27th will be the highlight since Adam Nayman has been working on a book on Showgirls (ECW Press).

Emerging Women Filmmakers: McKenzie, Goyette, Bohdanowicz, Litz, Supnet

Two of the following films When You Sleep and Le Futur Proche will be playing at 8:00PM on May 10th at the Innis Town Hall as part of the Breakthrough Film Festival, which is devoted exclusively to short films by emerging female artists. - D.D. 

*****

The Nova Scotian filmmaker Ashley McKenzie has made two short-films and is currently in post-production on a new project Stray. Her films are made with her artistic collaborator Nelson Macdonald through their production company Grassfire Films.

McKenzie's short-film's Rhonda's Party and When You Sleep at first appear to be very different but a closer look reveals some similarities. Even though their settings are a world apart - a nursing home and a low-income apartment building - what is explored are women in moments of crisis. Both of these films center on a death - Margaret's and a rats - and how they effect the people around it.

In Rhonda's Party the principal leads are Rhonda, a reclusive nursing-home resident who is grieving over the death of her friend, and Amy, the inexperienced young nurse who needs to comfort Rhonda while still doing her job. In When You Sleep the principal leads are the young adults Jesse, whose messy apartment has a rat infestation, and her boyfriend Lee, who is being a jerk.

To better understand McKenzie's films a good point of comparison would be with the films of Mike Leigh. The two share an observational filming style that poetically presents bleak social realities. The hospital scenes in Rhonda's Party are reminiscent of the ones in All or Nothing. The gritty living conditions in When You Sleep are reminiscent of Leigh's kitchen sink realism. While the lead characters in McKenzie's films seem cut from the same cloth as Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky or Mary in Another Year.

*****

In the Québécois film magazine 24 Images, Sophie Goyette’s newest short-film Le Futur Proche was included as one of the top ten Québécois films of 2012. Philippe Gajan writes about it, 

“Like in her previous short films (La Ronde, Manège), Goyette captures an intermediate state in the lives of her protagonists, an instant suspended between a before and an after, which are never really evoked. If this cinema appears at a first glance to be realistic or psychological, it is especially impressionistic.” 

The other films included in the 24 Images list are Rebelle, Tout ce que tu possède, Trente tableaux, Laurence Anyways, Pieces and Love All to Hell, La mise à l’aveugle, Le grand ailleurs et le petit ici, Camion and Sur le rivage du Monde. Helen Faradji would also include Sophie Dupuis' Faillir.

I would actually compare Le Futur Proche more to Denis Côté's Bestiaire, another great Québécois film from 2012, for how they blend documentary with fiction. In Côté's Bestiaire a narrative is created around a rural zoo through its filming style which blends a Wiseman institution overview with a Benning use of long-takes. In Goyette's fiction film Le Futur Proche the story of a pilot at an aerodrome is treated like a seventies NFB documentary of a professional at work.

The pilot of Le Futur Proche flies a small plane for industrial and personal customers. The pilot Robin describes the world as chaotic from the ground level but beautiful from his plane. What elevates Le Futur Proche to a higher level, in terms of quality, is its aerial subject and scope. The film is full of impressive aerial photography of the rural and urban, which is effective on an aesthetic and a character level.

Like in La Ronde, the protagonist of Le Futur Proche shows subtle signs of depression over the death of a parent. Robin's sorrowful underpinnings are illustrated through small visual cues. There is one screw on the plane that is loose and which needs tightening. There is a shot of a gyrating ceiling fan which is held for an extended duration. Robin is distant from his peers and he eats his lunches all by himself. His maintenance duties are performed with a silent authority that recalls some of Tony Scott's blue-collar heroes.

Robin perceives memories of his parents everywhere. Le Futur Proche ends with Robin taking an older couple over Montreal to celebrate their 40^th anniversary. There is special moment experienced as Robin flies his plane over some fireworks with this nice and familiar couple. This scene seems to represent the character's optimism for the future that are paradoxically saddened by memories of the past. Or as Robin puts it, “Je suis en route pour quelque que chose d’autres, mes je ne sais pas encore quoi.”

*****

Sofia Bohdanowicz’s three credited short-films are Falling with Force, Dundas Street, and the newest Modlitwa. Her most famous short-film is Dundas Street which is inspired by Bohdanowicz's grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa’s (1895-1965) poems. It is less a narrative than they a visual poem. There is also a religious quality to it that recalls the recent films of Terrence Malick.

Dundas Street, which is co-directed by Joanna Durkalec, is narrated by an elderly Polish woman who is unable to adapt to her new urban landscape. It follows her efforts to find meaning in a inhospitable and unfriendly city. She speaks fondly of the fruit merchant Cornelius. In one stunning shot as he is cashing out, the lighting brightens, and he sings a sorrowful song.

Modlitwa stars Maria Bohdanowicz (1930-2012), who the film is also dedicated too. Modlitwa builds upon the former through Bohdanowiczowa's poetry. Its Catholic wisdom is humbling: “Be Kind to those who suffer, oh good Lord. To those who labor through life toward death.” Maria's routine of taking care of her urban residence is contrasted with that of a dream of a nature and peace. Its imagery is as equally as touching and beautiful as that of Dundas Street.

*****

The actress-turned-director Nadia Litz has an impressive resume. She has worked with Reginald Harkema (Monkey Warfare), Daniel Cockburn (You Are Here) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Fear X). Her first feature Hotel Congress, which she co-directed with Michel Kandinsky, was made as part of Ingrid Verninger's 1K Wave. Its setting offers one of its first surprises as it takes place at the real Hotel Congress in Tucson, Arizona. An American setting is surprising for any Canadian film but especially one with such a small budget.

Hotel Congress is described as "a romantic film for the unromantic," and as a study of women and men relations it belongs up there with the films Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, and Eric Rohmer. The film beings with an intertitle that describes the story in short-form:

“A man and a woman meet at a hotel in Tucson. One of them believed in true love and found none. One of them didn’t believe true love was possible and found it. Both of them were stuck in the desert.”

The woman Sofia (Nadia Litz) and the man Francis (Philip Ricio) both have romantic partners but decide to test their love by escaping with one another to have an affair. What makes the plot interesting is how it isn't cynical and the two of them don't cheat. Instead they have many great conversations which has an emotional cathartic effect on them. The conversations include just about everything but most prominently romance, philosophy, and culture. The witty conversations and the great performances give life to a sophisticated script. In some ways Hotel Congress plays out like the reverse-shot and the missing dialogue track from Malick's To The Wonder.

*****

Leslie Supnet makes these great short animated videos and super 8 films. The animated graphics are cute and simple. They're of these women characters that are working through their personal demons and there is a fantastic quality to them that is reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki. They are made in collaboration with Clint Enns who does the sound design and edits them.

Supnet has made over a dozen short videos, in varying lengths, but the ones that are the most visually stunning are: You Are Here, which was made as part of a Helen Hill tribute, and is full of cute imagery of death; Gains + Losses, which is full of situational vignettes of day-to-day anxieties; and Fair Trade of a girl sitting on a bench and where she scratches open her stomach and then all of her bad thoughts come out.

Supnet's newest projects are the collaborations with Glen Johnson, The Idea and A Time is a Terrible Thing to Waste.