This is a guest contribution from Ron, which he gave me in hopes to change my mind on British cinema. Though, I have to say, Ron’s list is quite legitimate, which includes a lot of titles and names that are already on my list of films and directors that deserve further investigation. – D. D.
Ron’s Favorite British Films
- The League of Gentlemen (Basil Dearden, 1960)
- Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961)
- The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
- The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970)
- Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971)
- The Last Holiday (Mark Callum, 2009)
- Tunes of Glory (Ronald Neame, 1960)
- Tiger Bay (J. Lee Thompson, 1959)
- Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984)
- About a Boy (Chris & Paul Weitz, 2002)
- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960)
- A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961)
- This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963)
- Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966)
- Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971)
- Maurice (James Ivory, 1987)
- Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, 2008)
- The Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972)
- The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
- The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951)
- The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)
- Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969)
- The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971)
- The Music Lovers (Ken Russell, 1970)
- Savage Messiah (Ken Russell, 1972)
- If… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)
- O Lucky Man (Lindsay Anderson, 1973)
- Far From the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967)
- The Chalk Garden (Ronald Neame, 1964)
- The Mark (Guy Green, 1961)
- Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)
- The Wrong Box (Bryan Forbes, 1966)
- Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
- Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
- The Romantic Englishwoman (Joseph Losey, 1975)
- Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967)
- Morgan (Karel Reisz, 1966)
- The Knack… and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965)
- The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
- Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)
- The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Ken Hughes, 1960)
- Billy Budd (Peter Ustinov, 1962)
- The Collector (William Wyler, 1965)
- The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath, 1969)
- I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname (Michael Winner, 1967)
- Shirley Valentine (Lewis Gilbert, 1989)
- Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963)
- The Leather Boys (Sidney J. Furie, 1964)
- Sons and Lovers (Jack Cardiff, 1960)
- The Virgin and the Gypsy (Christopher Miles, 1970)
- A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker, 1958)
- Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947)
- Educating Rita (Lewis Gilbert, 1983)
- Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
- My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985)
- All Ken Loach films starting with Poor Cow (1967) and Kes(1969)
- All Mike Leigh
- The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich, 1968)
- Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Douglas Hickox, 1970)
- Prick Up Your Ears (Stephen Frears, 1987)
- Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)
- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)
- Quartet (James Ivory, 1981)
- A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985)
- The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993)
- A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984)
- The Angry Silence (Guy Green, 1960)
- The Battle of the Sexes (Charles Crichton, 1959)
- Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984)
- The Draughtman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982)
- Mountains of the Moon (Bob Rafelson, 1990)
- Dance with a Stranger (Mike Newell, 1985)
- Priest (Antonia Bird, 1994)
- Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945)
- Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986)
- Truly Madly Deeply (Anthony Minghella, 1990)
- Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959)
- The Rocking Horse Winner (Anthony Pelissier, 1949)
- The Winslow Boy (David Mamet, 1999)
- The Browning Version (Mike Figgis, 1994)
- The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
- Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)
- Georgy Girl (Silvio Narizzano, 1966)
- Nothing But the Best (Clive Donner, 1964)
- The Hill (Sidney Lumet, 1965)
- Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959)
- Hobson’s Choice (David Lean, 1954)
- The Yellow Canary (Buzz Kulik, 1963)
- Up the Junction (Peter Collinson, 1968)
- The Heart of the Matter (George More O’Ferrall, 1953)
- Whistle Down the Wind (Bryan Forbes, 1961)
- So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough & Terence Fisher, 1950)
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Francis Ford Coppola (and Stéphane Delorme at Cahiers du Cinéma)
Title: Francis Ford Coppola
Series: Masters of cinema
Author: Stéphane Delorme
Publisher: Cahiers du cinéma Sarl (2010)
Pages: 103
Price: $11.95
“Coppola had achieve what he had been trying to do from the beginning, to be a director free of attachments, directing and producing personal stories of which he was the sole creator. It was quite a journey to get there.” – Stéphane Delorme.
Francis Ford Coppola is an omnipresent figure in film history with masterpieces that include The Godfather I & II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, One for the Heart, Rumble Fish and Tetro. The films in his oeuvre are tightly knit worlds with paralleling characters and reoccurring images. The main subject is time which is pursued through stories of individuals and families in a changing world. This subject is explored in how time is used, gained, created, lost, held onto, the nostalgia for it and how it changes people and places. The director adapts his style to the subject of each new film, though they generally share a theatricality. And, there is something about the above Lucas quote that seems particular apt to describe Coppola’s attitude to filmmaking; whether it is the singular drive to take risks, the ambitiousness of the undertaking, or the glorious images that it conjures. Coppola is a natural storyteller whose varying projects, however impersonal, cannot help but reflect some aspect of its creator.
The story starts off when he was born on April 7th, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. His Italian parents were Italia and Carmine Coppola, a flautist and conductor, he had an older brother August and a younger sister Talia. He would graduate in theatre studies from Hofstra University, New York in 1960 before going to UCLA to join its emerging film school. This background in theater will later come to shape his aesthetics. In these years he made a short-film Aymonn the Terrible and two ‘nudies’: Tonight for Sure and The Bellboy and the Playgirls. He also wrote a few good screenplays.
It continues with Roger Corman at American International Pictures where he made Dementia 13 and also worked on The Terror (both 1963). His work on The Terror, especially the women apparition seems like an inspiration for the elusiveness of the wife at the French plantation in Apocalypse Now Redux. Coppola also did some editing at AIP. You’re a Big Boy is his ‘official’ directorial debut: a young man in search of a hot blonde. New York nightlife at its most complicated. Then there is the Fred Astaire and Petula Cark musical Finian’s Rainbow: a father and daughter go from Ireland to Kentucky to find the girl an ideal husband, with a dollop of African American protest. If One From the Heart will emphasize Coppola’s interest in the musical, which is further confirmed in Tetro, with its references to The Tales of Hoffmann, then Finian’s Rainbow is the beginning of Coppola’s relationship with that old classical Hollywood genre. With the leprechaun’s lustrous green garments and the films anything-goes magical lyricism, the title could have easily been called The Tales of Finian.
His next film The Rain People is one of his little-known masterpieces. A pregnant woman (Shirley Knight) drives off and leaves her husband. She picks up a hitchhiker (James Caan), a former college football player, hoping for a one-night stand before she figures out that he’s brain damaged and she debates if she should take care of him or leave him. The feelings that come from watching the film are overwhelming, everyone is treated with such simpathy. The reoccurring motif of water and rain, how the characters always seem isolated in the frame, the subconscious flash-backs and a exotic, yet familiar, setting all contribute to an atmosphere of regret, melancholy, yearning and unfulfilled desire. It’s also the first mark by Coppola to distance himself from the studios.
The Godfather trilogy is the black hole of Coppola’s oeuvre, everything revolves around it. From the opening marriage celebration and the Don (Marlon Brando) attending appointments in his office engulfed in Gordon Willis’ dark shadows to an aged Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) sitting alone on his property with all of his humanity drained from him, the trilogy offers a generational epic family saga in the tradition of The Leopard, East of Eden, and Gone with the Wind. It explores the inner-dynamics of the family through an America that is geographically expanding from that of the communal to the international. The Godfather was edited together piecemeal, with certain scenes added after principal shooting, which leads Delorme to call it, “A self-styled masterpiece of impassivity, The Godfather is like a necklace made up of stones of different sizes and colors, and is reminiscent of the cobbled-together methods of the Corman school.” Robert A. Harris recently digitally restored the three films for DVD.
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in The Conversation seems like commentary on Michael from The Godfather, as did the anxieties and trajectory of The Rain People. Caul is a surveillance expert; isolated from his peers he becomes even more reclusive as the film progresses, though reserved to brief moments of satisfaction playing the tenor saxophone. Though a complete film, the screenplay was not entirely filmed and it is Walter Murch that edited together the final product as Coppola was elsewhere filming.
Coppola would make two Vietnam War films: Apocalypse Now and The Gardens of Stone. Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Coppola and John Millius, originally offered to Dušan Makavejev to direct, set in the late 1960s a captain (Martin Sheen) is sent on an assignment up a river in Cambodia (filmed in the Philippines) to kill a rogue dissident general (Marlon Brando). One of its co-producers Mike Medavoy will be getting the Raimondo Rezzonico Prize at the Locarno Film Festival 2011. Where Apocalypse Now turns the war into a spectacular disaster, The Gardens of Stone turns it into a complex human drama. Dedicated to Coppola’s eldest son Gian-Carlo who had then recently died. An American sergeant (James Cann) works at the Arlington National Cemetery and tries to protect this young man from going off to war. Angelica Huston is moving as the romantic interest.
The electronic-neon musical One From the Heart is unforgettable, Coppola at his best. The story of a woman who leaves her boyfriend for a night gets a Busby Berkeley treatment in a stylized replica of Las Vegas with a whispering soundtrack by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle. Nastassja Kinski is just magical. And everything contributes to a haunting beauty. Delorme writes, “It’s a reversal that typifies the spirit of the 1980s, years of a retreat from the epic to the personal, but also, in parallel with that, a period of expansion of the image towards a mythology of the image (…) At the very moment when he was extolling the virtues of electronic transformation, what Coppola really wanted was to make theatre.” One From the Heart would be major inspiration for Claire Denis’ Friday Night.
Then there are the two greaser films: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. “Stay Gold” says Ponyboy, which seems an apt tagline to describe the sunset engulfed The Outsiders based on S.E. Hinton book for high-schoolers. On Rumble Fish, from a Serge Daney extract (which is included in the book): “This mistake would be to think that Coppola is simply content to add his hypertrophied style to themes that are in and pretty much worn out. That is not entirely true (…) It is clear that Rumble Fish is the story of lost illusions (…) At bottom, the world barely exists. Coppola only works its material to regain a little of his soul.”
The Cotton Club is a hired-gun job, with some nice moments, such as the romance and comedy between the black Cotton Club dancers, but otherwise, like The Outsiders, is a disinterested illustration of a generic screenplay. Coppola made some short-films and commissions: there is Rip Van Winkle, Captain Eo and Life without Zoe (which he made with his talented daughter Sofia). There was a Megalopolis project, which was abandoned.
On Peggy Sue Got Married, a story of a middle-age woman who becomes a teen again just-in-time for the prom. She reconsiders her relationship with her goofy husband (Nicolas Cage). In a recent interview in Cahiers (N.665), Dean Tavoularis:
“I think Tucker and Peggy Sue Gets Married and Rusty James are under-valued. They are films that are strange (…) Peggy Sue was only a contract film for Coppola for him to repay his depts (...) On reading the script he told me: “what can we do to make it more interesting?” We decided on painting everything, the streets, the grass. (…) This gives it its aura, even if we do not notice it consciously.”Bram Stoker’s Dracula and John Grisham’s The Rainmaker are two more successful attempts at literary adaptation. The Dracula film continues Coppola’s interest in the horror genre which started with Dementia 13, also in Rumble Fish the guys watch a Bela Lugosi film, where the frights come from old-fashion special effects, a heightened sense of atmosphere and an eerie score. Like how The Gardens of Stone aesthetic was inspired by Japanese Kabuki Theater, Jack seems partly inspired by the philosophy and stories of Aristotle and Socrates. Delorme writes about the film, “Jack fufills Coppola’s dearest wish: to travel across time without losing one’s integrity.”
Then there is the Tucker Automobile creator biopic, which has similarities with Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons as it is nostalgic for a vanished time and there is an inventor who gets spurned. And Youth Without Youth with its theme of the unraveling of a person identity is his Mr. Arkadin. Peter Cowie writes: “The two directors are tightly linked, however by their fascination with the exotic and the diabolical, the notion of Man as a fallen angel.” Delorme at Cahiers (N.651) on Coppola’s newest film, “Tetro gives the sentiment of a little film indie transforming itself, without us knowing about it, into an ‘epic’.” Coppola with Tetro, starts again from scratch. (I wrote about the film here).
His wife Eleanor Coppola has a couple of books: Notes on a Life and Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now; and she also worked with Fax Bahr and the late George Hickenlooper on a documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which Jonathan Rosenbaum argues quite persuasively in his book Movies as Politics has little to do with the actual Vietnam (“But the biggest absence in Hearts of Darkness is not Vietnam itself, but the shadow of any awareness that it’s missing”). While for more biographical information on Coppola, a good resource is Peter Cowie’s book Coppola (the latest entry is The Godfather III). There is also a documentary Inside the Coppola Personality by Monte Hellman.
The career and films of Coppola and the earlier maverick filmmaker Orson Welles share many similarities which are worth exploring as a way to measure their accomplishments and to examine their innovations in relation to film history. Delorme would contrast The Godfather and Citizen Kane in his book’s introduction while Peter Cowie explicitly argues the link between them in his book Coppola and Rosenbaum compares Apocalypse Now to Othello and The Trial. Coppola and Welles most renowned films opened up new eras in American Cinema. André Bazin wrote, “The two most important events in film history since 1940 are the films Citizen Kane and Paisan.” According to Bazin, from Timothy Barnards’s recent translation of What is Cinema? (Caboose books 2009), the innovative use in Citizen Kane of Gregg Toland’s cinematography through depth-of-field and long single-takes changed the traditional decoupage into mise-en-scéne. As well it brought the director to the fore-front of public consciousness. Welles not only contributed to the screenplay and directed the film; he was its star.
Welles technological revolution involved bridging the effects of the silent-era into the sound age and this evolution will be furthered by Coppola through the possibilities of the Dolby Laboratories. While in the 1970s Coppola and his contemporaries (Lucas, Friedkin and Spielberg) changed the way movies were made as the old studio system was crumbling as this generation of young filmmakers found success in mediating personal impulses through commercial projects. This eventually led to Coppola getting the reputation of a megalomaniac who makes these commercial flops, with a public response of anticipation and scorn of his self-indulgence. This reception was also shared by Welles, who later on in his career found it difficult to get financing. And for Coppola and Welles, after baroque masterpieces so early in their careers, where do they one go from there? Coppola not only grew with the evolution of cinema from celluloid to digital, he predicted it, shaping it as it were evolving to standing at its forefront today. Though he took on director-for-hire projects and pursued business endeavors, his desire to refuel his utopian cinema production company Zoetrope got him to work better with others and make more financially sound choices.
On a mere surface level, one can spot Copolla’s dept to Welles like Don Corleone's make-up which resembles the older Charles Foster Kane, the short-focus black-and-white smoky cinematography of Rumble Fish seems in dept to Welles RKO productions and the Mercury Theater group performed Heart of Darkness on the radio which is one of the sources for the screenplay of Apocalypse Now. And also there are the earlier comparisons between the two brought up in this review. Just as Coppola is in dept to Welles, according to Bazin, Welles was only one director in a tradition of realist-humanism already set up by Von Stroheim and Renoir.
Welles background in theater is more readily known, especially since Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles with the titular lead putting on Julius Ceasar in 1937 at the newly opened Mercury Theatre, but Coppola also studied drama before film-school. And this background with the stage is a reoccurring base for his films whether in inspiration, technique, setting or through the casting of his regular repertoire of actors. This background in theater is shared with other directors like James Bridges, Ingmar Bergman, and John Cassavetes. Bazin also championed Olivier and discussed at length cinemas relationship with theater, for Bazin, ‘filmed theater’ was as an admission of the mediums theatrical origins: faithfulness to its aesthetic specificity as an increase in its theatricality.
The Frodon quote is from his editorial Tournant in Cahiers July-August 2009 (N. 647), after writing 66 editorials, the magazine was purchased by Phaidon Press and Stéphane Delorme was given the role of chief editor starting in the next issue (N. 648). Since then Delorme supervised 20 issues and wrote all of their editorials (except for one that he reserved for an Akira Kurosawa re-print, which was related to the recent earthquake in Japan). When Delorme first got to the helm of the magazine, in the editorial (N.648), he asked himself, “How do you put together a film magazine today?” and answers the question, “le cinema fait parler” [“movies make you speak”]. On the role of Cahiers, Delorme emphasizes that it will “provide different perspectives on film.” The provision of a different perspective on film is important to re-iterate as, I think, Cahiers provides alternative readings of commercial American films, usually in response to simplified reviews the films received in North America. This revisionism hawks back to the Hitchcocko-Hawksiens.
Other then editing Cahiers, since 2004 Delorme has been on the selection committee of the Quainzaine des Realisateurs (Director’s Fortnight), mostly under the Artistic Director Olivier Père (2004-2009) and now Frédéric Boyer. An earlier president of the Cannes sidebar, Pascal Thomas describes the festival as “ The Director’s Fortnight confirms its role year after year as a manifesto of youth, vitality, and insubordination in filmmaking.” And their primary concerns that guide their selection, according to Olivier Père are: discovery, surprise, admiration, audacity and emotion.
Delorme is actually a fun and smart writer. His taste is both auteurist and mainstream. He usually discusses French cinema more in depth, highlights the crème de la crème of French cinema, as well he provides a revisionist take on American directors. He gave both of de Oliveira newest films (Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired girl and The Strange Case of Angelica) the ranking of a chef-d’oeuvre, the biggest compliment a film can receive (and should not be used lightly). Some filmmakers that are hated (“inutile de se déranger”) include Tsai Ming-Liang, Jacques Doillon, Hong Sang-soo, Amos Gitai, François Ozon and Benoît Jacquot. Delorme’s style of writing is inspirational and some things that he does: he builds upon the existing literature whether it is Cahiers history, major works (i.e. 50 Ans de Cinéma Américain) and the writer Serge Daney. Subjects that interest him are brought up in other reviews as a way to reiterate his taste as well he cross-references. He has an interest in politics and classic literature. He knows that italics are a great way to put an emphasis and brackets are use to input self-questions. As well he shares with his readers some of his concerns and anxieties that go with putting together a new Cahiers every month, it is an immense responsibility and should not be taken lightly.
These great skills would be enough, but to make matters better, they are genuinely shared amongst the magazines regular writers. The ten writers that make up le conseil des dix are Sophie Avon, Laurent Delmas, Jacques Morice, Jean-Baptiste Morain, Isabelle Regnie, Stéphane Delorme, Jean-Philippe Tessé, Joachim Lepastier, Vincent Malausa, and Nicolas Azalbert. The le conseil des dix (the equivalent of Film Comment’s critics choice) at the back of the magazine is an easily navigable way to see the magazines taste. Other contributors include Clélia Cohen, Nicole Brenez, Ariel Schweitzer, Charlotte Garson, Nicholas Elliot, Bill Krohn and Charles Tesson. The individual writers all seem to have their specialty and Delorme, as a good chief-editor, knows how to best utilize them. Charles Tesson, who used to be an editor, frequently contributes, either Cinema Retrouvé or Portfolio, which are reviews of special presentations at either the Centre Pombidou or the Cinémathèque Française, as well the magazine covers other art gallery/cinema hybrids wherever and whenever they pop-up. Nicolas Azalbert is great at shooting down films, the ones that are too simple or too arty, as well as championing punk auteurs (i.e. MacKay, Rodriguez). Joachim Lepastier is great at discussing film technique. Essays and think pieces are elaborations on the magazines aesthetic and moral position, such as guest contributions from philosophers like Žižek and Badiou. The Nouvelle Vague bunch, the post-New Wave Cahiers-critics-turned-filmmakers (From Téchiné and Assayas to Jousse and Saada), the past Cahiers editor Serge Toubiana that is now the director general of the Cinémathèque Française and Emmanuel Burdeau at Capprici France all contribute to the magazines charm of inherent cinephilia, where the movies, and their discussion, is part of a pleasurable life burden. The magazines back-issues are an unquestionably important resource for the scholarship of cinema, for example one of Durgnat’s sections in his in-depth article on Bresson in James Quandt’s tome is Bresson at Cahiers.
The Le Journal are sort of random going-about related to the cinema. In the magazine there are short reviews of new books and DVDs. The Cine-Clubs des Cahiers, where the magazine puts on a screening, sound like a lot of fun and I find Julia Hasting covers to be nice. Their advertisement for hair-products are sometimes a little corny, but not a big deal (though the Vincent Cassel one was cool). Cahiers use of pictures, both the selection and placement, should be an example to other film-magazines.
Cahiers is the contemporary cinema magazine.
Cahiers (N.648) there is a special on de Oliveira and Hellman (Brad Stevens has a contribution); Cahiers (N.649) Delorme mobilizes his troop and Apatow and Fellini don’t make the cut; Cahiers (N.650) Alain Resnais; Cahiers (N.651) Tetro is championed and Delorme brings the year to an end (Les Herbes Folles, Vincere, and Inglorious Basterds are the trop three films); Cahiers (N.652) a decade is finished (Mulholland Drive is number one); Cahiers (N.653) in memoriam to Eric Rohmer (Cahiers ed. 1957-63), the magazines old American correspondent Kent Jones has a contribution; Cahiers (N.654) Bad Lieutenant: Herzog gets the cover. Madness. And, Delorme meditates on the future of 3D technology and how it will affect cinema, he quotes Chris Marker: “but we finally have had, the sentiment of captured space, and we know that this could be used for a cinematographic worth.” Cahiers (N.655) Alice in Wonderland, with a piece by Antoine de Baecque, who also just wrote a book on Tim Burton, just in time for the Burbank Goth Cannes Jury presidency. Delorme also champions the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie and Xavier Dolan, young and personal filmmakers: “It is vital that these really young filmmakers pick up the camera without waiting for financing or permission to film.” Cahiers (N.656) Delorme’s first Cannes issue, “Every year, there are the same laments, “Cannes does not look to good this year.” While they play the best movies that will come out in the following year.” As well, Delorme likes Certified Copy and the mainstream director Doug Liman; Cahiers (N.657) Apichatpong (“un des plus grands cineaste aujourd’hui”); Cahiers (N.658) the feature is American television series (Mad Men) and Delorme writes about the Louxor cinema in Egypt; Cahiers (N.659) Nouvelles utopias du cinema Francais and Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is written about at length, though is generally seen as a disappointment (nobody will like Devil); Cahiers (N.660) like Rohmer seven magazines earlier, a Nicolas Guérin portrait of the New Wave Cahiers-critic-turned-filmmaker Claude Chabrol sits on the cover; Québec cinema is looked at (see: Denis Côté); Cahiers (N.661) French cinema, alt; Les Beaux Gosses and Belle Épine are greeted with welcome. Cahiers (N.662), for Delorme's second year end round-up he seems to be more strongly embracing the magazines direction, embracing its variability; Cahiers (N.663) Aronofsky’s casting in Black Swan, Le Guay, Hongqi and Brooks; Krohn elaborates on Hitchcock’s unrealized project Frenzy (before he made the other one); the most anticipated films of 2011 are looked at; while Charles Tesson has a dossier on Mexican cinema (See: Nicolás Pereda); Cahiers (N.665) Delorme includes Cahiers on a national debate through discussings forms of represention and identity in French cinema; Cahiers (N.666) the devil issue with Hark, Craven and Kubrick; Cahiers (N.667) there are some notes about Cannes; and positive reviews of Hall Pass and Sucker Punch as well a focus on Libyan cinema. Cahiers (N.668), the feature is Terrence Mallick’s Tree of Life. - David Davidson
*All of the English translations from French were done by myself.
Monday, June 13, 2011
João Pedro Rodrigues in Toronto
The Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues is getting a New Auteurs* treatment June 23rd to the 28th at the TIFF Cinematheque and his newest feature To Die Like a Man, which made Cahiers Top Ten of 2010, will be getting a three night run. Here is Andréa Picard, the Free Screen programmer, from her essay on the mini-retrospecitve:"Wry and perfectly poised between the silly and the serious (and sometimes shocking), Rodrigues’ “unholy three” (to quote the title of his Carte Blanche selection for this programme) reveals the filmmaker’s willingness to veer into dangerous territory by challenging not only moral and ethical boundaries, but those of taste. The films’ ritualistic push and pull between seduction and repulsion speaks to the unspeakable in matters of desire, but also to those of artistic creation, in which wild contradictions of style can be a risky affair. Rodrigues’ paradoxical vision, in which cruelty is ultimately confronted by hope, is made manifest by his feverish, uninhibited imagination. Even the depths of abjection offer a sideways slit for transcendence, best expressed by the dying Tonia’s incurable romanticism and her/his brave, dignified acceptance. In Rodrigues’ extreme studies of lust, longing and loneliness, death looms, but so does the everlasting. As a rival softly but matter-of-factly says to Tonia as she lies weakened on her deathbed: “We’re all here in passing. This is not the end.”*Pedro Rodrigues and his longtime collaborator João Rui Guerra da Mata will be in attendance to discuss their work.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Murch and Ondaatje on Art and Editing
Title: The Conservations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing FilmAuthor: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Knopf (1999)
Pages: 339
Price: $29.95
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.”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!
“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.”
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.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
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/.
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/.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Hot Docs 2011
-- James Marsh, whose Man on Wire was superb, has a new doc Project Nim; the subject is Nim Chimpski, “a chimpanzee whose epic life story unfolds against startling human error, eccentricity and hubris.” Thursday, May 5th 9:45PM and Friday May 6th 11:00AM.
-- Gianfranco Rosi’s El Sicario, Room 164, in it a sicario “confesses the secrets of his lethal 20-year career.” Monday, May 2nd 6:15PM and Wednesday, May 4th 11:00AM.
-- Allan Sekula and Noël Burch in The Forgotten Space explore "the catastrophic effects globalization has wrought on the ship, truck and train industries." Friday, May 6th 9:30PM and Saturday, May 7th 8:15PM.
-- Charles Officer’s follow up to the full-length feature Nurse.Fighter.Boy (which I wrote about here) is Mighty Jerome; “Race, national pride and tragic misfortune shape the story of 1960s track star Harry Jerome.” The former hockey-player turned director, since Nurse.Fighter.Boy, made a TV-series on musicians, City Sonic. Friday, April 29th 9:30PM, Saturday, April 30th 11:00AM, and Sunday, May 8th 4:30PM
-- Gary Burns and Jim Brown in their new documentary The Future is Now! “tackle the future in this documentary-drama hybrid.” Thursday, May 5th 9:00PM and Saturday, May 7th 1:00PM.
There are also two programs worth checking out:
-- Outstanding Achievement, Retrospective Honouring Terence Macartney-Filgate, which includes A Candid Eye (04/05 6:45PM), Timothy Findley: Anatomy of a Writer (05/05 6:45PM) and Pinter People (29/04 7:00PM).
-- Focus on Alan Zweig, which includes early short films (30/04 7:15PM), Vinyl (05/05, 9:30PM), Vinyl: The Alternate Take (06/05 9:30PM), A Hard Name (29/04 11:15AM), I, Curmudgeon (03/05 6:45PM), and Lovable (01/05 7:00PM).
For more information on Hot Docs 2011, here is the url: http://www.hotdocs.ca/.
***** On a side note, The National Film Board of Canada has been innovative recently through engaging with what the documentary can be in the age of new digital media. The result is their new Interactive menu. Two of their virtual documentaries include:
-- Highrise, a multi-year, many-media collaborative documentary, which “explores vertical living in the global suburbs.” Directed by Katerina Cizek and produced by Gerry Flahive.
-- Welcome to Pine Point, by The Goggles, which consists of Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, is a documentary about the deserted and forgotten townsite of Pine Point, Northwest Territories and their relationship towards it. The inspiration for the project emerged from the website Pine Point revisited.
-- Gianfranco Rosi’s El Sicario, Room 164, in it a sicario “confesses the secrets of his lethal 20-year career.” Monday, May 2nd 6:15PM and Wednesday, May 4th 11:00AM.
-- Allan Sekula and Noël Burch in The Forgotten Space explore "the catastrophic effects globalization has wrought on the ship, truck and train industries." Friday, May 6th 9:30PM and Saturday, May 7th 8:15PM.
-- Charles Officer’s follow up to the full-length feature Nurse.Fighter.Boy (which I wrote about here) is Mighty Jerome; “Race, national pride and tragic misfortune shape the story of 1960s track star Harry Jerome.” The former hockey-player turned director, since Nurse.Fighter.Boy, made a TV-series on musicians, City Sonic. Friday, April 29th 9:30PM, Saturday, April 30th 11:00AM, and Sunday, May 8th 4:30PM
-- Gary Burns and Jim Brown in their new documentary The Future is Now! “tackle the future in this documentary-drama hybrid.” Thursday, May 5th 9:00PM and Saturday, May 7th 1:00PM.
There are also two programs worth checking out:
-- Outstanding Achievement, Retrospective Honouring Terence Macartney-Filgate, which includes A Candid Eye (04/05 6:45PM), Timothy Findley: Anatomy of a Writer (05/05 6:45PM) and Pinter People (29/04 7:00PM).
-- Focus on Alan Zweig, which includes early short films (30/04 7:15PM), Vinyl (05/05, 9:30PM), Vinyl: The Alternate Take (06/05 9:30PM), A Hard Name (29/04 11:15AM), I, Curmudgeon (03/05 6:45PM), and Lovable (01/05 7:00PM).
For more information on Hot Docs 2011, here is the url: http://www.hotdocs.ca/.
-- Highrise, a multi-year, many-media collaborative documentary, which “explores vertical living in the global suburbs.” Directed by Katerina Cizek and produced by Gerry Flahive.
-- Welcome to Pine Point, by The Goggles, which consists of Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, is a documentary about the deserted and forgotten townsite of Pine Point, Northwest Territories and their relationship towards it. The inspiration for the project emerged from the website Pine Point revisited.
Friday, April 1, 2011
On Mitchell Haven (Burdeau’s Hellman book interview)
This is the second of two posts on Monte Hellman. The other is a review of the Brad Stevens book. – D. D.
Title: Monte Hellman: Sympathy for the Devil
Author: Emmanuel Burdeau
Publisher: Capricci (2010)
Pages: 192
Price: 13.5 €
***** “He crept along till he finally found another car to settle in behind. After a while in his rearview mirror he saw somebody else fall in behind him. He was in a convoy of unknown size, each car keeping the one ahead in taillight range, like a caravan in a desert of perception, gathered awhile for safety in getting across a patch of blindness. It was one of the few things he’d ever seen anybody in this town, except hippies, do for free.” – Thomas Pynchon, Inherent vice
The thing about Monte Hellman is that he is a filmmaker one feels passionate about. One thing that I disliked about my own Stevens-Hellman post is that in my attempt to do justice to the book, I reduced my own writing to a mere presentation of quotes and facts. Hellman is a filmmaker one should uninhibitedly splurge in enthusiasm, which makes the last page of Burdeau’s introduction, with its run-on sentences and emphasis on colorful imagery, so captivating. There is something about breaking the rules and the validation of it within Hellman’s oeuvre that is so appealing. And, not only is it about breaking the rules, it’s about further pushing the boundaries, which might as well be done in slow-motion (it prolongs the moment), and then burn the frame while you’re at it!
The former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Emmanuel Burdeau’s French-language book Monte Hellman: Sympathy for the Devil, and his whole interview series with Capricci, dispels the conventional way of putting together a book, especially through its use of format - though it is a regular book - the deep-purple cover, the odd index and back-cover (which is similar to Truffaut’s book on Hitch), its use of little quotes on the margins, black-pages between chapters, behind-the-scenes pictures, E.E. Cummings’ poem Tulips & Chimneys (1923), part of the Myth of Sisyphus and extracts from Rudy Wurlitzer’s Nog (and Wurlitzer’s thoughts about working with Hellman), Jack Nicholson’s screenplay for Flight to Fury, and parts of the unrealized script In a Dream of Passion; all contribute to a cinephilic gem. And, there is even a picture of Hellman’s fun-looking dog Moxie, who apparently has a cameo in Road to Nowhere, and Hellman’s margarita recipe: 90ml of Tequila 1800 Silver, 30ml of Cointreau, 30ml of Xylitol syrup, and 30ml of lemon & lime juice. If there was ever a pertinent book, this is the one.
“Like all great movies – ha, ha, ha! – It’s all accidental!”
“Everything is casting.”
Two things that are particularly emphasized for Hellman are accidents and casting. Not like accident as in fluke but as in an emphasis on giving the material the room for improvisation and of chance to go for ones own gut instinct. Letting the subject find itself as the films develops instead of imposing a strict guide. And on the use of casting, can you imagine anyone other than the terrific actors playing out those memorable performances?
It's worth contrasting Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks with the Hellman Westerns. Penn is a director that has consistently been integrating a European aesthetic - like the influence of the French New Wave on Bonnie and Clyde - and an existential mood within particularly American folk tales. The Missouri Breaks feels like a golden age Hollywood Western as if Bergman and Tarkovsky dreamt it. But where The Missouri Breaks recedes is that, where in the Hellman Westerns, like Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting, the story dealt more with the mythic American Old West while The Missouri Breaks seems more interested in using the Western as a guise to deal with contemporary experiences, like ‘70s gender politics and generational differences. Where in the Hellman films, Nicholson’s toned down performance puts it into a realm of its own, the Penn film’s screenplay and dialogue seems to have been written to accentuate Jack ‘wild-man’ Nicholson and Marlon ‘Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’ Brando. While the dialogue in the Hellman films is sparse and simple, the Penn film is full of over-exposition. Finally, most of the settings for The Missouri Breaks and the casting, including Harry Dean Stanton, seem to be in immediate dept to Hellman.
“I get mad at a lot of things. I am mad at Universal for massacring Two-Lane Blacktop, for example. The only way to get rid of this anger is too laugh it off.”
The films that get the most space within the book are Road to Nowhere and Two-Lane Blacktop, they take up more than half of the book. There is a Q & A with Hellman and Steven Gaydos at Cal Arts in April 2010 after a Road to Nowhere screening, it is quite insightful. Of particular interest is when Hellman discusses the economy of the Canon 5D Mark II Camera (2,500$), whose high resolution made it perfect to film Road to Nowhere. And to hear that the story of Laurie Bird is a partial inspiration for Road to Nowhere.
Hellman elaborates on the title of the American version of Two-Lane Blacktop, “Two-Lane is the highway with two lanes. A small little rural highway, lets say. Blacktop, is asphalt.” There is a something about the simplicity of the answer, the emptiness of its connotations, and the American landscape that it conjures, which instills these very intense feelings of doubt, loneliness, and escape. Hellman dislikes the French translation of Two-Lane Blacktop which is Macadam a deux voies, “A good translation, but a bad title. I would have preferred Plus Vite (Faster).”
Another thing which is of interest about reading the Hellman interviews is hearing his taste in movies. “An unknown film, which nobody knows of except myself.” Hellman raves about Carol Reed’s Outcast of the Islands, which he first saw in the theater. It is now only available on VHS and a bootleg DVD (a poor transfer from the VHS). This VHS cinephila seems pertinent to Hellman as that's the format Quentin Tarantino would have seen his films when he worked at Video Archives and Brad Stevens’ discusses fourth generation dubs of Back Door to Hell. He is a director who was discovered in the post-theatrical run era and before the pre-DVD age. Brad also expands on VHS life spans and image quality at the Dave Kehr forum. And, it is surprising to hear Hellman is an admirer of James Cameron’s Titanic, it reminds him of his own time at sea, though he hates Avatar. Resnais’ Serge Alexandre Stavisky reminds him of his own father. Tsai Ming-liang is also a favorite. The Spirit of the Beehive, of course. While on the Road to Nowhere Facebook page there is a post dedicated to all of the movie references within Road to Nowhere.
The Criterion Collection DVD for Two-Lane Blacktop is described to be a success, both the original and the director’s cut of Stanley’s Girlfriend are not the true final cut (it is a mixture of the two), Hellman has an affinity towards the American photographer Richard Avedon, and Hellman discusses some restaurants, which, for me, re-contextualize all of the scenes in his films where the characters are eating, one their last simple pleasures.
Monte Hellman: Sympathy for the devil is a blessing. Toronto is still waiting for Road to Nowhere to get its theatrical distribution. - David Davidson
Burdeau: “Now that you have a technical process that you like which isn’t expensive, and you film at your house, you can now make a film every year?”
Hellman: “No. My manner remains the same: a movie every twenty-five years!”
Title: Monte Hellman: Sympathy for the Devil
Author: Emmanuel Burdeau
Publisher: Capricci (2010)
Pages: 192
Price: 13.5 €
The thing about Monte Hellman is that he is a filmmaker one feels passionate about. One thing that I disliked about my own Stevens-Hellman post is that in my attempt to do justice to the book, I reduced my own writing to a mere presentation of quotes and facts. Hellman is a filmmaker one should uninhibitedly splurge in enthusiasm, which makes the last page of Burdeau’s introduction, with its run-on sentences and emphasis on colorful imagery, so captivating. There is something about breaking the rules and the validation of it within Hellman’s oeuvre that is so appealing. And, not only is it about breaking the rules, it’s about further pushing the boundaries, which might as well be done in slow-motion (it prolongs the moment), and then burn the frame while you’re at it!
The former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Emmanuel Burdeau’s French-language book Monte Hellman: Sympathy for the Devil, and his whole interview series with Capricci, dispels the conventional way of putting together a book, especially through its use of format - though it is a regular book - the deep-purple cover, the odd index and back-cover (which is similar to Truffaut’s book on Hitch), its use of little quotes on the margins, black-pages between chapters, behind-the-scenes pictures, E.E. Cummings’ poem Tulips & Chimneys (1923), part of the Myth of Sisyphus and extracts from Rudy Wurlitzer’s Nog (and Wurlitzer’s thoughts about working with Hellman), Jack Nicholson’s screenplay for Flight to Fury, and parts of the unrealized script In a Dream of Passion; all contribute to a cinephilic gem. And, there is even a picture of Hellman’s fun-looking dog Moxie, who apparently has a cameo in Road to Nowhere, and Hellman’s margarita recipe: 90ml of Tequila 1800 Silver, 30ml of Cointreau, 30ml of Xylitol syrup, and 30ml of lemon & lime juice. If there was ever a pertinent book, this is the one.
“Everything is casting.”
Two things that are particularly emphasized for Hellman are accidents and casting. Not like accident as in fluke but as in an emphasis on giving the material the room for improvisation and of chance to go for ones own gut instinct. Letting the subject find itself as the films develops instead of imposing a strict guide. And on the use of casting, can you imagine anyone other than the terrific actors playing out those memorable performances?
It's worth contrasting Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks with the Hellman Westerns. Penn is a director that has consistently been integrating a European aesthetic - like the influence of the French New Wave on Bonnie and Clyde - and an existential mood within particularly American folk tales. The Missouri Breaks feels like a golden age Hollywood Western as if Bergman and Tarkovsky dreamt it. But where The Missouri Breaks recedes is that, where in the Hellman Westerns, like Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting, the story dealt more with the mythic American Old West while The Missouri Breaks seems more interested in using the Western as a guise to deal with contemporary experiences, like ‘70s gender politics and generational differences. Where in the Hellman films, Nicholson’s toned down performance puts it into a realm of its own, the Penn film’s screenplay and dialogue seems to have been written to accentuate Jack ‘wild-man’ Nicholson and Marlon ‘Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’ Brando. While the dialogue in the Hellman films is sparse and simple, the Penn film is full of over-exposition. Finally, most of the settings for The Missouri Breaks and the casting, including Harry Dean Stanton, seem to be in immediate dept to Hellman.
The films that get the most space within the book are Road to Nowhere and Two-Lane Blacktop, they take up more than half of the book. There is a Q & A with Hellman and Steven Gaydos at Cal Arts in April 2010 after a Road to Nowhere screening, it is quite insightful. Of particular interest is when Hellman discusses the economy of the Canon 5D Mark II Camera (2,500$), whose high resolution made it perfect to film Road to Nowhere. And to hear that the story of Laurie Bird is a partial inspiration for Road to Nowhere.
Hellman elaborates on the title of the American version of Two-Lane Blacktop, “Two-Lane is the highway with two lanes. A small little rural highway, lets say. Blacktop, is asphalt.” There is a something about the simplicity of the answer, the emptiness of its connotations, and the American landscape that it conjures, which instills these very intense feelings of doubt, loneliness, and escape. Hellman dislikes the French translation of Two-Lane Blacktop which is Macadam a deux voies, “A good translation, but a bad title. I would have preferred Plus Vite (Faster).”
Another thing which is of interest about reading the Hellman interviews is hearing his taste in movies. “An unknown film, which nobody knows of except myself.” Hellman raves about Carol Reed’s Outcast of the Islands, which he first saw in the theater. It is now only available on VHS and a bootleg DVD (a poor transfer from the VHS). This VHS cinephila seems pertinent to Hellman as that's the format Quentin Tarantino would have seen his films when he worked at Video Archives and Brad Stevens’ discusses fourth generation dubs of Back Door to Hell. He is a director who was discovered in the post-theatrical run era and before the pre-DVD age. Brad also expands on VHS life spans and image quality at the Dave Kehr forum. And, it is surprising to hear Hellman is an admirer of James Cameron’s Titanic, it reminds him of his own time at sea, though he hates Avatar. Resnais’ Serge Alexandre Stavisky reminds him of his own father. Tsai Ming-liang is also a favorite. The Spirit of the Beehive, of course. While on the Road to Nowhere Facebook page there is a post dedicated to all of the movie references within Road to Nowhere.
The Criterion Collection DVD for Two-Lane Blacktop is described to be a success, both the original and the director’s cut of Stanley’s Girlfriend are not the true final cut (it is a mixture of the two), Hellman has an affinity towards the American photographer Richard Avedon, and Hellman discusses some restaurants, which, for me, re-contextualize all of the scenes in his films where the characters are eating, one their last simple pleasures.
Monte Hellman: Sympathy for the devil is a blessing. Toronto is still waiting for Road to Nowhere to get its theatrical distribution. - David Davidson
Hellman: “No. My manner remains the same: a movie every twenty-five years!”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)