Nick Ray at Cahiers du Cinema (circa 1950s)

The TIFF Bell Lightbox is currently running a Nicholas Ray retrospective The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray as part of its Hollywood Classics series. The series is programmed by James Quandt, scheduled over two seasons and is centered on the recent restoration of We Can't Go Home Again*, which will be playing on Sunday October 30th at 4PM and will be introduced by Susan Ray. "Poetic, pessimistic, high-strung and humanist, Ray's films are set in a lonely place and on dangerous ground - the wounded psyches of often solitary nomads, strangers who keep looking for a home in a world to which they "have not been properly introduced,"" Quandt writes in the 180°. These screenings will offer Torontonians a glimpse into Ray's mesmerizing work. We Can't Go Home Again, which has recently been restored, and Susan's own Don't Expect Too Much, a companion-piece documentary on We Can't Go Home Again are the kind of films by Ray that Bill Krohn compares to flying saucers, "you catch glimpses of them or hear about them from people who've seen one." The rare prints and the fact that they are only shown once or twice give these Cinematheque screenings an aura-like quality.

Since the Godard line that "The Cinema is Nicholas Ray" is quoted ad nauseam (The Dreamers, the bulk of journalistic reviews) I thought that I would take the occasion to look at what else the Young Turks had to say about the auteur with whom most of them fell in love with when they first discovered They Live By Night at the Rendez-Vous de Biarritz in 1950. A great resource for their writing** is the anthology edited by Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema - The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (1985)***. In the book's section on American Cinema there is a dossier on Nicholas Ray which includes reviews by Jacques Rivette on The Lusty Men, Francois Truffaut on Johnny Guitar, Eric Rohmer on Rebel Without a Cause, Jean-Luc Godard on Hot Blood and Bitter Victory, and an interview from November 1958 between Charles Bitsch and Ray (one of the first American directors to be interviewed in the magazines, as the editorial staff had no real contact with the foreign trade press). Within these pages - beautifully translated and with foot-notes by Liz Heron and Tom Milne - you can find what made the French film critics at Cahiers du Cinema so exciting to read at the time - and I believe more importantly - retrospectively and currently.

So what were the films that Ray made in the '50s? There is Born to Be Bad and In a Lonely Place ('50); On Dangerous Ground, Flying Leathernecks and The Racket ('51); Macao and The Lusty Men ('52); Androcles and the Lion ('53); Johnny Guitar and a teleplay High Green Wall ('54); Run for Cover and Rebel Without a Cause ('55); Hot Blood and Bigger Than Life ('56); The True Story of Jesse James and Bitter Victory ('57); Wind Across the Everglades and Party Girl ('58). In terms of his contemporaries, Jacques Rivette in The State of the American Cinema (Cahiers N.54) writes, "At present the undoubted spearheads (...) of the age of the auteurs are Nicholas Ray, Richard Brooks, Anthony Mann and Robert Aldrich," while Truffaut places him in the "Wise, Dassin and Losey generation." Even more so then these other directors, Ray stood at the fore-front of this new generation of Hollywood film-makers that came on the scene after the war. He stood as a harbinger for the modernity that was to be felt in the world of cinema.

From De l'invention (Cahiers N.27), Rivette reflects the magazine's generosity in discussing Ray,

"Without any doubt, the most constant privilege of the masters is that of seeing everything, including the most simple mistakes, turn out to their advantage rather than diminishing their stature. If you are now surprised to see me give the benefit of this law to Nicholas Ray's latest film it means you are ill-prepared to appreciate a work which is disconcerting and asks for, not indulgence, but a little love."

From L'Amirable Certitude (Cahiers N.46), Truffaut writes,

"Nicholas Raymond Kienzle is somewhat, in fact very much, the passionate discovery of the 'young critics'. Nick Ray is an auteur in our sense of the word. All his films tell the same story, the story of a violent man who wants to stop being violent, and his relationship with a woman who has more moral strength than himself. For Ray's hero is invariably a man lashing out, weak, a child-man when he is not simply a child."****

And here is Truffaut at his more aggressive,

"You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don't watch anymore films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty."

In Ajax ou le Cid? (Cahiers N.59), first off Eric Rohmer discusess (see: deplores) the translation of Rebel Without a Cause into French La Fureur de Vivre [The Rage to Live], as well he reads Ray's "masterpiece" as "a genuine drama in five acts," which is a surprising look at the film and an ambitious one. Rohmer, who has always been more conservative than his peers (in terms of both taste and filming approaches), proves to be just as insightful and adventurous in his prose as the other writers,

"It is impossible to attach any convenient label to his [Ray's] position, as one can with John Huston. It isn't problems that interest him, in the manner of Brooks, but human beings. There is not a trace of the psychological complexities so dear to Mankiewicz. None of those instantly dazzling flashes of lyricism, as in Aldrich. His tempo is slow, his melody usually monochord, but its delineation is so precise, its progress so compulsive, that we cannot allow our attention to stray for a moment."

Jean-Luc will be Godard (where at this point in time, he thinks, that D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpant is "the most important novel of the twentieth century"), which means wildly ambitious. Here he is from Rien que le Cinema (Cahiers N.68),

"After seeing Johnny Guitar or Rebel Without a Cause, one cannot but feel that there is something which exists, only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anything else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen."

Though disappointed about Hot Blood he can still find some merits,

"In short, [Hot Blood] is a semi-successful film to the extent that Ray was semi-uninterested in it."

And on Bitter Victory from Au dela des etoiles (Cahiers N.79),

"It is no longer a question of either reality or fiction, or of one transcending the other. It is a question of something quite different. What? The stars, maybe, and the men who like to look at them and dream."

And on the acting,

"Bitter Victory is exceptionally well acted by Curt Jurgens and Richard Burton. With Et Dieu... Crea la Femme, this makes twice one can believe in a character created by Jurgens. As for Richard Burton, who has acquitted himself well enough in all his previous films, good or bad, when directed by Nicholas Ray he is absolutely sensational."*****

To conclude, here is Truffaut from the 1973 documentary I'm a Stranger Here Myself where he further explains this Cahiers obsession towards Ray,

"What attracted us was that there was something European about this man from Hollywood. European in what way? Perhaps in the frailty, vulnerability of his leading characters. His male characters weren't 'macho'. There was this great sensitivity, especially in dealing with affairs of the heart, which lent a sense of great reality. At a time when Hollywood movies were rarely personal or autobiographical, you always had the feeling that the love stories in Nicholas Ray's films were true stories."

*****

* Some new writing on We Can't Go Home Again appears in the latest issue of Cinema Scope (N.48), which includes a piece by Susan Ray, Out of the Box, (Susan also has a long autobiographical introduction in I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies), and Gabe Klinger, Nicholas Ray’s Film Maudit Restored. It's also worth highlighting here another overlooked Ray title, The Janitor (which is available on YouTube). Brad Stevens writes about the film,

"What fascinates me about this short is the way it clarifies the structure of Ray's last few films, which are full of clashes between superego and id figures (Walt and Cottonmouth in WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES, Tommy and Rico in PARTY GIRL, Inuk and the trooper in THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS, Leith and Brand in BITTER VICTORY, Christ and Barrabas in KING OF KINGS). Here, Ray plays both the id and the superego, suggesting just how personal this theme was to him."

** In addition to the selection of pieces in the book other Cahiers articles of note include Jacques Doniol-Valcroze on They Live By Night, Paul et Virginie se sont maries la nuit (Cahiers N.5), Truffaut on They Live By Night, Les Extremes me touchent (Cahiers N.21), Eric Rohmer on Bigger Than Life, Ou bien... ou bien (Cahiers N.69) and Venise 1957 (Cahiers N.75), Luc Moullet's Filmographie de Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.89), Fereydoun Hoveyda on Party Girl (Cahiers N.107), Jean Douchet and Jacques Joly Nouvelle Entretien avec Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.127), Bill Krohn on We Can't Go Home Again (Cahiers N.288), and part of Ray's late period script Mister, Mister with an introduction by Wim Wenders (Cahiers N.400).

*** Other good resources on Ray include Bernard Eisenschitz' peerless Nicholas Ray: An American Journey and Patrick McGilligan's new Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure Of An American Director.

**** This passage on hidden narratives is similarly brought up in the magazines contemporary writing, here Jean-Philippe Tesse from his review of J.J. Abrams' Super 8, Leve les yeux (Cahiers N.660),

"Abrams has been to able to reconcile his storyteller-recycler spirit all the while plunging into the childhood cinema experiences of reactivating it's magic. And, certainly, he does this by re-taking brilliantly the secret scenario of all of his films: the curring of the hero by the irruption of the supertural within his neighborhood."

***** Here is Stephane Delorme on contemporary actors from his review of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, Requiem pour un reve (Cahiers N.664),

"Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, Natalie Portman plays in a sense her life: good comedian, appreciated, who never really craved the screen, child-star (Luc Besson's Leon) reduced to these roles of the princess in the Star Wars films without ever imposing herself (...) The troubling emotion comes from these effortless lost gazes and raised eyebrows of inquietude and concentration. As well we are on Natalie Portman's side, we want her to succeed. Aronofsky is the best American casting director."

On Content

A new guest contribution by Daniel Gallay. – D.D.

Content: A Brief Statement
(or: “You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!”)
I’m convinced that there isn’t a word more accurate than “bankrupt” to describe certain experiences I’ve had in the cinema. There have been films I have seen that as I watched them, I felt a certain suspicion. Not only was I not able to ignore this suspicion, it became the central element of the experience. I felt, almost from the outset, that there was a hollowness to what I was seeing and that beyond the surface of the image lay nothing at all. The images, although imaginative and aesthetically sound, carried with them no substance or presence of any content. In one such film, this was the intent of the director, and there is a story to illustrate why. This director, as was fairly common during the period, experimented with LSD under the supervision of his psychoanalyst (Cary Grant did this also, and praised it as a tool of self-realization). The experience this director had was one where the definition of all things fell away and he was left in a hellish landscape where nothing held any meaning whatsoever. The experience led him to the conclusion that since the definition of any object is always provided and constantly renewed by the viewer of the object, objective meaning, by the very nature of perception, is impossible. He found that this then freed up his ability to create images since he wasn’t bound by having to attempt to instill objective meaning. “The fire and the rose,” he said, “became one.” This is problematic, if only because it is the perfect definition of solipsism, but it brings me to the point of my statement. My point is this: Is there not an element of an experience that is common to all those who experience it? Take this essay as an example. As you experience it, my consciousness (or perhaps, more so, the consciousness of the essay, which may or may not be my own) and your consciousness are present. There is the presence of each independent of the other, but there is also some point at which they touch and overlap. As each person reads the essay, each of their experiences will differ; these experiences will not be necessarily definable, but necessarily existent. That perhaps is a definition of content – the overlapping of one consciousness with another where a personal experience can take place. The infusion of an object with consciousness relies to a great extent on the intentionality of the creator – if the intent is shallow, the results will likely seem shallow; alternately, if the intent is joyous, the results will likely seem joyous. So, as in the story of this director, if there is no intent, there is also likely no content. If there is no content, then the object will be hollow, and the experience of it will be likewise. If nothing is returned for the viewers’ investment of consciousness, bankruptcy results. It’s perhaps the most unforgivable form of thievery – a thievery not just of time, but, more importantly, of spirit.

Daniel Gallay

Himizu Review

This is the first guest contribution by Oded Aronson. - D.D.

Himizu (Shion Sono, 2011)
**** (Masterpiece)
Ruins lie everywhere. Dust and smashed objects litter the atmosphere. A teenager stands in the middle holding a gun to his own head. The wind gradually becomes louder and dissolves into the sound of a million voices of the dead crying for mercy. The boy shoots himself. Blood streams out of his head, leaving a long red trail. He lies in the field, no longer remembering who he is. Then he wakes up.

The boy’s name is Yuichi Sumida, and his family has been left without any means of income because of a tsunami that has all but demolished his hometown. His family’s business is a boat rental company, which has not had any profits at all since the tsunami. Yuichi’s father is a nasty, abusive harpy who storms home at midnight most of the time and proceeds to beat him up then complain that he never wanted a child. Yuichi’s mother has run away from her husband with her lover due to years of frustration and blood, so Yuichi is left to fend for himself.

His financial situation is so poor that eventually he is forced to leave school so that he can work at the boathouse in the vain hope that someone will rent a boat. One of his classmates, Keiko Chizawa, has had a crush on him for as long as she can remember, and searches for him. Keiko’s family also has their own troubles; her parents want to kill her so that they can collect insurance money, and are in the process of building their own guillotine. Keiko is forced to pass the guillotine every day and notice its development.

For the first two thirds of the story, there is frequent juxtaposition of dark humour and straight faced drama. The attitudes of the two main characters play a role in that juxtaposition. Yuichi has become so emotionally inured due to the beatings he receives from his father that he has retreated into a dark, nearly silent shell. He is almost completely unwilling to open himself up to anyone or anything. On the other hand, Keiko’s lifelong preparation for her upcoming death at the hands of her parents has somehow opened up wells of emotion in her, and she feels as though she has to cheer people up for as long as she lives. Keiko goes far beyond optimism into the realm of desperation, which then becomes so pronounced that it feels like optimism again.

The two clash, but Keiko tries to become friends with Yuichi despite his protestations. Eventually, they end up sharing most of their scenes to the extent that everybody thinks of them as friends. Although Yuichi remains sullen, her presence does seem to have some kind of positive effect on the people other than Yuichi. Keiko tries to revamp the boat house. As a result, it finally begins to have some business. Yuichi’s father comes home for the last time one night and suddenly things become even more complicated than before.

The last part of the movie is emotionally brutal. Not all people will enjoy the descent into darkness, but it is appropriate for the material, and leads to a powerful climax that will be a source of joy for anyone who is in love with the movies. I strongly recommend Himizu, the best of the 25 movies I watched at this year’s TIFF. - Oded Aronson

Le drôle Woody Allen (and Film Comedy Scholarship)

For my parents Alysse Weinberg and Michael Davidson who first turned me towards film and who encouraged me to pursue it as an academic endeavor. – D.D.

Title: Comment Woody Allen peut change votre vie
Author: Éric Vartzbed
Publisher: Éditions du Seuil
Pages: 112
Price: 12 €
Title: Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy
Author: Saul Austerlitz
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Pages: 512
Price: $27.95
*****“Woody Allen’s comedy is art, as all good comedy is.” – Saul AusterlitzIntroduction
With over forty films to his name and a career that spans from 1965 to today, it is hard to pin down Woody Allen. He was born Allen Konigsberg in Brooklyn, 1935, a shabby New York Jew with too much intelligence, wit and neuroses. His career trajectory goes from writing wisecracks for NBC, then Sid Caesar, getting expelled from NYU, performing stand-up, writing screenplays, becoming a film-director, writing short-fiction - and he still finds time to play the clarinet! His current wife is Soon-Yi Previn.

In his films, Allen’s characters are burdened by the accompanying neuroses of their privileged position. In his world, the people who have a belief in some kind of faith seem better off then their atheist counterparts. His protagonists give a whole new meaning to the Hitchcockian character-type of the man who knew too much. And like one of Hitchcock’s wrong men they are born into a godless world where things eventually go awry. Everything and anything can happen, ranging from murder to finding love. And what is most emphasized is the role chance plays in our lives. The films are funny too.

As a filmmaker he has worked with some of Hollywood’s best actors and actresses like Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts, Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, just to name a few. Everybody wants to work with him. The cast of his upcoming Rome-set film The Bob Decameron includes Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig and Allen himself (who will be returning in front of the camera). Allen is not the only talented one; he has worked with some of the best cinematographers out there such as Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond and Darius Khondji. He writes his own screenplays too.

“But what made Bergman great – and there were guys who were working the same side of the street but who were not great – was that he was show business, he was an entertainer,” according to Allen*, who like Bergman, is one a master entertainer-philosophers that have blessed the seventh art. Allen seamlessly blends pathos and comedy to magical results. For example, in his latest film Midnight in Paris – one of his most profitable films (eighty million dollars worldwide) – this middle-aged screenwriter (played by Owen Wilson) who wants to start writing serious literature is visiting Paris with his wife and her parents. At night he decides to wander off and mysteriously finds himself traveling back in time to the the 1920s and then to the belle époque. The lightness of touch, the ease of the actors, the magical mood all leads me to believe this is the high point of his late European period.

Allen has many supporters: Jean-Luc Godard** made a wonderful little documentary Meetin’ WA (1986), an interview between the two directors that Godard interrupts with jazzy inter-titles and film stills. And he has also starred in films by Paul Mazursky and Martin Ritt. Some smart people have written about him such as Robert Benayoun (Woody Allen, au-delà du language), John Baxter, Raymond Durgnat, Foster Hirsch, Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Richard Brody, Jean-Michel Frodon and Richard Schickel ; while real life intellectuals like Marshal McLuhan and Susan Sontag have also appeared in his films. In regards to the man himself voicing his thoughts, there is the Stig Björkman and Eric Lax interview books.

Allen’s films begin like novels: there is always that black screen set to soothing jazz music, punctuated by the credits written in Allen’s signature Windsor font. The experience of watching the credits change is akin to flipping through the pages of a book***. This technique builds excitement for a new Allen adventure within the viewer. And then the film begins…

* Woody Allen by Kent Jones, which included an interview, in Film Comment (May/June 2011).

** Godard also cast Allen as King Lear in his Shakespeare adaptation. Though Allen, overall, is not really a Cahiers-filmmaker (see Olivier Assayas scathing remarks on Everyone says I love you or Jones on Celebrity). On the other hand, Allen seems to have found a home over at the more generous Positif with his two latest films making it onto their cover.

*** This literary analogy is only made stronger as Allen is the author of a vast collection of short stories that can be found in The New Yorker and collected in books like Mere Anarchy, The Insanity Defense and Getting Even. Allen also recently contributed to The Guardian a piece on his five favorite books (The Catcher in the Rye, Really the Blues, The World of SJ Perelman, Epitaph of a Small Winner, and Elia Kazan: A Biography), which show the influence books had on him as a person.

*****“One’s important encounters are the spice of life.” - Éric Vartzbed
How Can Woody Allen Change Your Life?
I first discovered Allen in my early university years. I was studying Psychology and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa. On my summer off, I stumbled upon Annie Hall where in it Allen represented what is commonly known as an auteur: he was the star, director, and screenwriter of the film and it was clear that this Alvy Singer character was loosely autobiographical. That month I watched Annie Hall maybe five or six times, making sure to scribble down on a little notepad all of the cultural references that I was not being taught in university. Over the summer I tried to see all of his films, which coincided with a blossoming interest in cinema, where I was also discovering the films of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Since then I have gone to see all of Allen’s new films during their first-run releases, starting with Vickie Christina Barcelona (2008). I was also fortunate to go to Lyon, France that summer for some French language and culture classes. Where coincidently the Hangar Lumière (the birthplace of European cinema) was having an Allen retrospective. I didn’t need anything else…

The psychoanalyst Éric Vartzbed in his wonderful little French-language book Comment Woody Allen peut changer votre vie? talks about the way certain films seen at particular, and impressionable, times in ones life can influence someone personally, and that these small realizations and pleasures should be acknowledged and cherished. For Vartzbed, one of those occurrences happened to be when he saw Allen’s Another Woman*. Being a practitioner of psychology (at the Réseau Santé Valais) Vartzbed better understands the difficulty that Hope (Mia Farrow) is going through and the difficulty of confessing intimate and repressed thought. Allen in Another Woman and throughout his career proves to be a director of anxieties. Not only of presenting characters with anxieties but in how they can be debilitating in certain situations and what coping mechanism people come up with**. This is one of the subjects explored in the book, with particular characters from different films being used as case studies for the psychoanalyst to examine as he dissects the unconscious of Allen and his films through quoting other theorist like Sigmund Freud, Eric Fromm and Jacques Lacan.

Just as Allen has changed the lives of many people (Vartzbed’s, my own), Allen too was affected by the movies. The director? You’ve guessed it: Ingmar Bergman. Allen’s thoughts on Monika: “I came away reliving only the moment Harriet Andersson disrobed.” On The Naked Night, “Although the story was not totally focused, the work was directed with such immense talent that I sat forward for an hour and a half, my eyes bulging.” On Wild Strawberries, “I still recall my mouth dry and my heart pounding away from the first uncanny dream sequence to the last serene close-up.” On The Seventh Seal (“always my favorite”), “The flagellants, the burning of the witch (worthy of Carl Dreyer) and the finale, as Death dances off with all the doomed people to the nether lands is one of the most memorable shots in all movies.”***

* This first section of the book Comment Woody Allen a changé ma vie [How Woody Allen changed my life] is part self-analysis, while in the next section Comme Woody Allen peut changer votre vie [How Can Woody Allen change your life] Vartzbed tries to tease out life lessons and particular morals from the films themselves, and he is quite good at it.

** The role of the analyst in the films is also analyzed. Vartzbed sees complacency on their part where the session’s goal is no longer psychological progress but that of a routine, which would become a reoccurring gag for Allen. Like the wisecrack in Sleepers, “I haven’t seen my shrink for two-hundred years. If I had been going all of this time then I would almost be cured.”

*** From Woody Allen’s review of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern.

*****On to the Book
Vartzbed prose is fun. It isn’t too academic, though it is smart and well written. Vartzbed knows how to translate cinematic gags and jokes onto the page; there are a lot of exclamation marks. The title of the book makes it seem like it is one of those goofy self-help books, which it isn’t. How Can Woody Allen change your life is a serious look at Allen’s films, who for Vartzbed, are in the same league as the work of the great European writers and philosophers like Marcel Proust, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le Petit Prince), Molière and Emil Cioran.

Vartzbed quotes Allen from an interview with Robert Benayoun from Positif (which can be found in the Grand Interview issue) on Manhattan, “It isn’t New York that I am attacking, it’s the root of evil. It’s not a film that is happy to say: “Clean Central Park.” It is a film that is saying: “Clean up your emotional lives, or else you will never be able to clean Central Park.” Another insightful quote from the interview is, “My hero Isaac Davis prefers to think of the time past then the terrible things that are ruining the city today, he misses the time when New York looked like how you see it in the old sepia photographs, when it was as simple and romantic as Gershwin’s music.”

Vartzbed sees Allen humor as a defensive-mechanism - a way to make the people around him happy - while the sources of frustration is not coming from the exterior but the interior. For Allen, “desire and counter-desire is the same thing,” like the Julia Roberts character in Everyone Says I Love You who, “seems to prefer the dream of a potential happiness then the “closure” that comes with it’s realization.” This self-defeating impulse goes quite well with the famous Annie Hall* quip, “I would never be a part of a club that will have someone like me as a member.”

Vatzbed sees Zelig as Allen’s most political film, “Allen describes the mimetic passion that is central to in all the totalitarian phenomenon.” As well on Allen’s politics, “In the Allen universe, politics as they are are placed onto the second-plane ; the point of view is psychological and existential.”**

Allen shows the gap between what people say and what they mean, “with his style, he expresses the essence of the human life: our condition of the denatured animal, exiled in a landscape of signs, lost into language.” There is too much justification of bad behavior through a mise-en-mots, like the ‘natural’ and ‘happy’ divorce at the beginning of Husbands and Wives. And there seems to be an emphasis for Allen on capturing the complexity and contradiction of human feelings*** like when Isacc is running to meet Tracy at the end of Manhattan. One would want the two to get-back together but there are so many factors against that from happening. Even so we are still cheering Allen on.

* Annie Hall’s original title is Anhedonia, which means the inability to experience pleasure.

** Which makes Allen different then a more left-wing actor-director like Albert Brooks whose most recent film Looking for Humor in the Middle East (2005) is very critical of America’s foreign policy, which might have caused the films minor distribution and reception. Brooks also has a new fictional novel about a futuristic dystopian society 2030.

*** The subject of emotional validity is important to Allen which he highlights, as well as the disparities of critical reception, in the Eric Lax interview book:

"But the criticism that can be made of any film can be refuted from another point of view and, in the critical community, often is. So I'm not really interested in these analyses and discussions because I feel they're all rationalizations to justify an emotional response to the work. Two critics can see the same film and write opposite reviews and both are completely correct in their reasoning. So what do you have? Two conflicting intelligent points of view. So when I show my film to two or three friends in my screening room before I put it out, I'd like to hear their emotional response and not their cerebral analysis."

*****Career Periods:
What’s Up, Tiger Lily (1966) – Love and Death (1975) /
Annie Hall (1977) – Husbands and Wives (1992) /
Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) – Melinda and Melinda (2004) /
Match Point (2005) – Midnight in Paris (2011)

With over forty films to his credits it is hard to pin down Allen, but to make an attempt, one can see view his films in four distinct periods:
(1) The early funny ones: these films have a loose structure – the comparison to a stand-up sketch is frequently brought up - and include more physical comedic gags and non sequitur one-liners. This stage starts with What’s New Pussycat (1965 ; he wrote the original screenplay though didn’t direct the film) and What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966; a re-dubbing of a Japanese action film) and ends with Love and Death (1975). As Saul Auterlitz brings up in Another Fine Mess, “Nonethless, Allen’s yearning for gravity is hardly unfamiliar; we have already borne witness to similar ambitions from Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis and numerous others. To penetrate deeper into comedy one must grow more serious.” This brings us to Allen’s second period.

(2) The films of the first period were made away from Allen’s beloved Manhattan. So when Allen finally returned to make a movie in Manhattan, the results were astounding [cf. Annie Hall (1977)]. Through the help of his cinematographer Gordon Willis, Allen learnt to be a more stylistic and resourceful director, as well he learnt more about narrative cohesion from his editor Ralph Rosenblum. But drama then began to take precedence. The attempted suicide in Interiors (1978) through carbon monoxide poisoning created one of the most haunting images in Allen’s cinema. Who can forget Eve (Geraldine Page) turning the oven on high and sealing the cracks in the door with masking tape? With such a bold shift in tone Allen was detaching himself from his early ‘funny’ films. He was not going to continue to conform to expectations and simply make comedies, which would be the subject of Stardust Memories (1980). On a whole, this period is marked more by its dramas even though there are moments of humor in them. But even though some of the films were fluffier the overall tone is more pessimistic, which seems ingrained in the design of the films black-and-white cinematography - which Allen used more in this period then any of the others - that gives off a darker atmosphere. The mood is one of social oppression that recalls the anxieties of the post-WWII crime thrillers (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep). This period also coincides with Allen’s relationship with his wife Mia Farrow who they collaborated together in thirteen films. Starting with A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) and ended in January 1992 when she discovered sexually explicit photos of her adopted daughter Soon-Yi in Allen’s room. Their final film together is Husbands and Wives (1992). Farrow is now more concerned with humanitarian concerns, which was the subject of Alice.

(3) The end of the Farrow-Allen relationship brings us to Allen’s next period: “From comedic genius and New York icon to sleazeball and degenerate: Woody Allen’s fall was precipitous,” says Austerlitz. These post-Farrow films seem like a return to a more crowd-pleasing fare, even though they are pretty adventurous for Allen in terms of both content and form: starting with the noir Manhattan Murder Mysteries (1993), to a musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996) to the last film in this period the bifurcated Melinda and Melinda (2004). In these films Allen is exploring his interest in the writing of creative fiction as well as his ideas pertaining to chance and faith. There is also the European jazz tour documentary Wild Man Blues (1997) by Barbara Kopple, which is a striking project as it anticipates Allen’s next period.

(4) The final period, which brings us to today: the death of Allen’s longtime producer Jean Doumanian led him to take European financing. This move expanded the scope of the Allenian universe to Barcelona (Vicky Christina Barcelona), to London (Match Point) and to Paris (Midnight in Paris). The tennis metaphor in Match Point of a ball hitting a net relates to faith because one can never possibly know whether the ball will go over it or not. This indelible image of a round neon-yellow tennis ball hitting a net and spinning upwards as it almost floats in mid-air plays an important role in this latest period as the uncertainty of fate will lace all of Allen’s next films. Moving onward Allen shows himself to be more interested in open-endings and capturing people in indecisive moments. Though even amidst all this chaos and contradictions some people can still find meaning and happiness, which is a thought worth cherishing.
*****“It is a cliché that clowns cry; it has rarely been admitted that they might also think.” – Gerald Mast
Film Comedy Scholarship
Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind (1979), for me, is the foundation of film comedy scholarship. It looks at the subject of film comedy beginning with the breed of clown that “translated comedy into cinematic terms” and tries to figure out what is the structure of film comedy in cinema, what are it’s roots, what is the goal of comedy, and who were the individuals that had the largest impact on it. While someone like Andrew Sarris was building upon James Agee’s The Golden Age of Comedy* (1949) when he compiled the comic section Make Way For The Clowns! in The American Cinema (1968), on the other hand, Mast’s pantheon is reserved for strictly comedians of the world that defined the seventh art in its formative years: Mack Sennet, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Ernst Lubitsch, René Clair and Jean Renoir.

One of Mast’s points is that, “There has been little attempt to draw comic films into this mainstream of twentieth-century artistic thought.” Mast places Film Comedy alongside New Comedy and Aristophanic Old Comedy as well with purely ‘cinematic’ forms by, for example, creating parallels between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Charlie Chaplin (e.g. the bowler hat, the comic business) or by comparing Renoir to Shakespeare. Arguing with and against people like Wylie Sypher, Elder Olson and Henri Bergson, Mast’s argues for film comedy to be discussed seriously and lays the foundation scholarship in discussing it at the birth of film as medium by emphasizing silent-films and the works created at the transition to the talkie and afterwards. As well, Mast’s adds, “And so this book is evaluative, not just descriptive. It begins with the intention of revealing serious thought in the comic film form. And it assumes that the best comedies (even the funniest comedies) are those which achieve something that is more than simply funny.”

The eight comic film plots and basic structures, according to Mast, that are central to Film Comedy are as follows:

(1) The young lovers finally wed despite the obstacles to their union, and the amorous conclusion grows directly and exclusively from amorous complications.
(2) The film’s structure can be an intentional parody or burlesque of some other film or genre of films, the parodic plot is deliberately contrived and artificial.
(3) The reductio ad absurdum where a simple human mistake or social question is magnified, reducing the action to chaos and the social question to absurdity.
(4) An investigation of the workings of a particular society – usually through multileveled plots – comparing the responses of one social group or class with those of another, contrasting people’s different responses to the same stimuli and similar responses to different stimuli.
(5) A structure unified by a central figure (pícaro) of the film’s action, also known as the comedian comedy, which is built around the comedians persona.
(6) The “riffing” or “improvised and anomalous gaggery” plot that takes an initial situation, an object and then runs off with a series of gags that revolve around this central situation where pace and motion become unifying principles in themselves.
(7) The central character either chooses to perform or is forced to accept a difficult task, often risking his life in the process within a “comic climate” (built signs that let the audience know that he is watching a comedy).
(8) The story of the central figure who eventually discovers an error he has been committing in the course of his life, also within a “comic climate.”

To expand on Mast’s study on film comedy there is Professor Emeritus from Harvard University Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) – or one can look towards James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges** (1987) for a similar study of screwball comedies. Though my examination will focus on Cavell who in Pursuits of Happiness takes a long hard look at seven films or as he calls them “spiritual parables”: Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941), Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Adam’s Rib (1949), and Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937). These Hollywood talkies made between 1934 and 1949, for Cavell, constitute a particular genre: the comedy of remarriage - an inheritor of the Shakespearean romantic comedy (The Winter’s Tale). Cavell describes this group of films as, “the principal group of Hollywood comedies after the advent of sound and therewith one definitive achievement in the history of the art of film.”

Here is Cavell explaining what exactly is at heart of this comedy of remarriage genre:

“[T]he achievement of human happiness requires not the perennial and fuller satisfaction of our needs as they stand but the examination and transformation of those needs (…) [Which] applies only in contexts in which there is satisfaction enough, in which something like luxury and leisure, something beyond the bare necessities, is an issue (…) This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth; the people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily (…) It is as essential for the settings of our films to be such that we can expect the characters in them to take the time, and take the pains, to converse intelligently and playfully about themselves and about one another as it is essential for the settings and characters of classical tragedy to be such that we can expect high poetry from them (…) it will be a virtue of our heroes to be willing to suffer a certain indignity, as if what stands in the way of change, psychologically speaking, is a false dignity; or, socially speaking, as if the dignity of one part of society is the cause of the opposite part’s indignity, a sure sign of a disordered state of affairs (…) The conversations of what I call the genre of remarriage is, judging from the films I take to define it, of a sort that leads to acknowledgment; to the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness; a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival, the achievement of a new perspective on existence; a perspective that presents itself as a place, one removed from the city of confusion and divorce.”

Cavell focuses on the heroine and places them in their historical-cultural-social context. This woman is a continuation of the feminism that is rooted in the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and women gaining the right to vote back in 1920. As Cavell puts it,

“The genre it projected, on my interpretation, can be said to require the creation of a new woman, or the new creation of a woman, something I describe as a new creation of the human. If the genre is as definitive of sounds comedy as I take it to be, and if the feature of the creation of the woman is as definitive of the genre as I take it to be, then this phase of the history of cinema is bound up with a phase in the history of the consciousness of women (…) Our films may be understood as parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition (as Hegel put it) or demand for acknowledgment (as I have put it) is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other.”

In his textual analysis Cavell provides examples of possible interpretations for the motivations of the characters behavior as well as the directors intentions and then decides on the choice that appears the most rational. The important philosophers for Cavell that he references are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And this radical juxtaposition of Immanuel Kant (philosophy) and Frank Capra (film) is part of Cavell’s uninhibited rejoice of Classical Hollywood films (à la Robert Warshow) mixed with his university context. Cavell articulates the reasons for why he writes*** and that, for him, “philosophy is to be understood, however else, aesthetically.” He provides other Depression-era fairy tale films that could have been examined as well he provides other contemporary ‘remarriage’ films like Starting Over, An Unmarried Woman and Kramer and Kramer. And to posit some more recent titles: Eyes Wide Shut, Hall Pass, and Certified Copy.

* The comedians highlighted by Sarris were W.C. Fields, Jerry Lewis, Harold Lloyd, The Marx Brothers and Mae West. Though as Gregg Rickman notes in the introduction to The Film Comedy Reader: “Agee also established a starring comedian’s talents and personality as the major factor by which to judge screen comedy,” and that there were “[s]ilent comedians dismissed by Agee, meanwhile, such as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Charley Chase, have taken years to find new partisans.”

** On this period James Harvey writes, “Nineteen thirty-four was the turning point, the year when it first began to seem as if the Hollywood movie had invented the romantic comedy. Suddenly in The Thin Man and It Happened One Night and The Gay Divorcee, in actors like Dunne and Lombard and Grant, Powell and Loy and Astaire – all the familiar, borrowed elements came together in combinations so new and fresh, so eclectic, and so intrinsically movielike that familiarity became revelation.”

*** Cavell, “one learns that without this trust in one’s experience, expressed as a willingness to find words for it, without thus taking an interest in it, one is without authority in one’s own experience.” He also uses really ordinary language to describe complex ideas by renowned philosophers.

*****Twenty-First Century Jokers
What are the well-researched and well-written film-comedy books of our time? Which ones are the most up-to-date and insightful? And which ones are the most likely to teach you about a comic-director or -star that one is unfamiliar with? Or make you re-appraise a personality originally viewed as fluff?

If The Comic Mind and Pursuits of Happiness (and/or Romantic Comedy in Hollywood) lay the foundation of film comedy as a field of study in book-form, then it is in The Film Comedy Reader and Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy that the subject as a whole is brought into the twenty-first century*.

One thing that The Film Comedy Reader (2006) edited by Gregg Rickman is interested in is “how ideas develop over time,” as it anthologizes essays about film-comedy from the beginning to the present day. Some examples include: James Agee’s Comedy’s Greatest Era and Buster Keaton's What Are the Six Ages of Comedy moving forward with Raymond Durgnat on Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing and Robin Wood on Gays and '90s Comedy. Rickman points out differences in the writing about film-comedy, “Some further background on the different schools of film theory which inflect our readings of cinema follows. To briefly summarize, a divide exist between those who define the comic film in terms of its narrative pattern, and those who define it in terms of its goal, the physical act of laughter,” which is worth considering.

Rickman personal entries are on Some Like It Hot ("Wilder's characters more often than not are con artists, manipulators of other people's emotions, usually through their skilled use of language."), Bamboozled ["That Bamboozled indulges in a "rhetoric of blame" (Edward Said's phrase) cannot be doubted. Yet Spike Lee can be thought of as a critic of blackface minstrelsy in line with Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)."], The Producers [""Putting on a show" has been sufficient plot justification for many a great musical comedy and it may perhaps be in this particular subgenre (rather than as a satirist or performer) Brooks may ultimately best be remembered."] and Runaway Bride ("This reduction of a privileged moment in film history to a plot device, a gimmick, is just another reason It Happened One Night will still be debated a hundred years from now, while Runaway Bride will be little more than a footnote to its star's career.")

While Saul Austerlitz's book Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy (2010) is one of the broadest in scope and up-to-date books on the subject. For Austerlitz the important film is Preston Sturge’s Sullivan’s Travels. To make comedies or to make dramas? Now that is the question. In the book Austerlitz posits thirty pantheon personalities that have been important to film comedy. From Chaplin to Judd Apatow by way of Laurel & Hardy and Katharine Hepburn and Jerry Lewis**, Mel Brooks and Albert Brooks and Richard Pryor, Steven Martin and Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller. As well there are one-hundred-and-five shorter entries on oddities, one-shots and newcomers: Nora Ephron, Jim Jarmusch, Robin Williams, the Farrelly’s, Whit Stillman, Paul Rudd, John Belushi, Jayne Mansfield, Mike Nichols, Tyler Perry et cetera.

What else does Austerlitz have to say on Allen (who receives a longer entry): Well that he sees Allen as a hybrid child between Bob Hope and Ingmar Bergman. On Allen’s early routines, “Allen was modeling himself after satirist Mort Sahl, but rather than Sahl’s didja-see-this-article shtick, Allen was punching above his intellectual weight, providing his own freewheeling annotations to Freud and Dostoyevsky.” And that with Annie Hall, “Allen created something entirely new: a somber comedy,” where “the humor, ultimately, is inseparable from the sentiment.”

Allen bridges the long-standing tradition of nonsense in film history that begins with the Marx Brothers (whose Duck Soup appears in a segment in Crimes and Misdemeanors) and passes through Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards and Robert Altman. Allen’s oeuvre has variations of all of Mast’s eight comic plot structures and his best characters reach Cavell’s criteria of, “the achievement of a new perspective on existence.” With each new film – a reliable Woody every year - the connections and links between the works are getting denser. As Allen creates continuity between the films and different career periods there is also an evolution and maturation where he places different emphasis on certain behavior and ideas. Where his work was once more parody and slapstick, it has evolved going into light-hearted jest, drama and philosophical exploration. Geographically going from the micro to the macro. Allen is creating his own Infinite Jest, to use a David Foster Wallace expression. The somber comedy*** that Allen popularized with Annie Hall has been the mise en abyme of his carreer and its influence on contemporary auteur film comedy (Apatow, Solondz) might just be his legacy. - David Davidson

* Though I should bring up here Laurence Maslon and Michael Cantor’s Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America (2008) whose focus is more multi-disciplinary as it looks at comedy from the position of stand-up, talk-shows, Saturday Night Live, comedians, television series, and film. And to include an eccentricity in film comedy scholarship, I am going to suggest, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s catalogue for a series he programmed for the Viennale, The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S. (2009), which includes a long introduction (where he explains his selection criteria), eleven re-published essays, and capsules for fifty-five films from Owen Land’s On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmmund Freud in Wit and its relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Whole (1979) to John Waters’ Hairspray (1988).

** There was a time, I believe, when the cinephilic debates were over Jerry Lewis or Woody Allen. Just as, I imagine, there was a time that you have had to prefer Chaplin or Keaton. Whil now the directors you have to align yourself with are Todd Philips, Judd Apatow or the Farrelly’s. My response: I just don’t know why some people can’t just get a long. From the above list, the only director that I have a serious problems with is Todd Philips whose Old School I liked but I thought the Hangover is abysmal with its two-dimensional characters, racism and homophobia - I could not be bothered to go watch the sequel.

*** And two unlikely directors have recently pronounced their appreciation of Allen’s films: Monte Hellman and Francis Coppola.

A Woman’s Work is Rarely Done (or Backwards in Heels)

This is the second guest contribution from Daniel Gallay. – D.D.

For Andréa Picard

“And there will be poets like this! When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself, when man – up till now abominable – will have set her free, she will be a poet as well! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delightful; we will accept and understand them.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871

I have had many experiences viewing films that have expanded my consciousness. The films of Paolo Gioli and Joseph Cornell come to mind, as do Welles, Warhol, Rivette, Antonioni, and, of course, Rossellini. These artists have all offered me tremendous experiences. The most important experiences I’ve yet had, however, have been through the work of women filmmakers. The films of Catherine Breillat, for example, have impacted me immensely. From her I learned, among other things, that feminism could be as faulty as chauvinism. By that I mean that within chauvinism, a woman must be a man’s version of a woman, but within feminism, a woman must often be a woman’s version of a man. (To this I’ll add that from her films I learned that the only thing I truly know about women is that I’m not one.) From that I understood that all things and all circumstances must be viewed with respect for their own individual content. This, I find, is achieved nowhere better than in the films of female directors.
Films with this approach that immediately come to mind are Glimpses of the Garden and Lights by Marie Menken. In these films there is a sensitive observation and respect for the inherent content of the subjects of these films, in this case a garden and lights. These things do not have their own consciousness, of course, but they are still accepted and respected by Menken if only because they exist. The presence that permeates these films can also be sensed, in relation to performers this time, in the films of Agnès Varda and Ida Lupino, particularly in the climactic scenes of the latter’s The Bigamist and The Hitchhiker. Chantal Akerman and Tacita Dean, too, take this approach to beautiful extremes with the huge, spiritual gulps of time and subject in their work. To elaborate on this further, however, I will touch on what I find to be one of the finest examples of this particular kind of filmmaking, the films of Joyce Wieland.

In her short work, such as Sailboat, Birds at Sunrise, or Rat Life and Diet in North America, there is a constant presence of acceptance. Even in Barbara’s Blindness, there seems to be an acceptance of the found film footage she is editing. In terms of acceptance itself, anyone who has experienced either side of true acceptance knows the courage the act takes. It calls for a steely nerve and a concrete, dignified sense of self. This authentic sense of acceptance is very present in her one feature length film, The Far Shore, although in this case with several other elements also at play. Too “normal” for the avant-garde and too “weird” for the mainstream, The Far Shore is a generally unknown and unseen film that easily stands beside her greatest accomplishments as an artist. Like her quilt works, it intelligently and subversively reclaims something dismissively relegated to the domain of the woman. In the case of the quilts, it is “woman’s work” and in the case of The Far Shore, it is the “woman’s film” – the melodrama. Within the structures of this genre, she speaks to the nature of the artist in Canada, the relationship between Anglophones and Francophones, but most importantly, the place of the Free Woman (in a mental and emotional sense, at least) in modern society. She does this in a number of ways – through abstraction and satire and through her tremendous compositions – but mainly through that very essential and fine edged acceptance. Most notably, it is visible in the performances, or more accurately said, the performers. This is due to a very intricate relationship that, I think, lies at the heart of these films. In The Far Shore (and in many of the other films mentioned here), there are often infinitesimally small gestures visible in the performers that are very affecting. They are of such consequence because they are not emanating from the performers within the artificial construct of the film, but from the person, the human, reacting to the artificial construct of the film. This is very complex, and would be regarded by less sensitive and perceptive artists as mistakes, whereas they are, in fact, triumphs. The main thing this approach accomplishes is that it renders the elements of the film as subjects rather than objects. This permits them dignity, autonomy and true vitality. These acts are not of forcing things into existence, but of being aware of what will exist and permitting it to by creating the proper conditions. It’s the reverse of the typically assumed direction; backward, like Ginger Rogers to Fred Astaire. It’s similar, too, to that tremendous, almost Franciscan effort that it takes to actually see the sky – to look up and allow the sky to exist and not have it blotted out by your assumptions. It’s a very selfless act, a sublimely passive one, and, I will say, an importantly feminine one.

I am, by no means, implying that only women are capable of this approach. The films of Rossellini in both film and television could easily be said to have these elements; as can works like Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance Nue, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop or certain works by Nathaniel Dorsky, like Summerwind. All people have these capacities within them -- like Lorca said, “Mi alma de niña y niño” (My soul is both male and female). Though, in my experience it seems that directors who are women can most wholly and organically accomplish this effect. Experiencing works like these that take such an independent mind have been extraordinary for me. This is in part because they are so delicate, and in part because they are so rare. Until Rimbaud’s statements on the female poet are true to a greater extent, however, the last word will come from one of these rare, courageous and important Free Women: “There should always be a giving to the senses and an enrichment of the soul.... It's a way to tell the truth but it's also a way to open vision, how to see.” (Joyce Wieland).

Daniel Gallay
*****Further Viewing: The CFMDC’s recently released box set of the complete works of Joyce Wieland is cause for celebration. It is available through the CFMDC.

Further Reading: Johanne Sloan’s recent Canadian Cinema monograph on Wieland’s The Far Shore is an invaluable resource for information on the film. Cinematheque Ontario’s monograph on Wieland is also an excellent source of information on the artist’s work in film. Both are available at the TIFF.Shop at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Jean Pierre Lefebvre's video work (a book by Peter Harcourt)

Title: Jean Pierre Lefebvre: Vidéaste*
Series: Canadian Directors**
Author: Peter Harcourt
Publisher: Toronto International Film Festival Group (2001)
Pages: 91
Price: $9.95
*****“Once we understand its conventions, it can inspire the human delight that we feel for the best of folk art.” – Peter Harcourt

It is topical to review a book on an important Canadian director after writing a post on contemporary Canadian cinema as a way to contextualize today's output alongside its heritage. Peter Harcourt writes that “the films of Jean Pierre Lefebvre helped consolidate a sense in Québec of an emerging national cinema.” And his career begins as a film-critic, like those New Wave guys, though, unlike them, he's still one with regular contributions to 24 images; his latest entry was on Serge Giguère (N. 151). Inspired by Gilles Groulx's Le chat dans le sac (1964), Lefebvre's first film Le révolutionnaire (1965) was one of the first landmarks of Québécois cinema. His National Film Board work is as innovative and beautiful as anything by Gilles Carle and Il ne faut pas mourir pour ca (1967) was the first Canadian film to premiere at Cannes. The Harcourt-Lefebvre book explores the L’Âge des images*** (1994-1995) series that was made after Le fabuleux voyage de l’ange (1991), which was aggressively rejected by the critics, and before his lastest effort the TV movie Le manuscrit érotique (2002). Pertaining to his influence, Piers Handling notes, “Many of the new generation of Anglophone filmmakers – among them Atom Egoyan, Jeremy Podeswa, Bill MacGillivray and Bruno Pacheco – have cited Lefebvre as a formative influence.”

Lefebvre’s examines his early film-going experiences in the ‘40s and ‘50s in Snapshots from Québec and discusses them with warmth and passion; the essay itself is divided into helpful sub-headings which themselves form a narrative: Chance and Neccesity, Candid Eye, Cinema Direct, Cinema Verite, Time/Money, Form/Content. Lefebvre speaks kindly of his mother who “judged films on only on criterion: the film was good if it made her laugh or cry.” After the NFB reign of propaganda and folkloric images, according to Lefebvre, “If the pot began to simmer in 1956, especially at the NFB, it was in 1958 that it boiled over with thirteen short films for the television series Candid Eye on the one hand, and the film Les Raquetteurs shot by Gilles Groulx in collaboration with Michel Brault and Marcel Carrière on the other." The most representative film of the cinema direct period is Gilles Groulx’s Golden Gloves (1961) and for cinéma vérité there is Pierre Perrault’s Pour la Suite du Monde (1963) and Claude Jutra’s A Tout Prendre (1964), according to Lefebvre.

Peter Harcourt’s The Music of Light: The Video Work of Jean Pierre Lefebvre is the centerpiece of the book and it is an analysis of the five episode series L’Âge des images; the episodes are Le Pornolithique, L’Écran invisible, Comment filmer Dieu, Mon chien n’est pas mort, and La Passion de l’innocence. Harcourt examines the genesis of Lefebvre aesthetic approach and its impact - “His films combine the formal authority of Michael Snow with the compassionate humanity of Jean Renoir” - and divides his work into three categories: the personal, the political, and the pastoral. Harcourt compares Lefebvre with Jean-Luc Godard as, at the time, they both had difficulty financing films, which result is a turn towards video, and L’Âge des images is contrasted with Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998). The comparison is apt though it might be pushing it as Lefebvre is not as epochal as Jean-Luc Godard, who is described by Raymond Bellour (Trafic) as, “It is through the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard that the history of cinema - understood as the history of the twentieth century – was forever divided.” And on Godard’s magnum opus Histoire(s) du Cinema, Antoine de Baecque writes, “Unrivalled in terms of its ambition, and aesthetically peerless, it is the culmination of our time.” It is worth mentioning here that the Godard lectures at the Conservatory of Cinematographic Art at Concordia University in the late 1970s, which Lefebvre brings up, are in the process of being put together in a book by the publisher Caboose in Montreal.

The videos in the L’Âge des images seem both narratively and thematically interconnected and the scope is as broad and diverse as an examination of the origins of cosmological time to the Clarence Thomas versus Anita Hill sexual harassment hearing (in the interview it is discusses how this came to be). There are appropirations of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s Babes in Toyland (1934) and intertextual references to the Group of Seven. L’Écran invisible is about potential and family, in Comment filmer Dieu Lefebvre interviews his cameraman Lionel Simmons, Mon chien n’est pas mort is about Lefebvre's family pup Kathy, and La Passion de l’innocence is described as being “full of longuers,” which are “quiet, slow moments of contemplation that invite participation by the audience.” In the special 100th issue of 24 Images one of the features got ten Québécois directors to expand on the one film that most marked them: Lefebvre answer is Umberto D. for its humanity in harsh circumstances, its focus on ordinary people, and its emphasis on regular gestures.

Some interesting comments from Lefebvre from the interview include: Lefebvre says that, “I’ve always loved wrestling,” which is strange as it is presented almost as one of the most nauseating activities imaginable in Le Pornolithique where, “I also tried to see things through the eyes of Sammy, my newborn baby." While the idea for La Passion de l’innocence came from what was not happening, "I was waiting to shoot a feature film, waiting and waiting and nothing was happening.”

Like all books on Canadian cinema, Lefebvre provides his own perspective on its necessity,

“Consider as well all the filmmakers who personify the concept of national cinema: Renoir, Ford, Hawks, Buñuel (three nations), Eisenstein, Mizoguchi, Kobayashi, Bergman, Lang, Wenders, Renais, Griffith, De Sica, Fellini … you will notice that not only do the stories they recount originate in their environment, but also the form through which they transmit those stories is a perfect amalgam of the specifics of that envinroment and the attendant emotion: the emotion of belonging to a corner of the world, a river bank, a mountain, a lake, an ocean, a season, another human being.”

The reoccurring complaint is there that “either the Canadian cinema would survive or it will become American.” Harcourt and Lefebvre, in short, argue for a stronger presence of experimental cinema against that of the entertainment ideology of Hollywood and this can viewed by the important role experimental film has in Canada from Café Ex in Ottawa to the Winnipeg Film Group to the Images Festival in Toronto to Media City in Windsor to Phil Hoffman's Film Farm and to Isuma Productions. Lefebvre says it best, “Beyond all doubt, the concept of a national creation, and a national cinema, is of great importance as it is linked to the nation of belonging, which is in turn linked to the instinct for survival.”

*****“Although Robin didn’t much care about the new cinemas that were emerging [in the 1960s] from, say, the previously invisible cultures of Latin America or Canada, the work he was doing on largely the Hollywood product was all part of the burgeoning excitement of the times…. But we continued to have our quarrels. I would get annoyed at some of the more pompous assertions he would make in CineAction!, especially if related to Canadian film.” - Peter Harcourt

This quote from the latest issue of CineAction (N.84) - whose feature is Robin Wood in Celebration, which includes pieces by William MacGillivray (whose Life Classes was important to Wood) and Olof Hedling - asserts a strong impulse to support a burgeoning and over-looked national cinema in opposition to Hollywood. Even though after reading the Lefebvre book one can get the impression that Harcourt feels that cinema both begins and ends with Lefebvre - he even has another book on Lefebvre (Canadian Film Institute, 1981) – my point is that the endeavor is honorable. I first discovered Harcourt as he was already a recognizable name (I remember seeing one of his books at the CFI office in Ottawa) and, what really caught my eye, is that he is the only Canadian brought up in Raymond Durgnat’s seminal text Films and Feelings. There is this sense of validation associated with seeing Canadians positively recognized in the international film community. Like how in the photographer Jeff Wall’s Rainfilled Suitcase (2001), which mounted light-box can be seen in its vivid glory at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the vintage yellow Tim Hortons coffee cup – Timmy’s being one of Canada’s most identifiable products – becomes a symbol of Canadiana within a nondescript scene. Spotting this detail, like noticing the Harcourt reference, is a pleasant recognition of seeing even just a small part of Canada within great work being discussed in a more international setting. The same applies to Timothy Barnard’s introduction to the new edition of André Bazin’s What is Cinema? where he discuses the peculiarities of reading and translating Bazin into French- and English-Canadian.

Not that people have an aversion to Canadian films, well, maybe they do. It is just that it is rarely discussed by the heavyweight film-critics. An example of a ‘heavyweight’ is Dave Kehr who on his indispensable blog contributors from around the world put in their two cents on his “weekly column on film history.” His background as discussed in the long-awaited When Movies Mattered is a post-Sarris focus on the transition from classical to post-classical Hollywood with an emphasis on “filmmakers who built on the past, who seemed dedicated not to trampling on the classical model but trying to reconfigure it,” like Cassavetes, Demme, Scorsese, Schrader and Brooks. It’s almost funny how the “uncharted territory” of his DVD reviews includes Swedish silent-films, the long unavailable work of Naruse Mikio and even in his new “Further Research” column in Film Comment – which features un-canonized directors like John H. Auer - there is hardly ever any references to Canadian cinema. On that note I would like to highlight some note-worthy Canadian DVDs that have recently come out: the Eclipse box set The Actuality Dramas of Allan King, Patricia Rozema’s I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, the long unavailable work of Joyce Wieland on a 5-DVD box set by CFMDC, and Daruma Pictures release of Midi Onodera’s video work.

Even as I write this I realize that maybe the lack of serious critical reflection has to do with both relevancy and quality of Canadian cinema. After attending all of the João Pedro Rodrigues films as part of the New Auteurs series at the TIFF Cinematheque and watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life; it is obvious that they are more formally invigorating and conversation worthy. In To Die Like a Man when Tonia (Fernandos Santos) goes off into the fairytale forest with her boyfriend and the two cross-dressers where they sit down – the screen becomes a roseate tableaux - and listen to Baby Dee’s Cavalry; the effect is hypnotizing. As Brad Deane puts it, it’s cinema. This is a long way away from watching an old tape and sitting on an uncomfortable chair with big clunky headphones at the Film Reference Library. Even Lefebvre writes about his work “What I’ve wanted to insist upon and to apply to my films… is the right to adopt a small scale, to make films that don’t claim to be absolute masterpieces.”

I guess what I am trying to advocate for, at least in my own writing, is a mediation between art-house, Hollywood and Canadian cinema. But my only concern is that I hope studies in it can become a marketable asset, as say, that of being an expert on Blake Edwards as is the friendly Sam Wasson who has two popular books on the subject and who recently came to the Lightbox to introduce Breakfast at Tiffany's. I want to eventually apply to do my Masters in Film Studies at the University of Toronto in the hopes, for now at least, to write about the renegade Québécois filmmaker Gilles Carles; as well, I would like to explore certain key Québécois films and their similarities with the work of Robert Altman; and, what exactly constitutes Québécois film language. I would hope that it would be a rich experience for both myself and for other people to hear and read about. – David Davidson

******Jean Pierre Lefebvre: Vidéaste is divided into the following sections: a preface by Handling; two articles by Lefebvre, the autobiographical Snapshots from Québec and The Concept of National Cinema. The centerpiece of the book is Harcourt’s essay The Music of Light: The Video Work of Jean Pierre Lefebvre on L'Âge des images and there is an interview with the director, his filmography and a selected bibliography.

**The Canadian Director series is part of the TIFF Cinematheque publications that includes books on Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Don Owen, Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault and Allan King; as well, in a different series, books on Jack Chambers, Peter Mettler, and Joyce Wieland. While the Canadian Cinema series, which are extended textual analysis of key Canadian films, has books so far on A History of Violence, Le Déclin de l'empire américain, The Adjuster, A Married Couple, The Far Shore and My Winnipeg. These books are available at the TIFF.Shop.

***The Film Reference Library at the TIFF Bell Lightbox has L'Âge des images I, III, IV and V. Though the FRL will be closed for July and August, you can always set up an appointment with Eve to view their collection. The NFB Mediatheque has both of Lefebvre’s NFB films: Mon amie Pierrette (1967) and Jusqu’au Coeur (1968).

Canadian Cinema (Summer 2011)

It's time to get patriotic over here at Toronto Film Review as I attempt to provide an overview of Canadian cinema – an idea sparked by reading Tom McSorley’s contribution in the International Film Guide 2011 – by grouping together the various elements that constitute it. The four different categories that will be explored are: the first-tier directors, which are the ones that have the most international recognition; the second-tier directors, which are accomplished filmmakers who have yet to cross the border; the directors of short-films; and Québécois cinema.

In Toronto, in anticipation for TIFF 2011 one cannot help but think of the projects that our directors are working on for possible nominees for the Opening Gala and Canada First! so from this ‘first-tier’ category those who have completed films or have ones in production include David Cronenberg, Deepa Mehta, Guy Maddin, Bruce McDonald and Don Shebib. Peter Mettler is editing a new film. Atom Egoyan is now preparing an opera. For the ‘second-tier’ directors, my point of reference is Adam Nayman’s piece in Montage where he discusses with some filmmakers their possible dream projects. The directors on this list include Carl Bessai, Kari Skoglang, Lynne Stopkewich, Ingrid Verninger, David Weaver, David Christensen and Jerry Cioccritti. I would also include here Sarah Polley, Ron Mann, Michael Dowse, Simon Ennis, Jason Eisener, John Greyson, Patricia Rozema, Philip Hoffman, Vincenzo Natali, Sook-Yin Lee, Charles Officer, and Lee Demarbre. Other note-worthy talents that have been highlighted in Cinema Scope include Bruce LaBruce, Daniel Cockburn and Isabelle Lavigne. Pertaining to short films (and some of the directors have gone on to features) there is the First Generation school, with directors from both Ryerson and York, which includes Kazik Radwanski, Nicolás Pereda (who currently has a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives), Chris Chong Chan Fui, Igor Drljaca, Shervin Kermani, and the Vancouver-based Antoine Bourges (who is completing his much-anticipated first full-length feature). These projects in waiting and the short-film directors getting ready for their first full-length feature just goes to show the bustling energy under the radar that should be ready to surface soon.

I don’t think people can talk about Québécois cinema without first acknowledging the important role Cinéma Beaubien plays in projecting their films as well that of the Cinémathèque québécoise; and there is also the Québécois film magazine 24 Images that continuously writes about and supports these filmmakers. In the new issue of 24 Images the feature is Renouveau du Cinema Québécois where they discuss the multifaceted subject of where their cinema is today and, though my attempt is not to convey its complexities here, I want to highlight Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan contribution (he did the feature on Québécois cinema in Cahiers) who writes about the different types of filmmakers. There is the “Québec’s New Wave” of the 1990s: Denis Villeneuve, André Turpin, Arto Paragamian and François Girard. The new auteurs of the 2000s: Denis Côté (who in the issue comments about his Director of Photography and Editor), Maxime Giroux (whose Jo pour Jonathan everyone’s talking about), Rafaël Ouellet, Stéphane Lafleur, Myriam Verreault and Henry Bernadet. While there are outsiders like Sophie Deraspe and Xavier Dolan who make “a cinema more artist.” While others still include Yves-Christian Fournier, Simon Galiero, Simon Lavoie, Simon Sauvé, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and Jacob Tierney. There are also the COOP Video de Montréal filmmakers like Bernard Émond, Catherine Martin and Robert Morin. There were some Québec short films that were brought to Toronto this summer that were part of the program Québéc Gold. It is worth restating that Donigan Cumming’s Too Many Things and Theodore Ushev’s Lipsett Diaries are both masterpieces. And after all of that if there is one Québécois director that I have missed and that I think is making some of the most fantastic films (C.R.A.Z.Y., The Young Victoria) in the entire country it is Jean-Marc Vallée whose new film Café de flore I am especially looking forward to see. - David Davidson