Two in Red

Franscope and American Color

One tradition we've sadly lost: the "first film in color." That second debut that usually marked the moment a director became more commercially viable (though nowadays we have a new tradition, exclusive to older filmmakers--the "first film on video"--that usually marks the beginning of a looser, less commercially-minded period). As The Red Desert, as in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, so in L’Aîné des Ferchaux (sometimes called Magnet of Doom in English), Jean-Pierre Melville's first film in color, a film set largely (and largely unknown) in America. Melville's other color films are designed in this sort of funeral parlor hue that gives everything a sense of twilight. A haze, a prolonged decay that permeates the image and brings out the green in a person's skin.

The images all have exclamation points, as if Melville's thinking "America! New York!" The excited way street signs and motels are framed gives it a sort of home movie quality: a little movie and a big one, at the same time. That sort of mad love for American culture only a foreigner (usually a Frenchman) can have, the kind that leads Jean-Paul Belmondo, in the scene above, to punch out two GIs for calling Frank Sinatra a "wop." Melville is a man of symbols, but they tend to be symbols of a fairly minute nature: clothing, cars, the way objects (cigarettes, pistols, hats) are held and handled. L’Aîné des Ferchaux seems to be working on the largest level of any Melville movie--the symbols it works with are fairly large: cities, popular references, thousands of dollar bills raining down into a canyon. The landscape shots look like sketches for the Western Melville always hoped to make; the project was never realized, but with L’Aîné des Ferchaux we get little glimpses of, like in the sequence where Belmondo kisses a beautiful hitch-hiker against the backdrop of a stern blue sky and imposing rocks, a river rushing along nearby.

"The only necessary thing would be an organizing intelligence. Wexler's. And the camera. The characters would relate directly to the eye. They would make their own context. It would be impossible for a modern audience not to see a resonance with what had been happening in the streets. With what was happening in the world. It would be documentary fiction."
--Jeremy M. Davies, Rose Alley

Transmissions

Looking through my computer, I found a folder of still frames I took from DVDs a few years ago. It was a good habit to have. I should get back into it.

The Cotton Club is Francis Ford Coppola's best film. I bring it up now because Tetro is opening in theaters soon. It's good, but really The Cotton Club's the only Coppola that's worth a damn. Well, maybe Bram Stoker's Dracula, too.

There's no betrayal in The Godfather, just pretty pictures -- but you can feel it in Maurice Hines' face and understand what's it's like to be the traitor in Gregory Hines' eyes. Richard Gere expresses more through his cornet than Marlon Brando ever could with his mumbling mouth. There are no moments in any of Coppola's other films like the Hoofers' Club tap-off, the screen test, the dance club slap. There is no tenderness like the half-second Gregory Hines kisses Loretta McKee's neck when they reunite after years apart, and no emotion more vivid than the tap dance number the Hines brothers share when they reunite in a Harlem club. No speech like the one Lawrence Fishburne delivers at the bar after being fucked over by the mob. It's Coppola's truest film.

The Private Life of Billy Wilder

There's a moment in Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon I'm very fond of. Audrey Hepburn is the jeune fille whose father, Maurice Chevalier (who else in Wilder's Paris?), is a private eye specializing in trailing cheating wives. More often than not, they're cheating on their husbands with Gary Cooper's notorious American playboy, with whom Hepburn becomes infatuated after seeing his image in a surveillance photograph. After she overhears one of her father's clients plotting to shoot Cooper in the hotel where he meets the man's wife nightly, she decides to rescue him. Sneaking across a balcony, she arrives at the window outside Cooper's suite.

There's a close-up of her face. The expression is vaguely startled. The next shot is of Cooper and the wife, but the camera is not placed where Hepburn would be. Instead, it's startlingly close to the couple, who are dancing slowly to a hired Gypsy band. The shot is only a few second long, but it's the closest Wilder would get to any of his characters until The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Wilder, whose camera is always judging, is here completely without judgment. The lovers are covered by a warm shadow. The details of their skin and their clothing are tactile; exact, but not caricaturistic. It's not that Wilder is letting his guard down--it feels more like he realizes that here, it's useless. It's an inelegant moment. This is something wit and cynicism can't affect, and he lets the camera linger a little, before the next shot comes and the comedy resumes.

Wilder is portrayed too often as a cynic. He appears to be one on the surface; the joke, of course, is on the people who believe in surfaces. It's the sort of thinking that Wilder despised above all: people who see themselves and others as types. The romantic Wilder is not a "secret Wilder"-- it's a persona hidden in plain sight. It was Wilder who directed Avanti!, one of the greatest screen loves--one that negates all notions of what a romance should be or how it should develop.

Staving Off Death

Does anyone even make these movies any more? Those little dramas? Apparently Michael Keaton does. Keaton, who is an under-appreciated actor and now an under-appreciated director. The Merry Gentleman could be a grayer (but more lightweight) James Gray (in palette, in feeling), or maybe a crime film by Shinji Aoyama, with the sort of indefinite ending that marked many Japanese films from the early 2000s. This careful movie, all Brooksian drama, every shot drawing out its beginning and end, every take a deliberation on the dialogue. There is something subtly subversive about filling a Cinemascope frame with people so completely ordinary--a little frumpy, neither attractive nor well-spoken, who sound heavy-handed when they try to say what they think is important and spend most of the time in winding, half-mumbled conversations that seem to be protracting something, as if talk is just a way to stave off death, which comes quickly and uncruelly.

There's the Glaswegian who seems to attract ill-fitting men: two cops and a killer. One her husband, one a suitor, and the third completely mysterious in his intentions. There are people who aren't bad but never do good and people who may very well be bad but are full of the promise of good deeds; actually, there's no real difference between the two. I think of the violent husband, whose profession of newfound faith sounds so hollow, and the inarticulate (or poorly self-articulating) characters, sometimes just humiliating to watch, whose silences and pauses become so heavy that this movie ("an actor's film," they'll say) seems like an attack on the idea of conversation. Or maybe conversion.

What is What is the 21st Century?

I had some ideas, some vague notions. I played around with sounds and with pictures, and I took a lot of notes, but I wasn't ready to put them together. So I thought, "I better make something of this. I better start doing something." And What is the 21st Century? is that something. It's a column I'll be doing, weekly. The first one is up, and it's hopeful--the sort of hope only Jason Statham can bring.

What's it about? I'm not sure. The idea is that I'll try to answer the titular question a little bit every week. I know that a complete answer is impossible, which is something very hopeful. There's no hope in concrete goals--or, really, it might just be that concrete goals are too daunting. Just doing is easy; trying to accomplish has a note of despair. It might not even stay a column. It might become something else, moving away from words and still images.

Recent Failures

From a post intended for Film of the Month Club:

"Who is this image by?"

"Hong Sang-soo, of course."

"How do you know?"

"Well, there's a line right down the middle." Which is true. There's a bit of physics to Hong; he can warp space. He can make a tabletop five miles wide. This is what he does as a director: he creates borders. This is true of his editing--nowhere has the word cut been more appropriate in describing the joining of two moving pictures--but even truer of his images. And they are images and never imagery, which is why frame captures tend to fail in capturing a Hong image. He's interested in the dramatics of a moving picture, not in its drama. There's no drama, or understandable emotion, to the image above; it's just two men sitting at a table eating and talking. Yet, within the actual take, within the film itself, there is a drama--something that only the viewer can see or feel. The viewer watches and thinks: "Never have two people sitting so close together sat so far apart."

This is Hong: when two people look each other in the face, there isn't a sense of connection; each is simply looking at the face of the other. This isn't a single action, but two actions that happen to be synchronous. A conversation is not one thing, but two people talking in turn.

From a plastic angle, a nearly identical image. It was taken in 1957 at the South Pole; the men in the photo are arctic scientists, characters more at home in a Zanussi film than one by Hong. There are other differences: the men are not engaging with each other--each is working at his separate task. And, yet, by placing themselves equally in the same framing (the photo, staged, was taken with the camera on a timer), they reinforce the idea that, though they're working on different things, they are working together. There's no dividing line; the lamp at the center seems to radiate a unity that imbues both of them.

Also:


From an abandoned post for Tisch Film Review:


There is, of course, the film, and then there’s the filmmaker. The Woman on the Beach presents us with a troubling case. We don’t know, for instance, how much of a “Jean Renoir film” it really is. The story goes, as it often does, that RKO had large portions of it re-shot and re-edited after some poor test screenings. Which in turn leads us to ask whether it’s Jean Renoir we admire or “the films of Jean Renoir.” Because at first glance an admiration for Renoir above all would compel us reject The Woman on the Beach. This is maybe the only time in Renoir’s career this question is seriously posed, though it pops up in almost all of the films of Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray: "What do we admire when we admire a movie’s director?" Because it’s when a director is at his or her most compromised that we often have our suspicions (whether positive or negative) about them validated (and The Woman on the Beach is a film of suspicions, both of the characters and the audience, who, as in Renoir’s La Nuit du Carrefour, are turned into detectives). The ”least exemplary” work usually provides a better understanding of a director than their best known one. I'm thinking of a hundred films: Yasujiro Ozu's Dragnet Girl, King Vidor's Metaphor, John Ford's Seven Women, Josef von Sternberg's Jet Pilot, Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, Richard Linklater's Bad News Bears, Arthur Penn's Mickey One, Francois Truffaut's A Gorgeous Kid Like Me, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, etc., etc., etc. Each one is a decoder ring that deciphers some previously invisible aspect of the director's other films.

[...]

The reason we said Renoir was great or Minnelli was a master was first and foremost because of the movies and what they suggested of their greatness. We didn't know right away that Renoir was "intelligent" (Hollywood is run by intelligent people); his movies suggested an intelligence. Renoir came first, but we discovered him last. So we don't admire Renoir as a deep-focus tracking shot, which is, after all, the result of the work of numerous technicians and actors. We admire the thinking. What attracted Renoir to the deep-focus tracking shot was the complexity of the drama it could give a moving image, the subtleties that could occur within a single take—the same reason directors from Mizoguchi to To have been attracted to it. But we should remember that what attracted these directors was not the shot itself—the fetishization of a certain framing—but the idea of a dynamic moving image, that when you pointed a camera at something, it wouldn’t just be a single idea (a door opening, a car pulling up), but several social and emotional forces playing out in a way they couldn’t in a still photo. The wide shot was simply the easiest way of achieving this dynamic. So, if the American Renoir includes more close-ups and medium shots than the French Renoir—imposed studio style—it does not make the images any less dynamic. What happens within a single shot of Charles Bickford’s face as Robert Ryan gives Joan Bennet a cigarette in The Woman on the Beach is as complicated as anything in Boudu Saved From Drowning. It’s an image that grows in ambiguity with every viewing of the film.

The Sunchaser (Michael Cimino, 1996; photographed by Doug Milsome)

The Greatest Civil War on Earth (Tian-lin Wang, 1961; photographed by Luying He)

Six Great American Films, 1978 - 1988

...All the Marbles (1981)
This was Robert Aldrich's last movie, and I like to believe that Aldrich died happy, knowing he'd made it. Along with Abel Ferrara's Cat Chaser, made, at the tail end of the decade, this is one of the last true examples of film noir. It's simultaneously shadowy and colorful, in every sense. But what do you expect from Joseph Biroc, who gave the world the image-monuments of Forty Guns and the careful delirium of Confessions of an Opium Eater? And you end up wondering the kind of movies Peter Falk would've been in if he was born 20 years earlier--him and Harry Dean Stanton. How many bits of 80-minute grit could they have cranked out in the post-war years?

Big Wednesday (1978)
History, tugging like a hand on your sleeping shoulder. John Milius's best film, and one of the few epic films. The mise-en-scene is Vincente Minelli and John Ford arguing about a decade; you're never sure if the 1960s were a tragic romance or some great folly. Waves crash, punches are thrown, mistakes are made and lived through. Grandly sincere, or sincerely grand, this is Milius's attempt to make The Great American Movie. The attempt is a failure, but the result is a success regardless. That's the funny thing about movies: though the intentions behind them play a role, intentions aren't the final result. Yes, a film is a gesture, but it is more importantly a film. The writer only writes what he or she thinks up, while the moment you start running film through a camera, you let the world in. What language can't communicate, cinema wholeheartedly accepts, sometimes without us even noticing.

The Driver (1978)
The vague and the painstaking. The soundtrack is a terse musique concrete composition for voices, squealing tires and slamming doors. The driver of title is played by Ryan O'Neal, an actor without temperature, neither cool nor warm. Maybe that's why Stanley Kubrick managed to put him to such good use: Kubrick's cinema is climate-controlled, which leads many people to wrongly assume that it's cold. Walter Hill is an abstractor (this film, 48 Hrs.) and a parabalist (Streets of Fire, Crossroads, Johnny Handsome), which is more or less the same thing. To take something complicated (a history, a morality) and turn it into a parable is not very different from taking a real thing and, through its image, making something direct: a color is easier to understand at first glance than a street, the cold light of a headlamp is simpler than an oncoming car. But, of course, no two things are completely alike: the parable has only a limited meaning, while the image is bottomless.

Modern Romance (1981)
The present hasn't been too kind to Albert Brooks, but history will be kinder: we'll someday say "Brooksian" with the same ambiguous clarity as "Hawksian." Fed by a distinctly American sense of compromise, that sour taste that accompanies every sweetness, Brooks' cinema is not one of contradictions: the world is complicated, but it isn't fractured. Every happy thing is sad, and every sad thing is a little funny; there is no clear separation in our experience of things. It's through focusing on certain elements, through the sieves of our memories (or the editing of a film), that we are able to look back and distinctly say that an event was tragic or that it was good. It's the basic premise of Brooks' later Defending Your Life, in which the newly dead must argue that scenes from their lives display their strengths, even though it can just as easily be said that they show them at their worst. Absolute happiness is an illusion: it's just something you claim to win an argument. Modern Romance is a rejection of traditional dramatics, a serious approach to comedy. And always unflinchingly intelligent.

The Moderns (1988)
An incomparably passionate film by the most brilliant American director of the 1980s. The Jazz Age is to Alan Rudolph what the Belle Epoque was to Jean Renoir: an era of creativity that inspires more creativity through reflection. A film about the ideas of an era more than its specifics. Or, to rephrase, a film that takes inspiration from the ideas of an era to create something new. Keith Carradine is Keith Carradine is a painter, Wallace Shawn is Wallace Shawn is a gossip columnist, John Lone is John Lone is a businessman and Kevin J. O'Connor is some dream image of Ernest Hemingway. Here the elements that are used haphazardly or lazily by other directors become rigorous and expressive. Rudolph stands with Fassbinder--and now Hong Sang-soo--as one of the few poets of the zoom lens: what is done with a jerky hand-operated zoom in a brief sequence in The Moderns is more beautiful than most directors' camera movements. The use of black-and-white historical footage is genuine quotation instead of a lazy attempt to set a mood.

Paradise Alley (1978)
I refuse to believe that any movie directed by Sylvester Stallone isn't at the very least interesting. Sometimes, as in the curious case of Paradise Alley, the movie's much more than that: it's great. Case in the sense that Paradise Alley is isolated from its contemporaries and seemingly the rest of film history; curious in the sense that every film is the result of a set of choices, and the choices here are, as if often the situation with a great movie, infuriating--certainly more infuriating than Big Wednesday, and possibly more infuriating than The Moderns. A movie that seems to belong to no time and no mindset. Lit with the kind of neons that bathe a body but designed in the earth tones that make every character feel like a part of the room they're in, it's set in 1940s New York--more of a location than a period, just one of those places any story can be set as long as it's costumed accordingly (like "Morocco").

As a director, Stallone is always acting. Every one of his movies isn't directed by Sylvester Stallone, but by Stallone playing some directing archetype; he's clearly playing a different character behind the camera of every film. So maybe Paradise Alley is his best movie because Sylvester Stallone, Director of Paradise Alley is his most original character, the ordinary visionary he'd re-use for the first half of Staying Alive.

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008; photographed by Eric Gautier)