From December 3rd-5th, Yale will be hosting a "European Film in 1919" conference that's the program of the year. Nearly everything will be shown in 35mm: among other things, that includes Feuillade's complete Tin Minh, Kuleshov's The Project of Engineer Prite, Lubitsch's The Oyster Princess, Gance's J'Accuse in a new 161 min restoration, Dreyer's The President, L'Herbier's Rose-France, Sjostrom's The Outlaw and His Wife, and the film Dreyer said he learned the most from, Stiller's Hr Arne's Treasure.
The complete program, which includes many other films and a series of talks, can be found here. Donald Sosin and Philip Carli will share accompaniment.
***
Charles Silver, who seems to curate most of MoMA's classic Hollywood series, is keeping a blog for his weekly "Auteurist History of Film" here. Charles, who's been extremely generous in helping me do research the past few years, has been at MoMA for about 40 years: his blog includes not just introductions for the films, but reminiscences about some of the people behind them (he's told me about helping Walsh maneuver during his own retrospective while Walsh pretended he could still see). Here's a bit on Blanche Sweet.
***
Alain Resnais talks to Le Monde about Les herbes folleshere. Among other things, he talks about how he doesn't shoot a shot without asking himself what Breton would think ("yes, I'm completely absorbed in surrealism, it's like when you put milk in the fridge and everything starts to take its smell"), how he tries to make movies by doing the opposite of what he did the time before, and about how his latest film is about two people who imagine themselves into a story and relationship they never should have been in, purely by force of will.
But I'm holding this part closest:
"The film closes with an enigmatic phrase: "Mama, when I'm a cat, will I be able to eat cat food?"("Maman, est-ce que quand je serai un chat, je pourrai manger des croquettes?"). I love cats, they're one of the only animals who possess the faculty of the imagination. A cat can keep himself amused, all alone, with just a ball of yarn."
At MoMA last night was a curated selection of home movies; two highlights, in extremely compromised form (the first has lost its colors, the second its crisp grain that's its defining feature), both compared to Citizen Kane, are below. If the second doesn't work, play full-screen. The charm, as in almost all the films, is watching non-actors restage, or even stage, their own lives. Also included last night: Joan Crawford nude, a 30-year old Hitchcock wagging his plumpness at his wife and newborn daughter as he grins, and pecks them on the cheek and lips.
10.21.2009
Jean Renoir on French Cancan (my translation):
"I'm sorry not to be able to come to New York for the premiere of French Cancan, not so much because of French Cancan, which I know I by heart, but because I miss New York. I've had to return to Paris for the editing of another film. I confess that I'm spending some very lovely hours head to head with Ingrid Bergman, who smiles at me very nicely from the depths of my moviola.
The subject of French Cancan is determinedly infantile and as unsurprising as that of a Western. I feel myself more and more drawn to these types of stories, of stories that are feeble enough to leave me free to occupy myself in filming them. Without being a rocket-scientist, I know that this consists in registering movements. The movements that I like aren't necessarily those of a galloping horse or of cars driving in ravines. The small gesture of a girl fixing her hair is enough for me, or the breathing of a beautiful woman sleeping naked in her bed, or a cat stretching out. In French Cancan, I've attempted some movements of that sort, with Francoise Arnoul schlepping her laundry basket, with the petty merchants of the rue de Paris, with the dancers practicing. And why shouldn't I confess that I'm completely in love with the laundry girl Nini?
This won't be enough for certain viewers. There is right now a serious counter-offensive of bourgeois romanticism–that is, moreover, in disguise. Ruy Blas has donned the blue overalls of a factory worker or the jacket of an office employee.
Around 1870, a group of young people that's been called The Impressionists ever since attempted to liberate art from all traces of literature. After 50 years of trying, they led their public to understand that, in a painting or in a piece of music, the subject is secondary. I remember my father having a fit over one of his paintings showing a young girl lowering her head that a merchant had thought it commercially expeditious to title The Thought. Furious, Renoir proclaimed: “In my paintings, nobody thinks.”
It's a very old battle which the artists have often won by using hypocrisy as their weapon. The painters of the Renaissance escaped it by calling a study of their model brest-feeding a re-born Virgin and child. Maybe I'll also one day be obliged to disguise my poor characters as intellectuals and, to follow the taste of the day, to burden my future little laundry girls with horrendous problems. All of that doesn't have any importance, I mean to my films and some others. If I'm making use of such great examples, it's only to illustrate my theory."
***
From a year or two ago, a photo-essay on Mizoguchi's paranoid closed-and-open spaces is now up at The Auteurs.
This rounds up a whole series on Mizoguchi done over a few years:
“Man is a creature of habit, and the task of the artist is to try to break these habits.”— Jean Renoir
My friend Miriam has graciously asked me for some words on comedy as part of some margin notes to her programming of Artists and Models, maybe, a film I haven't seen beyond the opening 5 minutes of the Walsh version, and Ishtar, a childhood favorite. Research curtailed by a stolen laptop and aimlessness, thoughts tentative as always, whatever follows was written in appreciation of having something to do, and entirely for my benefit in writing it. And possibly one day reading it.
A short-stood theory of comedy, or a type: a logic that makes perfect sense when it never should. Inevitably, as in tragedy, one man's intentions are at odds with the world around him. A man trips on a banana by setting up one logic--a swarthy businessman hoofing down the street--to have it broken by the physical laws of the world conspiring against him unknowingly. And the joke works because the audience expects it as much as the businessman (or Sturges hero), who means to walk like he owns the world and turns out to be its pawn, doesn't.
Likewise, the joke's always on those who try to explain it; the idea of defining comedy is funny. Cary Grant's face in The Awful Truth is, as always in McCarey's domestic picaresques, given ample time to react, and is funny; ascribing logic to him would be illogical except that what's so preposterous about his expressions isn't their total preposterousness, but also their logic--perfectly logical reactions brought to their breaking point. What's really funny is that the audience knows why he looks why he does, as if there could be any reason to look ridiculous. But eventually everything looks ridiculous.
Tati's comedies, like Keaton's and Bresson's (L'Argent a desperately funny film, down to the gangster's hand reaching in frame to slap his girlfriend's centered ass, as they do in movies), are established in mechanical ballets, logical systems that show up sense--and in Playtime, all of civilization with its rules and rulered space--as nonsense. Tati jumps up to grab some restaurant decoration nobody else can reach and gets it by pulling down the ceiling; Buster Keaton, in The General, sets off a cannonball at completely the wrong moment and hits an enemy train anyway as it turns a curve straight into the explosion; the kids in Mon Oncle who lob people into poles just by whistling; a hand in Pickpocket reaching for a purse (or holding it?) only for another hand--the law's--to grab it as it would grab the money; the map by the elevator in Playtime that shows a series of color-coded lines criss-crossed in every direction: What's funny in all these cases is the world going to hell as logically and efficiently as possible.
Pickpocket's ingenious heist-as-waltz is funny because, as a friend puts it, "it doesn't show what's natural but necessary," in typical Bresson style--and because as a waltz, half the dancers don't know they're dancing. The gag where a thief replaces a woman's bag with a newspaper could be out of Chaplin, Bresson's hero, based as it is in one person knowing a total stranger so perfectly in their movements--Bresson's characters, like Chaplin's, are human machines, totally deliberate and expressive in the smallest motions--that their every gesture can be exploited. And the simple motion of a hand reaching in frame and fucking with a girl whose activities in a train station are as much routine as the thieves', indicates an entire thought process of the thief, never articulated, but filmed diagrammatically as a textbook guide. What's funny, beyond an unlikely event shown matter-of-factly as clockwork, is that it exists almost purely as a signifier, not what's natural, but essential: signifying an entire train of thought, signifying a particular event in the Platonic form of a manual guide and operating as smoothly as the tracking shot that follows the bag passed among thieves into one's coat at the back of the line. Signifiers, inevitably, are funny, for being as precise (the connotation of a signifying detail, a cigar or a fanny pack) as they are abstract (standing in for an entire type), as meaningful (a light-switch switched-off in The Smiling Lieutenant signaling sex) as they are reductive (but just sex--Lubitsch, like Bresson, uses such small gestures as language to be decoded).
Lubitsch built an entire form out of the sly innuendo of synecdoche; a slack, sunken fat man with a camera slung to his belly for decoration who plods on-screen in Playtime and stares at the camera like some actual tourist popping by the movie set to see what it's for, is funny, not for doing anything, but for doing nothing--he's a type, precisely a schlub in every wrinkle of his clothes and lumpen face--and a type of schlub that's impossibly funny: swollen and collapsed, inflated and deflated, grandiose and totally pathetic, every schlub and this schlub, who couldn't be anyone else but himself. Tati, who always finds uninteresting people really interesting, clearly likes him for being both unassuming and completely, obliviously distinctive in an anonymous city--another man's intentions unknowingly at odds with the world around him. His costume, with clothes for five more schlubs, says everything anyone could possibly know about him, a fat man whittled down to form.
Signifiers, and types, pigeonholing standard personalities and philosophies into preposterous patterns of dress and comportment--carrying the logic of a man's beliefs to totally illogical ends--leave, at the same time, everything to the viewer's imagination to anticipate ridiculous scenes. Standard schools of comedy say that comedy is surprise--but, as when Keaton's train track leaves a train nowhere to go but its own doom, comedy forces viewers to expect the absolute absurd.
One smartass hillbilly jig--
Thought it was happy every after When it all begun Wife askin' if I loved her And if I'd seen the films of Bergman
--isn't enough without a tradition:
Loved women, booze, and cows And skippin' to the loo Yes everything was happy Till I read Albert Camus
What's funny isn't even a hick bomb defuser--deflected expectations, irony and hypocrisy, Rita Hayworth made to make out with a turtle by virtue of rear projection, in both senses--as Marxist farmers--confirming hopes that art and theory be applied to life.
You may say that art ain't real When yar out there with yar corn But try not having a hard-on When yar watchin' hardcore porn
A man falls on a banana peel and his basic intention of walking is countermined by colder intentions of the universe. But Tex Avery cartoons are funny in reverse--the characters' intentions made physically manifest at the cost of every physical law. In Avery, the logic that makes perfect sense barring habitual expectations can be internal--a wolf's phallic contortions, or a prison-suit's lines jumping off the prisoner--as in Rubens, a glance carrying physical properties (a spot-light in King-Size Canary); or structural--Northwest Hounded Police's impossible premise setting the internal logic of the film that Droopy, like God but boreder, will appear wherever a wolf goes, as grandma does in Red Hot Riding Hood. But the logic can also be purely graphic--the long shots of an erected canon in Blitz Wolf and an endless free-fall in Heckling Hare making tedium of grandiosity and terror--a wolf running off the celluloid frame, or around a title car into the forest and back in Swing Shift Cinderella--a cat piling two blocks on top of each other in rapid succession to scale a window ledge; or musical, as in Deputy Droopy, in which every hoot and holler is nearly precipitated by the soundtrack.
Played-at anarchists like Bruce Conner, the Marx Brothers, Howard Hawks, and Frank Tashlin--Hobbesians--speculate unbridled instinct as apocalyptic freedom from codes of decency and reason and, in Tashlin's case, society's branding human roles like soup cans (the ending of The Disorderly Orderly)--while Hawks famously takes his dramas to see how these codes can be implemented and obeyed. Kubrick finds instinct and reason equally proposterous for taking the guise of the other. The funniest characters are always the most moral and the least, because anybody can recognize themselves in either; Tati's target's reason; Avery's is instinct.
Dialectics and distinctions are essential to comedy; Avery as much as Tati is the master of the type, whittled down to form just so. The ultimate joke of Avery's masterpiece Little Rural Riding Hood is that after all the preposterous oppositions--the innocent fairy tale with a bunch of hick actors who just want to get laid; the hick wolf lead then sent to a nightclub metropolis where sex is in the air, and air only, as the debonair innuendo of curling mustaches and sinuous legs; the sinuous legs of the rather titular chanteuse matched with the hick in overalls trying to keep his eyeballs in his head, leaping erect in every direction, and pummeling himself in the head with a sledgehammer as if to keep from going crazy by going insane--the ultimate joke's that all these dialectics, all these internal logics brought to preposterous, and completely understandable, conclusions, all just offer two forms of expressing the same sensations. Fear and desire are expressed in identical foot-stomping hoots of rage (the wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood looking the same chasing skirt as he does running from her sexpot grandma); the chanteuse's snaking dance and the hick's bent-metal responses both meaning sex; the urban wolf's violent and nonchalant safeguarding of his cousin more or less the same as his cousin's self-directed rages that lead him to need safeguarding; the urban wolf being one expression of pure sex, wrapped in leather and mink, as the rural wolf's another, wrapped in nothing: and all these characters being parodies of parodic stereotypes, and complete celebrations of them. What's funniest in Little Rural Riding Hood, as in Shakespeare's sex comedies, is that it's impossible not to sympathize with any of the idiots on display, not for their ridiculously precise and precisely ridiculous forms, but for the fact that they've all got their all-too familiar reasons.
In comedy, everyone's got their reducto ad absurdum reasons; Wallace Stevens' "the civillest of odours" with which a girl hopes to win an evil giant's heart, is funny for nailing poetry's reasons as beauty and decency (fairness vs. fairness) and meaning as not only florid impossibilities, but irreconcilable florid impossibilities; the old rush poster proclaiming "Still a virgin? JOIN SAE" is funny for offering all the same frat-reasons in exactly the wrongest way.
Jerry Lewis, by any of these standards, doesn't qualify as funny, but something else: installation art? Where funny people have their logic and reasons, Lewis has almost none, except to act exactly the opposite as he should. The opening of The Ladies Man finds Jerry running in fright from gorgeous women trying to seduce him, the joke being that everyone's acting nonsensically for no real reason, or perhaps that Lewis likes any excuse, even a film he's making, to get beautiful girls to chase him down. What follows is a series of nonsequiturs and, as usual, deliberate inconsistencies and incongruities, from goon-Jerry to cherub-Jerry, scenes of inexplicable embarrassments and even more inexplicable wish-fulfillments (a typical pattern for his films). Where the Looney Toons animators, including Tashlin, make a mockery of their form by showing characters who live in painted frames and montages, Lewis' best gags (as director) don't so much break the fourth wall as establish it: the repeated joke in The Bellboy of rituals performed impossibly fast between a cut to somewhere else; the dollhouse in The Ladies Man; the microphone gag in the same film that leaves a crown of angry sycophants yelling silently at the camera; the final joke in The Pansy that he's Jerry Lewis and didn't get hurt and is standing in a film set for The Pansy; the casual tracking shot down to a free-range airplane's lower deck where an ancient army is rowing through the air in Cracking Up--all these gags work not by insisting on viewer complicity by revealing it, as in Avery, but in insisting on a strict division (which Avery always crossed) between the real world and the inexplicable one on-screen. As parodies, they play like parodies of the modern condition, a man caged and stranded for an audience and struggling to express himself when there's nothing but physical laws to express--if that--a la Beckett or Francis Bacon.
Which is Jerry's genius--the most expressive man in history never able to express himself, flailing to a patient camera and patient admirers in the room around him as they wait--as in Laurel and Hardy's Big Business--for him to finish a performance piece without end. In his way, Lewis is closer to contemporary Tsai-Ming Liang than any other filmmaker, their films both about people in closed spaces trying to find anything, hallucinated or real, any way, to connect to in ritual. The closest corrollary for the long shot of Jerry trying to fit a man's hat on his head is the almost identical shot in Tsai's new Visage of a model blinking and waiting as make-up's applied to her (rather titular) face.
Obviously, I haven't seen many Jerry Lewis movies.
Not very funny, but somehow great comedy despite everything--as if Lear's fool got a play of his own with the Lear family congratulating him between monologues--Lewis speaks sentences like Charlie Parker plays melodies--only Shakespeare could probably weave such webs of total nonsense from the simplest prompts. The real butt of Jerry's joke definitely isn't Jerry, but normality, never seen, except, perhaps, in the peasant-faced lovers he struggles to impress long after they've hinted he's their one true love.
Lancelot du Lac will never be funny, but in the right mood, it's perfectly comic: a parade of clashing armor, deadly skirmishes fought by knight-suits with only a colored flag to suggest an entire personality. The comedy is humanity having to express itself (the noblest aims and basest jealousies) so inhumanely on every level. Inevitably, the comic view is cosmic: being able to abstract familiar things to types and patterns and blatant inconsistencies. Renoir's and Lubitsch's and Ophuls' films are just as despairing as Bresson's, maybe more so because the jokes don't alleviate the despair. Orson Welles, who over and over posited the artist's work as a comedian's--hijacks and hijinks--went out insisting on parody as the highest form of art--or the only form of art. Pound called himself a satirist (taking a beat from Dante); Joyce said he just wanted readers to find Ulysses "damn funny." Silence, exile, and punning. Metempsychosis: and one thing, punned, is everything else. There aren't dialectics and distinctions but those people invent on farms and cities. Probably everything's funny, among, and usually with, other qualities.
For supplement, an old, very German interview with Douglas Sirk at Bright Lights, with lines like:
"There is no tradition in the United States. In anything. It was different in New York, which was highly Europeanized. But California was a mixture of Mexicans, early settlers, people who had been in the Pacific during World War II or Korea. It was open. Your wife could go to the supermarket in her bathing suit. When we came, there was no industry at all. Just blue skies, no smog. Of course, after the war, the picture changed completely. But before, everything was movies. And you have no idea how this shaped your life. The movie stars were a strange aristocracy. If Lana Turner walked down the street to buy dark underwear, Hedda Hopper would tell all about it. It was so primitive, and at the same time it was so pleasant. We liked America in spite of everything. Europe was so old, so burdened with guilt complexes. California was a center for mass art. "
and
"In All That Heaven Allows the town is shown as being arranged around the church steeple. You don't see them going to church, because that would be too much on the nose. But even that church is a prison, just like the homes, which are their cages. People ask me why there are so many flowers in my films. Because these homes are tombs, mausoleums filled with the corpses of plants. The flowers have been sheared and are dead, and they fill the homes with a funeral air."
and
"Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands. And there was a certain dialectic at work in his casting, especially after Magnificent Obsession. This film he did not understand at all. But after it, I used him as a straight, good-looking American guy. A little confused, but well-meaning. In the novel — in Pylon — that reporter is a complex character, interwoven perhaps too much into the other world, the world of the flyers. I wanted to use him as a drab guy, with no experience but his shitty job in his drab, shitty office. Then he falls in love with these gypsies of the air. He wants to find out about their life. He's fascinated. He begins to imagine. He is the outsider looking up into the prison of the air. Because up there, in those planes, is a prison too. These flyers are trying to leave the prison of society — which was terrible after the war. They think they are escaping into the air. But we are all prisoners, into the final prison, which is the grave, and death. This is something that I don't think Rock understood, but for his part, as the outsider, his confusion as an actor helped. There is always in the films a dialectic — between the imprisoned group, and the one who wants to come inside."
Roberto Rossellini's last film, experimental documentary, his Playtime and possibly best film, Le centre Georges Pompidou or whatever its title is is now available for download here.
Above: Two movie-hallucinations in Visage and Les Herbes Folles
I'll no longer be writing for The Auteurs: it's an amiable parting. There will, hopefully, be another project coming up and screenings of some videos; we'll see. If anybody would like to commission me to write on anything, I'm available trekking coast to coast. Meanwhile, some old articles should be published at The Auteurs over the next few weeks, a link to an old one on The Sun Shines Bright is here, and there's the coverage there and here I did for Cannes. For the hell of it, another subjective, mostly unsubstantiated list of favorite and otherwise recent movies from Cannes and cineplexes with links where available--mostly, for the sake of advocacy (Tsai). Not quite ranked. Not included are all the greats from Cannes restorations (Red Shoes, Accident, Brighter Summer Day etc.). Among the missed, so far: Tetro, Beaches of Agnes, Year One, Pelham, The Girlfriend Experience, Moon, Three Monkeys, etc. Starred titles are ones, for whatever reason, I missed part(s) of.
Best, below, are all the back-boned women on-top, in control of their own movies; Resnais' camera, in Les herbes folles, even lurches back at Sabine Azema's gaze as if struck by lightning-vision. As Megan Fox (sleek body, good transmission, no brakes) humps machines hump-trumping her, and Paz de la Huerta makes the ultimate apparatus twice-over (for Noe and Jarmusch), 2009 looks a year of actresses: Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell, Tilda Swinton in Julia, Giovanna Daddi in Le Streghe, Jeanne Balibar in Ne Change Rien, Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank, Kim Hye-ja in Mother, Kristen Stewart making some suburban geek fantasy her own in Adventureland, Melanie Laurent in Inglourious Basterds, Nina Hoss in Yella and Jerichow, and most of all, 6 year-old Manelle Driss in Father of My Children.
Masterpiece
Les Herbes Folles (Resnais) -- A painting stands in for the sky; a movie theater for the past. Like all great Resnais, Les Herbes Folles takes place in a museum of art inspired by reality; all imaginings and reimaginings for Resnais, as for James, are like art, playful reinterpretations, and very funny. Will hopefully write more if there's a venue.
Yella/Jerichow (Petzold) -- a diptych. Petzold's favorite shot is the profile: a mug shot that traps the character in place (as they always are) while making the viewer imagine what they look like and are thinking; literally and figuratively, Petzold's characters are almost never shown head-on. A great director of mysteries who deserves all the same Bressonian praise Michael Mann's been getting.
Drag Me to Hell(Raimi)-- Every transaction is financial: even the gypsy woman deals in contracts. Raimi edits beautifully--each cut moves the scene forward to stack up one awful situation on another--but it's all Lohman's, with her lispy voice first seen practicing proper English as she tries to master her dreams of bourgeois decorum in a world of total chaos. About as good a caricature of window-shopping and untenable innocence and a societal id masquerading as decency as Hollywood Lang.
Julia (Zonca) -- a film, like Fleischer's, that gets the weight of dead bodies hitting the floor. In handheld 'scope.
*To Die Like a Man* (Rodrigues) Antichrist(von Trier)
Up (Docter) -- with talking dogs saying things their eyes already express; a montage with edits from Pickpocket, and a last, literal shot of heaven waiting on the horizon.
Adventureland (Mottola)-- its strengths and weaknesses both in its calculated and genuine naivite and innocence and precociousness (always calculated). Reminded me of Henry King's great State Fair, with its Schopenhauer lovers talk under ferris wheels at dawn (a stacking of standard-issue Americana poetic souvenirs).
Public Enemies (Mann) -- sloppy and superfluous; looks like it's all on a green screen; uses its deliberate, awesome disjunctions as justification for lazy edits with the sound of room noise not one element (romance) mixed with another (dishes clashing) simultaneously a la Rossellini, but the sound of a camcorder recording diffuse and tinny background sounds that sound only like that on youtube. Mann and his supporters talk of video as inhabiting the present, film the past, but video doesn't inhabit space at all: which is why Costa uses the push-and-pull of a long-held flat image with a three-dimensional soundtrack to open up the space. The deliberately flat moments of Public Enemies--night scenes that make it look like fluorescent trees and people were laid against a black screen--and the endless open skies of the opening moments--3-dimensional and 2-dimensional at once--work eerily well. The rest looks blunted. ... Still Walking (Kore-Eda) -- with actual 3-D soundfrom all sides of the camera, occasionally. Limits of Control (Jarmusch) -- a match to the Resnais and its dadaist/constructivist people-inhabiting-art.
The Hurt Locker (Bigelow) -- demonstrating the weird paradox that was Redacted's point that the more realistic you try to be with spontaneous camcorders, the more contrived the whole thing looks for being just that smidgen apart from naturalism. Mostly looks influenced by Half-Life 2.
Navidad (Lelio) -- on Rebel Without a Cause
Giallo (Argento)
Prey (d'Roccster) -- For making the fact that it doesn't make any sense the point confusing the characters (a la Sherlock Jr.). Was programmed as a George Miller--not true.
